anklin wore in his day of degradation when he was
compelled to listen with a tranquil visage and a throbbing heart to the
fluent invective of Wedderburn, and which was laid away and left unused
through five tremendous years, not to be taken from its retirement
until Franklin wore it again on the day of his greatest triumph, when
he signed that treaty with England which gave his country her place
among the nations of the world. Battles had been fought and won in the
saddest of civil wars, the trained and seasoned troops of Europe had
learned the lesson of defeat from levies of farmers, English generals
had surrendered to men of their own race and their own speech, and a
new flag floated over a new world between the day when Franklin went
smartly dressed to Westminster to hear Wedderburn do his best and
worst, and the day when Franklin vent smartly dressed to Paris as the
representative of an independent America. Franklin's flowered coat is
no less eloquent than Caesar's mantle.

The man whom the Court party employed to deal the death-blow to
colonial hopes, and to overwhelm with insult and abuse the colonial
agent, was a countryman and intimate friend of the detested Bute.
Alexander Wedderburn attained the degree of eloquence with which he now
{158} assailed Franklin at a cost of scarcely less pains than those
devoted by Demosthenes to conquer his defects. He had a strong and a
harsh Scotch accent, and neither the accent nor the race was grateful
to the London of the eighteenth century. Wedderburn's native tenacity
enabled him in a great degree to overcome his native accent. He toiled
under Thomas Sheridan and he toiled under Macklin the actor to attain
the genuine English accent, and his labors did not go unrewarded.
Boswell writes that he got rid of the coarse part of his Scotch accent,
retaining only so much of the "native wood-note wild" as to mark his
country, "which if any Scotchman should affect to forget I should
heartily despise him," so that by degrees he formed a mode of speaking
to which Englishmen did not deny the praise of eloquence. Successful
as an orator, secure in the patronage of the royal favorite, Wedderburn
sought the society of the wits and was not welcomed by them. Johnson
disliked him for his defective colloquial powers and for his supple
readiness to go on errands for Bute. Foote derided him as not only
dull himself, but the cause of dulness in others. Boswell, who admired
his successfu