mother country and the King's officers in the Colony; but we must
remember the strength as well as the ardor of his affection for
his native land and the righteousness of the cause he lovingly
espoused and so nobly advocated. We must remember also the
antagonisms he naturally aroused, and the hatreds of which he was
the object, on the part of loyal authority in the Colony which
feared while it traduced him. This is shown in the mishap that
befell him in a British coffeehouse in Boston, where he was
roughly assaulted by a man named Robinson, an ally of the revenue
officers whom he had denounced in an article in the Boston
Gazette, an attack that left its traces in the mental ailment
which afterwards distressingly incapacitated him and shortened
his bright public career. He nevertheless lived to see the
fruition of his hopes, in the throwing off by the Colonies of all
allegiance to Britain and take part himself in the battle of
Bunker Hill. The harvest reaped by his country from the seeds of
liberty he had planted in his day was such as might well cheer
him in the period of mental darkness which fell upon him and
regretfully clouded his closing years. Nor was he, in his own
era, without regard and honor among those who delighted in his
splendid patriotism, in the days of his manly strength, mental as
well as physical, and who held him in high esteem as a patriot
orator and the staunchly loyal tribune of the New World peoples.
In these days of flaccid patriotism and moral declension in
public life, his example may well stimulate and inspire. In his
wholehearted devotion to the hopes as well as to the interests of
the Colonies most notable was the polemical fervor with which he
espoused their cause and noble the stand he took for liberty and
independence.