We are perpetually told, he said, of men’s incensing the mother country against the colonies, but we hear nothing of the vast variety of acts which have been made use of to incense the colonies against the mother country, setting at defiance the king’s authority, treating Parliament as usurpers, pulling down the houses of royal officials and attacking their persons, burning His Majesty’s ships of war, and denying the supreme jurisdiction of the British empire; and yet these people pretend a great concern about these letters as having a tendency to incense the parent state against the colonies, and would have a governor turned out because he reports their doings. “Was it to confute or prevent the pernicious effect of these letters that the good men of Boston have lately held their meetings, appointed their committees, and with their usual moderation destroyed the cargo of three British ships?” While this ferocious attack was being delivered,--and it is said to have been delivered in thundering tones, emphasized by terrible blows of the orator’s fist on a cushion before him on the table,--Franklin stood with head erect, unmoved, and without the slightest change upon his face from the beginning to the end. When all was over he went out, silent, dignified, without a word or sign to any one except that, as he passed Dr. Priestley, he secretly pressed his hand. His superb nerves and physique again raised him far above the occasion. It was one of the most remarkable traits of his wonderful personality that in all the great trials of his life he could give a dramatic interest and force to the situation which in the end turned everything in his favor. Burke said that his examination before Parliament reminded him of a master examined by a parcel of school-boys; and Whitefield said that every answer he gave made the questioner appear insignificant. In his much severer test before Wedderburn and the Privy Council he was defeated; but his supreme and serene manner was never forgotten by the spectators, and will live forever as a dramatic incident. Pictures have been painted of it, for it lends itself irresistibly to the purposes of the artist. In these pictures Franklin is the hero, for it is impossible, from an artistic point of view, to make any one else the hero in that scene.