Note 28 — Chapter XIV

This anecdote has had a wide circulation in the newspapers. Mr. William Cobbett inserts it in his “Works,” with the following comment, characteristic of the spirit of most of the higher class of Englishmen, in those days:

“Whether this anecdote record a truth or not I shall not pretend to say. But it must be confessed, that the expressions imputed to the two personages were strictly in character. In Gibbon, we see the faithful subject, and the man of candor and honor. In Franklin the treacherous and malicious old Zanga, of Boston.”—Works of William Cobbett. Vol. vii, p. 244.