The temper and character which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of free-mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth dom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery. * * directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to My hold of the colonies is in the close affection auspicate all our public proceedings on America, with which grows from common names, from kindred blood, the old warning of the church, sursum corda! We from similar privileges, and equal protection. These ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as trust to which the order of Providence has called us. links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our of their civil rights associated with your government; ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glothey will cling and grapple to you; and no force rious empire; and have made the most extensive, and under heaven will be of power to tear them from their the only honourable conquests; not by destroying, allegiance. But let it be once understood that your but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happigovernment may be one thing and their privileges ness of the human race. Let us get an American another; that these two things may exist without any revenue, as we have got an American empire. English mutual relation, the cement is gone-the cohesion is privileges have made it all that it is; English priviloosened and everything hastens to decay and dis- leges alone will make it all it can be. In full confisolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep dence of this unalterable truth, I now (quod felix the sovereign authority of this country as the sanc-faustumquesit) lay the first stone of the temple of tuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our peace.* common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that of succession, I should have been, according to my grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, they may have it from Prussia; but until you become a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a lost to all feeling of your true interest and your can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, son, who, in all the points in which personal merit natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity of price, of which in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in you have the monopoly. This is the true act of navi- every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomgation, which binds you to the commerce of the colo-plishment, would not have shown himself inferior nies, and through them secures to you the commerce to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he of the world. Deny them this participation of free-traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have dom, and you break that sole bond which originally vision which belonged more to mine than to me. wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that promade, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination, as would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symthat your registers and your bonds, your affidavits metrised every disproportion. It would not have been and your sufferances, your coquets and your clear- for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting ances, are what form the great securities of your in himself a salient living spring of generous and reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, manly action. Every day he lived, he would have reand your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture purchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times of this mysterious whole. These things do not make more, if ten times more he had received. He was your government. Dead instruments, passive tools made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatas they are, it is the spirit of the English communion ever but in the performance of some duty. At this that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is exigent moment the loss of a finished man is not the spirit of the English constitution which, infused easily supplied. through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member. [Mr Burke's Account of his Son.] has scattered about me. He resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to But a Disposer, whose power we are little able to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognise the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the land-tax act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the committee of supply which gives you your army? or that it is the mutiny bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! Surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber. All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who, therefore, far from being qualified to being strong in numbers. the right of parliamentary representation should be extended *At the conclusion of this speech, Mr Burke moved that to the American colonies, but his motion was negatived by 270 to 78. Indeed his most brilliant orations made little inpression on the House of Commons, the ministerial party be himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blained for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege; it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me; they who should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety, which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to show, that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent. [The British Monarchy.] The learned professors of the rights of man regard prescription, not as a title to bar all claim, set up against old possession, but they look on prescription itself as a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long continued, and therefore an aggravated injustice. Such are their ideas, such their religion, and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dikes of the low fat Bedford Level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm-the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitutional frankpledge of this nation; the firm guarantee of each other's being and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity-as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe; and we are all safe together the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. [Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.] [From 'Reflections on the Revolution in France."] It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in-glittering like the morning star full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to that enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom ; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. [The Order of Nobility.] [From the same.] To be honoured and even privileged by the laws, opinions, and inveterate usages of our country, growing out of the prejudice of ages, has nothing to provoke horror and indignation in any man. Even to be too tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him, and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure property, and to preserve communities in a settled state. What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society. Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus, was the saying of a wise and good man. It is, indeed, one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it with some sort of partial propensity. He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive esteem. It is a sour, malignant, and envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see anything destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face of the land. [Dependence of English on American Freedom.] [From Address to the King.' 1777.] To leave any real freedom to parliament, freedom must be left to the colonies. A military government is the only substitute for civil liberty. That the establishment of such a power in America will utterly ruin our finances (though its certain effect), is the smallest part of our concern. It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the destruction of our freedom here. Great bodies of armed men, trained to a contempt of popular assemblies representative of an English people, kept up for the purpose of exacting impositions without their consent, and maintained by that exaction; instruments in subverting, without any process of law, great ancient establishments and respected forms of governments, set free from, and therefore above the ordinary English tribunals of the country where they serve; these men cannot so transform themselves, merely by crossing the sea, as to behold with love and reverence, and submit with profound obedience to the very same things in Great Britain which in America they had been taught to despise, and had been accustomed to awe and humble. All your majesty's troops, in the rotation of service, will pass through this discipline, and contract these habits. If we could flatter ourselves that this would not happen, we must be the weakest of men: we must be the worst, if we were indifferent whether it happened or not. What, gracious sovereign, is the empire of America to us, or the empire of the world, if we lose our own liberties? We deprecate this last of evils. We deprecate the effect of the doctrines which must support and countenance the government over conquered Englishmen. As it will be impossible long to resist the powerful and equitable arguments in favour of the freedom of these unhappy people, that are to be drawn from the principle of our own liberty, attempts will be made, attempts have been made, to ridicule and to argue away this principle, and to inculcate into the minds of your people other maxims of government and other grounds of obedience than those which have prevailed at and since the glorious Revolution. By degrees these doctrines, by being convenient, may grow prevalent. The consequence is not certain; but a general change of principles rarely happens among a people without leading to a change of government. by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation, into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on the menacing meteor which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of wo, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants flying from the flaming villages, in part were slaughtered: others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept intc captivity, in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but, escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. Sir, your throne cannot stand secure upon the principles of unconditional submission and passive obedience; on powers exercised without the concurrence of the people to be governed; on acts made in defiance of their prejudices and habits; on acquiescence procured by foreign mercenary troops, and secured by standing armies. These may possibly be the foundation of other thrones; they must be the subversion of yours. It was not to passive principles in our ancestors that we owe the honour of appearing before a sovereign who cannot feel that he is a prince, without knowing that we ought to be free. The Revolution is a departure from the ancient course of the descent of this monarchy. The people at that time re-entered into their original rights; and it was not because a The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exipositive law authorised what was then done, but be- gency, were certainly liberal; and all was done by cause the freedom and safety of the subject, the origin charity that private charity could do: but it was a and cause of all laws, required a proceeding para-people in beggary; it was a nation that stretched out mount and superior to them. At that ever-memorable its hands for food. For months together these creaand instructive period, the letter of the law was super- tures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in seded in favour of the substance of liberty. To the their most plenteous days had fallen short of the free choice, therefore, of the people, without either allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, reking or parliament, we owe that happy establishment signed, without sedition or disturbance, almost without of which both king and parliament were regene- out complaint, perished by a hundred a day in the rated. From that great principle of liberty have streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid originated the statutes confirming and ratifying the their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, establishment from which your majesty derives your and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was right to rule over us. Those statutes have not given going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part us our liberties; our liberties have produced them. of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of Every hour of your majesty's reign, your title stands the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all upon the very same foundation on which it was at the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, first laid, and we do not know a better on which it this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein can possibly be laid. the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions. Convinced, sir, that you cannot have different rights, and a different security in different parts of your dominions, we wish to lay an even platform for your throne, and to give it an unmovable stability, by laying it on the general freedom of your people, and by securing to your majesty that confidence and affection in all parts of your dominions, which makes your best security and dearest title in this the chief seat of your empire. [Destruction of the Carnatic.] [From speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts, 1785.] When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march did they not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one fourfooted beast of any description whatever. One dead uniform silence [The Difference Between Mr Burke and the [The Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale attacked Mr Burke and his pension in their place in the House of Lords, and Burke replied in his Letters to a Noble Lord,' one of the most sarcastic and most able of all his productions.] I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator-Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even for me. I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand. * * I know not how it has happened, but it really seems that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter from the crown-grants to his own family. This is the stuff of which his dreams are made.' In that way of putting things together, his Grace is perfectly in the right. The grants to the house of Russel were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray-everything of him and about him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour? I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at all the honour of acquaintance with the noble duke. But I ought to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves the esteem and love of all who live with him. But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own, to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal; his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his Grace eo very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said, 'tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law; what have I to do with it or its history? He would naturally have said on his side, 'tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions; he is an old man with very young pensions-that's all. Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious individuals ! Since the new grantees have war made on them by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the heroic origin of their house. The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr Russel, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a minion of Henry VIII. As there generally is some resemblance of character to create these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood much such another as his master. The first of these immoderate grants was not taken from the ancient demesne of the crown, but from the recent confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite's first grant was from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on the enormity of the first, was from the plunder of the church. In truth, his Grace is somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind so different from his own. Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his from Henry VIII. Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered 7 the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. The merit of the grantee whom he derives from, was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on everything that was great and noble. Mine has been in endeavouring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent, who in the bad times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief governors, or confiscating dema gogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy. The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil with a prince, who plundered a part of the national church of his time and country. Mine was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal desolation. The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favourite and chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to his native country. My endeavour was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to support, with unrelaxing vigilance, every right, every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer and more comprehensive country; and not only to preserve those rights in this chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language, and religion in the vast domain that still is under the protection, and the larger that was once under the protection, of the British crown. His founder's merits were by arts in which he served his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation on his country. Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom; in which his majesty shows an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil. [Character of Howard the Philanthropist.] I cannot name this gentleman without remarking, that his labours and writings have done much to open the eyes and hearts of all mankind. He has visited all Europe-not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to make accurate measurements of the remains of ancient grandeur, nor to form a scale of the curiosities of modern art; nor to collect medals, or collate manuscripts, but to dive into the depths of dungeons, to plunge into the infection of hospitals, to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries. His plan is original: it is as full of genius as of humanity. It was a voyage of discovery; a circumnavigation of charity. Already, the benefit of his labour is felt more or less in every country: I hope he will anticipate his final reward by seeing all its effects fully realised in his own. JUNIUS. 6 elaborated, and more highly polished, than any of his previous communications. They attacked all the public characters of the day connected with the government, they retailed much private scandal and personal history, and did not spare even royalty itself. The compression, point, and brilliancy of their language, their unrivalled sarcasm, boldness, and tremendous invective, at once arrested the attention of the public. Every effort that could be devised by the government, or prompted by private indig nation, was made to discover their author, but in vain. It is not in the nature of things,' he writes to his publisher, that you or anybody else should know me, unless I make myself known: all arts or inquiries or rewards would be ineffectual.' In another place he remarks, I am the sole depository of my secret, and it shall die with me.' The event has verified the prediction: he had drawn around himself so impenetrable a veil of secrecy, that all the efforts of inquirers, political and literary, failed in dispelling the original darkness. The letters were published at intervals from 1769 to 1772, when they were collected by Woodfall and revised by their author (who was equally unknown to his publisher), and printed in two volumes. They have since gone through innumerable editions; but the best is that published in 1812 by Woodfall's son, which includes the letters by the same writer under other signatures, with his private notes to s publisher, and fac-similes of his handwriting. The principles of Junius are moderate, compared with his personalities. Some sound constitutional maxims are conveyed in his letters, but his style has undoubtedly been his passport to fame. His illustrations and metaphors are also sometimes uncommonly felicitous. The personal malevolence of his attacks it is impossible to justify. They evince a settled deliberate malignity, which could not proceed from a man of a good or noble nature, and contain allusions to obscure individuals in the public offices, which seem to have arisen less from patriotism than from individual hatred and envy. When the controversy as to the authorship of these memorable philippics had almost died away, a book appeared in 1816, bearing the title of Junius Identified with a Celebrated Living Character.' The living character was the late Sir Philip Francis, and certainly a mass On the 21st of January 1769 appeared the first of strong circumstantial evidence has been presented of a series of political letters, bearing the signature in his favour. The external evidence,' says Mr of JUNIUS, which have since taken their place among Macaulay,* is, we think, such as would support a the standard works of the English language. Great verdict in a civil, nay, in a criminal proceeding. The excitement prevailed in the nation at the time. The handwriting of Junius is the very peculiar handwritcontest with the American colonies, the impositioning of Francis, slightly disguised. As to the position, of new taxes, the difficulty of forming a steady and permanent administration, and the great ability and eloquence of the opposition, had tended to spread a feeling of dissatisfaction throughout the country. The publication of the North Briton, a periodical edited by John Wilkes, and conducted with reckless violence and asperity, added fuel to the flame, and the prime minister, Lord North, said justly, that 'the press overflowed the land with its black gall, and poisoned the minds of the people.' Without any wish to express political opinions, we may say that the government was not equal to the emergency, and indeed it would have required a cabinet of the highest powers and most energetic wisdom to have triumphed over the opposition of men like Chatham and Burke, and writers like Junius. The most popular newspaper of that day was the Public Advertiser, published by Woodfall, a man of education and respectability. In this journal the writer known as Junius had contributed under various signatures for about two years. The letters by which he is now distinguished were more carefully pursuits, and connexions of Junius, the following are the most important facts which can be considered as clearly proved:-First, that he was acquainted with the technical forms of the secretary of state's office; secondly, that he was intimately acquainted with the business of the war office; thirdly, that he, during the year 1770, attended debates in the House of Lords, and took notes of speeches, particularly of the speeches of Lord Chatham; fourthly, that he bitterly resented the appointment of Mr Chamier to the place of deputy-secretary at war; fifthly, that he was bound by some strong tie to the first Lord Holland. Now, Francis passed some years in the secretary of state's office. He was subsequently chief clerk of the war office. He repeatedly mentioned that he had himself, in 1770, heard speeches of Lord Chatham; and some of these speeches were actually printed from his notes. He resigned his clerkship at the war office from resentment at the appointment of Mr Chamier. It was by Lord Hol *Edinburgh Review for 1841. |