A few gentlemen, more advanced in years than the rest, are sprinkled through the company. One, an old acquaintance of ours, the boy who in 1721 furnished through the “New England Courant” such strong food for even Boston, and afterwards set up an intellectual bakery at Philadelphia, now seventy years old, rests his massive benevolent figure in a chair made comfortable by his presence,—his broad mild face, so largely serene, framed in by flowing soft locks, and beaming with a placid composure, as if the ploughshare of hard work had not turned a furrow there. He looks as if he could forgive George III. for his narrow notions, wedged inextricably fast in his narrow brain, and even his sallow, bilious, meadow-bottomed, Hanoverian dulness, dripping in pestilent, unhealthy oozings through his slow liver into his slower understanding. Well does the serenely fronted old sage know all the importance and the character of the business in hand. His clear, philosophic mind has weighed in its calm well-adjusted balances the questions now to be decided. He has but lately escaped from England, where, as agent for the Colonies, he was watched and treated by the government with incised and rigorous dislike; yet, as a man and thinker, he was there welcomed by the best men and most advanced statesmen. With Pitt, Camden, Burke, Charles James Fox, and even Lord North, he met, and with calm, compact, sensible, logical eloquence discussed the nature of the principles, alike dangerous in England as in the Colonies, which the Ministry, in the name of the former, were seeking to fasten, as the shirt of Nessus, upon the latter. While on his ungracious mission, he had, also, encountered that ponderous, fact-clad, political Goliath, Samuel Johnson, who had lately stepped forth in front of the ministerial Philistines, and defied any one to prove that taxation of a people unrepresented was tyranny. In that encounter, the American, armed only with a simple Quaker sling, planted in the giant’s head a stone harder even than itself, and very uncomfortable therein. Few now were Franklin’s words; but each one weighed ten pounds, and though perhaps homely in shape and unrounded at the angles, when hurled out by an honest heart-force, they crashed resistlessly through all the fences and thickets of sophistry or learned show.