Word: blennerhassett
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...enthusiastic spectator who was in the Field of Mars on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was an Irish gentleman named Harman Blennerhassett. A native of County Kerry, a graduate of Dublin's Trinity College and a member of the Irish bar, he wandered the Continent for several years. Profoundly excited by the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau, Blennerhassett had been attracted to Paris, where he soon began intensively cultivating the taste for revolution and romanticism which was to be his ruin a few years later a few thousand miles away...
Deft Sir Patrick Hastings soon had the Court's lips twitching. He read aloud the more puckish portions of the advertisement describing the efforts of a Blennerhassett to make a yo-yo perform for his children. He began with "deprecatory condescension. . . . The yo-yo was recalcitrant. . . . First it would and then it wouldn't. But the Blennerhassett blood was up. He was determined to make the little devil on a string do its stuff...
...Came the dawn and he was still there, disheveled and wild-eyed, with the yo-yo string still dangling from his trembling fingers. . . . Eventually poor Blennerhassett was taken away. . . . Today he is happy in a quiet place in the country and under sympathetic surveillance he practices...
Summing up for the defense, Sir Patrick Hastings stressed that printed apologies had already been made to outraged Broker Blennerhassett. argued that the ad writer had chosen "Blennerhassett" without malice, "simply as a name which suggests a stolid, humorless, didactic person. . . . Moreover in the advertisement the briefcase of the Mr. Blennerhassett in the picture was far too small for the initials of the plaintiff...
Mirthfully convinced, Hon. Mr. Justice Branson dismissed the libel, ordered Broker Blennerhassett to pay costs, including the fat fee of suave Sir Patrick Hastings...