** The corporation of the city of London passed a vote of thanks to him, and Franklin (to whom Chatham submitted the bill before offering it in the Senate) sent forth an address to the people of England, and to his own countrymen there, in which he portrayed the wickedness of rejecting this plan of reconciliation, the only feasible one that had been offered for years. Franklin and other agents asked to be examined at the bar of the House of Commons touching the demands of the general Congress; but even this courtesy, for it could be called nothing more, was roughly denied.
*** Gibbon the historian, author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who had then a seat in Parliament, writing to his friend Sheffield, said, "We voted an address of 'lives and fortunes,' declaring Massachusetts Bay in a state of rebellion; more troops, but, I fear, not enough, to go to America, to make an army of ten thousand men at Boston; three generals, Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne! In a few days we stop the ports of New England. I can not write volumes, but I am more and more convinced that, with firmness, all may go well; yet I something doubt.'"
*** Gibbon was very much disposed to take sides with the Americans, and it is said that he publicly declared at Brooke's Coffee-house, that "there was no salvation for England, unless six of the heads of the cabinet council were cut off and laid upon the tables of the houses of Parliament as examples." Gibbon had his price, and, within a fortnight after the above expression was uttered, took office under that same cabinet council, with a liberal salary and promise of a pension. His mouth was thus stopped by the sugar-plums of patronage. So says Bailey, author of "Records of Patriotism and Love of Country," page 169. Bailey also gives the following poem, which he asserts was written by Fox:
"King George, in a fright, lest
Gibbon should write
The story of Britain's disgrace,
Thought no means more sure his pen to secure
Than to give the historian a place.
But his caution is vain, 'tis the curse of his reign
That his projects should never succeed.
Though he write not a line, yet a cause of decline
In the author's example we read.
His book well describes, how corruption and bribes
Overthrew the great empire of Rome;
And his writings declare a degen'racy there,
Which his conduct exhibits at home."
The first volume of Gibbon's Rome was published in 1776, and the sixth and last on his fifty-first birthday, in 1788. His bookseller, Mr. Cadell, on that day gave him forty thousand dollars. Gibbon died in January, 1794.
John Wilkes in Parliament His Character and Career.—Bill for destroying the New England Fisheries.—A conciliatory Bill
In the debate on this bill the celebrated John Wilkes, then a member of Parliament, fora radical paper, who had given the government a world of trouble during a portion of the first eight years of the reign of George III., took a conspicuous part in favor of the Americans.
