Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/37

 first speech in the House of Commons, took a piece of paper and a pencil as if he intended to make notes, but was observed, after listening attentively for a time, to put up the pencil and drop the paper.

Wedderburn, though he did not stand so high as an advocate at the bar as Erskine, stood considerably higher as a debater in Parliament. Perhaps Wedderburn's most successful forensic display was his Privy-Council speech, of which nothing remains but a small portion of his invective against Franklin, referring to some letters of a colonial governor, which, it was alleged, had come unfairly into the hands of Franklin, then agent of the American colonies in England. Wedderburn's invective against Franklin, one of the three—one of the triumviri, very different from the Roman triumviri—

is partly taken from a tragedy then well known and popular, now never heard of, a sort of attempt