”I said that Mr. Franklin had great merit as a philosopher. His discoveries in electricity were very grand, and he certainly was a great genius, and had great merit in our American affairs. But he had no title to the ‘legislator of America.’ M. Marbois said he had wit and irony; but these were not the faculties of statesmen. His Essay upon the true means of bringing a great Empire to be a small one was very pretty. I said he had wrote many things which had great merit, and infinite wit and ingenuity. His Bonhomme Richard was a very ingenious thing, which had been so much celebrated in France, gone through so many editions, and been recommended by curates and bishops to so many parishes and dioceses. “M. Marbois asked, ‘Are natural children admitted in America to all privileges like children born in wedlock?’... M. Marbois said this, no doubt, in allusion to Mr. F.’s natural son, and natural son of a natural son. I let myself thus freely into this conversation, being led on naturally by the Chevalier and M. Marbois on purpose, because I am sure it cannot be my duty, nor the interest of my country, that I should conceal any of my sentiments of this man, at the same time that I do justice to his merits. It would be worse than folly to conceal my opinion of his great faults.” (Adams’s Works, vol. iii. p. 220.) The French always believed that Franklin was the originator of the Revolution, and that he was a sort of Solon who had prepared laws for all the revolted colonies, directed their movements, and revised all their state papers and public documents. It was under the influence of this notion that they worshipped him as the personification of liberty. It must have been extremely irritating to Adams and others to find the French people assuming that the old patriarch in his fur cap had emancipated in the American woods a rude and strange people who without him could not have taken care of themselves. But, protest as they might, they never could persuade the French to give up their ideal, and this was undoubtedly the foundation of a great deal of the hostility to Franklin which showed itself in Congress. In 1811, long after Franklin’s death, Adams wrote a newspaper article defending himself against some complaints that Franklin had made, of which I shall have more to say hereafter. It is a most vigorous piece of writing, and, in spite of some unfounded suspicions which it contains and the bluster and egotism so characteristic of its author, is by far the most searching and fairest criticism of Franklin that was ever written: