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Townshend. Colonel Hale bore his despatches to England, an honor which would have been conferred on Major Barré had Wolfe recovered.

Officer," and it concludes with an Appendix of 30 pages, in which "he gives the parallel passages from the pamphlet and from the letters of Junius, with illustrative notes.* "This letter," says Mr. Simons, was written, if not by a soldier, at all events by a In style, person skilled in military affairs. phraseology, and matter; in sarcastic irony, bold interrogation, stinging sarcasm, and severe personalities; in frequent taunts of treachery, desertion and cowardice, it so closely resembles the compositions of Junius, that the identity of their authorship scarcely Several pas. admits of a doubt.

sages in it evince also that strong prejudice against the Scotch which is another characteristic of Junius." †

The identity of the pamphleteer and Junius being thus almost established, Mr. Britton does not hesitate to ascribe the letter to Barré, who was the friend of Wolfe, and therefore the enemy of General Townshend. The only conclusion which we think legitimate is that it was written by some individual who accompanied the expedition, and this seems to have been the opinion of the

From New York, to which Barré and his wounded comrade Colonel Carleton had gone, the former addressed a letter to Mr. Pitt, (Lord Chatham,) dated 28th April, 1760, detailing the events of his professional career, and asking that preferment which would have fallen to his share had he borne to England the despatches of his General. On the ground that "senior officers would be injured by his promotion," his request was refused. This refusal of promotion Mr. Britton justly enough connects with a very remarkable letter, printed and published in London between June and October, 1760, inveighing in eloquent, severe, and satirical periods, against the conduct of General Townshend, as the successor of Wolfe in the command of the Quebec expedition. This pamphlet excited much interest at the time of its publication, and led to a hostile meeting, prevented by the arrest of the parties, between Townshend and the Earl of Albemarle, who was suspected of having instigated or employ-officer who wrote the "Refutation" when ed an anonymous author to traduce the General.* This letter has a stronger resemblance to the letters of Junius than any other compositions that have been compared with them, and it possesses a double interest as a new feature in the controversy, because it could not have been written in imitation of Junius. A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1817, who had seen only a few extracts from the letter in question, was so struck with the similarity of style, that he expressed it as his strong opinion," "that if the author of the Letter to a Brigadier-General should be known, it would be no difficult task to set at rest the inquiry after the author of the Letters of Junius." In the year 1840, the same letter came under the notice of Mr. N. W. Simons, of the British Museum, and so "close was the resemblance" which it bore "to the style and composition of Junius," that upon referring it as well to some friends as to other gentle men of impartiality and judgment, the unhesitating opinion of all was, that the pamphlet and the Letters of Junius were by the same hand. Mr. Simons' little volume contains a well written and judicious introduction to the pamphlet, and to "A Refutation of it by an

"

*Correspondence of Horace Walpole, vol. ii. p.

202.

he says—“But where has this pamphleteer
been to find himself under the necessity of
He must not have
quoting this letter?
been in England surely, or must not have
read the public papers," &c. If it was writ-
ten by Barré, it must have been written in
America, as he did not reach England till
the 5th of October, 1760, when he brought
home the despatches which gave an account
of the surrender of Montreal and the subjec-
tion of Canada; and if it was written in
America, and was the production of Junius,
then it necessarily follows that of all the
claimants to the name of Junius, Barré and
Macleane, who alone were at the siege of
Quebec, are the only individuals entitled to
that honor.

We have already alluded to the hostile meeting between General Townshend and Lord Albemarle, and to the suspicion in which it originated, that Lord Albemarle had prompted the composition of the Let

* A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for July, 1843, informs us that an individual, then recently deceased, who had merely seen extracts from the Letter to the Brigadier-General, had not only come to the same conclusion with Mr. Simons respecting the identity between its author and Junius, but had, previously to the illness of which he died, begun to prepare for the press a statement of his opinion.

The references in Mr. Simons' volume, are to the second edition of Woodfall's Junius.

ters. The officer who writes the "Refutation," seems to refer to this when he says"The sneer at the militia, in whose institution General Townshend had so principal a hand, betrays the sore part of the writer and his PATRON." If Lord Albemarle, therefore, was the patron of the person who employed the pamphleteer, Mr. Britton should have tried to point out the connection between his lordship and Colonel Barré.

On the 8th of October, three days after his return from America, Barré expressed himself "as bound in the highest gratitude to Mr. Pitt for the attention he had received," but it was not till the 29th January, 1761, that he received his commission as Lieutenant-colonel of the army.

on the 7th December, 1763, deprived of the lucrative offices of Adjutant-general and Governor of Stirling Castle, while Lord Shelburne was dismissed from the place of Aidede-camp to the king.

In the summer of 1765 the ministry of George Grenville terminated, and was succeeded by that of the Marquis of Rockingham, which did not last more than a year. Mr. Pitt was induced at the earnest solicitation of the king to form a ministry, and on the 27th of July, 1766, his majesty signed the warrant for creating him Earl of Chatham. He accordingly took his seat in the House of Lords with the office of Lord Privy Seal. The Duke of Grafton was first Lord of the Treasury, General Conway was continued as Secretary of State, and Lord Shelburne as Secretary of State for the southern department, his friend Colonel Barré being appointed one of the Vice-treasurers of Ireland,

Ellis, and at the same time a Member of the Privy Council; Lord Rockingham was made President of the Council; Lord Camden, Lord Chancellor; and Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer. On the 12th of August, 1767, on the resignation of the Earl of Bristol, Lord George Townshend kissed hands as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, thus forming a part of the administration to which Lord Shelburne and Colonel Barré belonged, and which continued in power till the 21st of October, 1768, when Chatham, Shelburne, and Barré retired from office.

It was at this time that Colonel Barré became acquainted with the Earl of Shelburne, who had succeeded to his father in May, 1761. A few months after this Mr. Pitt resigned, and Lord Shelburne joined the minis-vacant by the retirement of Mr. Welbore try of the Earl of Bute. On the 17th October, Colonel Barré received a "letter of serve" to raise, as "Colonel proprietor," the 106th regiment of foot, and on the 28th of November he was elected Member of Parliament for Chipping Wycombe, in place of Lord Shelburne. He had scarcely been three days in the House before he made an assault upon Mr. Pitt so violent that the Earl of Bath characterized it as "a rude and foul-mouthed attack," and Sir Andrew Mitchel, in a letter to a friend, gives the following account of what he calls "Colonel Barré's Philippic." Talking of the manner of Mr. Pitt's speaking, he said "There he would stand turning up his eyes to heaven that witnessed his perjuries, and laying his hand in a solemn manner on the table,-that sacrilegious hand that had been employed in tearing out the bowels of his mother country."

In the reduction of the army, which followed the peace of 1762, Barre's regiment was disbanded, and on the 8th March, 1763, he received compensation for his loss by the lucrative appointment of Adjutant-general to the army. When George Grenville became Premier on the retirement of Lord Bute, Lord Shelburne came into office as First Lord of the Board of Trade, and on the 14th May, Barré was appointed Governor of Stirling Castle, which, with his other emoluments, yielded him an income of £4,000 a year. On the resignation of Lord Shelburne, the Duke of Bedford entered George Grenville's administration, and when Barré joined the opposition along with his patron, he was

Previous to this date, and between the 28th April, 1767, and the 19th October, 1768, there appeared in the Public Advertiser a series of no fewer than forty-eight letters, which have been published by Woodfall, under the name of the Miscellaneous Letters of Junius, and confidently ascribed to the pen of that distinguished writer. These letters are filled with such virulent abuse of Lord Chatham and Lord Shelburne, individuals to whom the real Junius was deeply attached, and whom he invariably praised, that it is impossible to regard them as of his composition, without viewing him as one of the most degraded of men. Mr. Woodfall has adduced no satisfactory evidence to prove that they are genuine, and even if in point of style they had approached to that of Junius, the sentiments and views which they advocate frequently stand in diametrical opposition to his. Believing, or rather presuming, that the Miscellaneous Letters are genuine, Mr. Britton is compelled to regard them as the production of Colonel Barré, and to assign a

variety of very trivial reasons in favor of so extraordinary an opinion. That Barré should thus attack the Government under which he held high and lucrative offices-that he should villify his generous friend and patron the Earl of Shelburne-that he should abuse Lord Chatham who appointed him vicetreasurer of Ireland, and of whom he professed to entertain the most exalted opinion* -that he should abuse Lord Townshend, to whose wife he left the whole of his property --that he should do all this is utterly incredible, and what never can command the assent of any reasonable man.

At the time when Junius ceased to write, Mr. Britton has pointed out no event in Colonel Barré's history which can afford any explanation of so remarkable a fact. He continued in his career of opposition to the Government of Lord North from 1773 to 1782, and it is quite unaccountable that such a man, were he Junius, could have preserved silence as a public censor, during those disastrous events which he reprobated with such animation within the walls of St. Stephens. When Lord North's ministry was dissolved on the 20th March, 1782, Lord Rockingham availed himself of the talents of Lord Shelburne as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and of Colonel Barré as Treasurer of the Navy. In consequence of the sudden death of the Premier, in the course of three months, Lord Shelburne was appointed his successor, and Barré was raised to the lucrative office of Paymaster to the Forces. After concluding peace with America, and recognizing its independence, events which illustrated his short administration, Lord Shelburne was forced to resign, in consequence of the extraordinary coalition between Mr. Fox and Lord North; and Barré, his faithful Achates, followed him into private life, with a pension of £3200 a year, which had been secured to him on his retirement from the ministry. The celebrated William Pitt, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Shelburne, held the same office under the Coalition Ministry, and in January, 1784, he wisely relieved the Exchequer of Colonel Barré's pension by conferring upon him the sinecure office of Clerk of the Pells, with a salary of £3000 per annum, which had then become vacant by the death of Sir Edward Walpole.

In the new Parliament, which met in May,

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1784, Colonel Barré sat for Calne. He was incapacitated, however, for public business by a total loss of sight; and he finally retired from Parliament at the general election of 1790. He died at his house in Stanhope Street, May Fair, on the 20th July, 1802, in the 76th year of his age, leaving a large part of his fortune to the Marchioness of Townshend!

We have thus endeavored to give our readers a general view of the life of Colonel Barré, and of the grounds upon which Mr. Britton believes him to have been the author of the unacknowledged Miscellaneous Letters ascribed to Junius, as well as of the genuine productions to which he affixed the shadow of his name. Had Mr. Britton endeavored to identify Barré with the author of the Letters signed Junius and Philo-Junius, he might have made out a case more rational, and more likely to be received than many of those which have been submitted to the public; but when he tries to identify him with Lucius, Atticus, Poplicola, Domitian, and many others, the slanderers of Chatham, and Shelburne, and Townshend, with two of whom he lived on the most affectionate and friendly terms, and to whom he owed all his success in life, he fixes the brand of villany upon the brow of his hero, and converts the honest Junius into a public slanderer, without political principles, without consistency of character, and prepared to reprobate to-morrow the man who was to-day his idol. We shall relieve Mr. Britton, however, of the millstone of the Miscellaneous Letters, and consider his hypothesis in relation only to the genuine Letters of Junius. We thus deprive him, no doubt, of some of the points of identity which the Miscellaneous Letters supply between the Letter to a Brigadier-General and the productions of Junius; but as we grant him the truth of this hypothesis, and render it unnecessary that Barré should have witnessed in Paris the public burning of the books of the Jesuits, and that he should have been the slanderer of Lord Townshend, to "whom he was a frequent visitor" in the decline of life, we place him in a more favorable position than his own.

We think it will be admitted by all disinterested judges, that independent even of the actual declaration of the Marquis of Lansdowne, Junius stood in a peculiar relation to the person, the politics, and the interests of that distinguished and patriotic nobleman. Nothing is more probable than that Barré, as and political supporter, should have been his particular friend and constant companion

Junius; but it is equally probable that the private secretary, or the under secretary, or any other political friend of his lordship, should have been Junius. With regard to Barré, Mr. Britton has not shown, and cannot show, that he possessed the knowledge, the talents, the powers of composition, and, above all, the genuine wit and sarcastic humor which characterize the productions of Junius. There is a species of boldness, and vigor, and coarseness in his speeches, but they are other wise tame and pointless, and his Letters to Lord Chatham have the same character. We think it clear that Junius was not a public orator, or a person who had the faculty of public speaking. To think and speak on his legs, as Lord Brougham defines the art of making an extempore speech, compels the orator to seize the slightest associations. His sentences are long, involved, and parenthetic ; and if he ever had the power of sententious and antithetical writing, of constructing symmetrical and well-balanced periods, and of writing with logical accuracy, he necessarily loses it after he has acquired a facility of composing upon his legs. Had we space we could establish this truth by a reference to the productions of our most distinguished orators. Barré, therefore, though he had the position, and the political knowledge, and access to the secret information which Junius must have possessed, possessed neither his brilliant talents nor his powers of composition, nor the smallest trace of his Attic wit and his sarcastic humor. We cheerfully concede to Mr. Britton that Barré, had he possessed the necessary intellectual power, was in a position to have written the Letter to a Brigadier-General, and therefore to have had a high claim to the honors of Junius. But he may have been merely the friend who communicated to the true author the information that was required, or, as Lord Albemarle was supposed to be, he may have been the patron who stimulated or encouraged him. But even if all these objections were groundless, it would be a difficult task to persuade the public that Junius held lucrative offices in the State, while he was systematically assailing the King and the Government, and that he who denounced the appointment and the pension given to Sir W. Draper should have been a sinecurist when Junius, and should have spent his latest years as a pensioner on the Civil List.

It has been almost universally admitted that Junius was, and should have been, an Irishman. Barré possessed this title to be Junius, but he wanted another still more es

candidate,

sential, and without which no however brilliant his talents, and however appropriate his position, can be admitted as a competitor. Junius hated Scotland and the Sotch. He availed himself of every opportunity of abusing them; and we must therefore discover some solid grounds why the representative of so noble and distinguished a writer took such an unfavorable view of a nation which has gained the esteem of statesmen, and whose people, in point of education and moral and religious training, occupy a most exalted place among the nations of Europe. Colonel Barré, certainly in so far as his history can show, had no reasons for hating the Scotch and abusing Scotland, and nothing has surprised us more than the following observations on the subject from the pen of Mr. Britton :—

"His residence in Scotland for three years may have induced that prejudice against the Scotch character which is palpably marked in the Letters of Junius. Johnson was equally inimical to the Scotch after a cursory view of them and their homes. Barré, as an Irishman of ardent and enthusiastic temperament, who had mixed in various society, and lived an active life, must have felt a great contrast between himself and the cold and calculating conduct of Scotchmen."-P. 21.

It will be difficult to explain this remarkable sentence, and still more to show how a patriot and a generous soldier like Barré, who had seen much of men and much of the world, could observe a "cold and calculating conduct" in our countrymen. Was it at the hospitable board at which he and his brother officers must have been courteously entertained? Was it among the sober and religious population of the Lowlands-provident, peaceable, and loyal? Was it in its academic groves, then trodden by so many distinguished men? Was it in the halls of its nobles, among the emblems of a glorious lineage and the realities of living beauty? Or was it among the green mounds which deck the purple heath of Culloden-the resting-place of warriors, faithful to their chieftains and to their Prince-that the English soldier discovered those revolting features of our national character which disturbed him in his youth, and haunted him through life? Or could it be when Colonel Barré was Governor of Stirling Castle, and gazed over the field of Bannockburn, the Marathon of the North, where the flower of English chivalry fell, and "the proud usurper was laid low?" NoBarré learned no such lessons in Scotland. He never abused the Scotch, and never wielded the spear of Junius.

There is one other objection to the hypothesis of Mr. Britton, which it will be very difficult to remove. Why did Barré, were he Junius, cease to write in January, 1772 ? He was then in perfect health; he retained his seat in the House of Commons; he was then the friend and correspondent of Shelburne and Chatham; he received no bribe from the Government; he continued to maintain the same principles, and was associated with the same political friends. In his last private letter to Woodfall, dated January 19, 1773, Junius assures him that he had good reason for discontinuing his communications." In the present state of things, if I were to write again I must be as silly as any of the horned cattle that run mad through the city, or as any of your wise aldermen. I meant the cause and the public. Both are given up. I feel for the honor of this country when I see that there are not ten men in it who will unite and stand together upon any one question. But it is all alike, vile and contemptible." In his Dedication to the English Nation, however, which he sent to Wilkes on the 3d November, 1771, he gives utterance to sentiments of a very different kind:- You are roused," says he, "at last, to a sense of your danger. The remedy will soon be in your power. If Junius lives you shall often be reminded of it." Junius, if he has ever been named, did live, but did not fulfil his pledge. Barré lived, and lived under circumstances which might well have called him into the field. In a letter, written two days after Junius abandons "the cause and the public," Barré announces to Lord Chatham,* that the honors of his profession have been withheld from him, though the Secretary at War had, “in a private and unsought for conversation," promised him promotion in his turn, and that he was thus an object of persecution, and would quit the army if he were "not reinstated according to seniority of rank, and the rightful pretensions of service." Having, in conformity with Lord Chatham's advice, transmitted a memorial to the king, his majesty rejected his petition, and gave him permission to retire from the service. Had Junius been Barré,

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this act of perscution might have summoned him again into the field, or he might have listened to the importunate call of Cindercombe, a writer in the Public Advertiser, who, on the 26th December, 1770, implored him to fulfil the promise in his Dedication, and especially the pledge which he had long since given," that the corrupt administration of Lord Townshend in Ireland shall not be lost to the public.' Junius remained deaf to these calls. He had truly abandoned the "cause and the public," and we have no doubt that he was influenced by motives which no patriot could avow, and which prompted him to preserve his name from the reprobation of posterity.

Although we cannot concur in the hypothesis of Mr. Britton, we are bound to thank him for the interesting information which he has collected regarding the life and character of Colonel Barré. Every attempt to identify Junius with one of his contemporaries should be received with gratitude, and whether it signally fails, or is favorably received, it cannot but throw some light upon the problem, or remove some difficulty from its solution. But independently of its intrinsic value, Mr. Britton's work has been the cause of placing the controversy upon a new foundation. An able writer in the Athenæum,* as we have already seen, has, in a notice of that work, assigned the most satisfactory reasons for rejecting the great mass of the Miscellaneous Letters, ascribed to Junius, and even the few which he does admit as appearing to be genuine, he admits with a caution which will justify the rejection of them on any question which concerns either the personal character or the identity of Junius.

"A letter by Domitian," says the writer in the Athenæum, "is said to be referred to by Junius in a private note of the 7th of December, 1770; and coupled with other circumstances-amongst these his private note of the 22d February, 1772, the evidence appears sufficient. Let Domitian, therefore, be received as Junius. Testiculus' may also be allowed on the inconclusive memorandum, on private note, and date of publication, and if so, Testis' claims protection. Two short notes by Vindex' may be received on like authority."-P. 747.

6

Bedfords have avowed separately and without reserve their disapprobation of the measure which occasioned the step. This leaves no doubt from what quarter the measure comes. It is but just to apprise your lordship what proscribed people you honor sometimes with your correspondence.”—Chatham's Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 253.

* Athenæum, July 1848, pp. 711 and 745.

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