This medallion of Franklin is upon one of Richard Champion’s exquisite flower-plaques. This plaque is considered by Owen to be “the most important” of Champion’s work. Champion was an ardent admirer of America and Americans, and his special veneration for Franklin evidently impelled him to produce this elaborate work. It is eight and a half inches in length, and seven and a half in width, the portrait bust being surrounded immediately by a laurel wreath tied with a bow-knot, and outside the laurel wreath by a rich wreath of roses and lilies in highly raised and most delicate work. Another specimen of the same medallion is known to exist upon a plain ground plaque, and has often been attributed to the Sèvres manufactory. One of these flower-plaques with the bust of Franklin was exhibited at the Loan Collection in New York, in 1889, by Dr. Caspar Wister Hodge, of Princeton, N. J. Rev. Dr. Hodge was the grandson of William Bache, the grandson of Franklin. Dr. Hodge’s mother was born in Franklin’s house in Philadelphia, and her account of the flower-plaque was that it was made at the Sèvres manufactory and was the gift of Louis XVI. to Benjamin Franklin; that it had been sent to America by private hands, in connection with a similar one of George Washington, which was surmounted by a gilt crown; and that the messenger, in officious democratic zeal, picked off the crown with his penknife before delivering the medallion. Dr. Hodge said it was a complete surprise to him, and it could not have been a very pleasant one, when he offered the plaque for exhibition in New York, to be told that it was Bristol china, and was not unique. Of course these latter facts might be so without destroying the other part of the family tradition—that it was a royal gift; but it is far more probable that Richard Champion presented this choice specimen of his work to Franklin, for in a letter to Champion, written from Paris, January 2, 1778, the unknown writer speaks of a visit to Franklin, and says: “He begs his compliments and is much obliged for your present, which arrived in perfect safety. He says that there is a good likeness with Wedgwood & Bentley’s, only with this difference, that he wears his hair, which is rather straight and long, instead of a wig, and is very high in his forehead.”