are prescribed, and the last fixed on is changed by the hand that gives it."

The attention paid to these philippics, and the celebrity they had so considerably acquired, stimulated the author to new and additional exertions: and having in the beginning of the ensuing year completed another with more than usual elaboration and polish, which he seems to have intended as a kind of introductory address to the nation at large, he sent it forth under the name of JUNIUS, (a name he had hitherto assumed but once,) to the office of the Public Advertiser, in which journal it appeared on Saturday, January 21, 1769. The popularity expected by the author from this performance was more than accomplished; and what in some measure added to his fame, was a reply (for the Public Advertiser was equally open to all parties) from a real character of no small celebrity as a scholar, as well as a man of rank, Sir Wm. Draper; principally because the attack upon his Majesty's ministers had extended itself to Lord Granby, at that time commander in chief, for whom Sir William professed the most cordial esteem and friendship.

Sir Wm. Draper appears, to have been a worthy, and, on the whole, an independent man; and Lord Granby was perhaps the most honest and immaculate of his Majesty's ministers. JUNIUS did not begin the dispute with the former, and seems from a regard for his character, to have continued it unwillingly: "My answer," says he to him in his last letter', upon a second assault, and altogether without reason, “shall be short; for I write to you with reluctance, and I hope we shall now conclude our correspondence for ever!" At the latter he had only glanced incidentally, (for upon the whole he approved his conduct',) and seems rather to have done so from the company he consorted with, than from any gross misdeeds of his own. Nothing could therefore have been more improvident or impolitic than this attack of Sir Wm. Draper: if volunteered in favour of the ministry, it is impos

1 Letter xxv. Vol. I. p. 157.

2 See his opinion of Lord Granby given under the name of Lucius, in Miscellaneous Letters of this writer, Vol. II. p. 160, as also in the note at the close of JUNIUS, Vol. I. p. 66.

sible for a defence to have been worse planned;-for by confining the vindication to the individual that was least accused, it tacitly admitted that the charges advanced against all the rest were well founded; while, if volunteered in favour of Lord Granby alone, it might easily have been anticipated by the writer that his visionary opponent would be hereby challenged to bring forward peccadillos which would otherwise never have been heard of, and that he would not fail at the same time, to scrutinize the character of Sir William himself, and to ascribe this act of precipitate zeal to an interested desire of additional promotion in the army. It was too much for Sir William to expect that JuNIUS would be hurried into an intemperate disclosure of his real name by a swaggering offer to measure swords with him; while the following rebuke was but a just retaliation. for his challenge.

"Had you been originally and without provocation attacked by an anonymous writer, you would have some right to demand his name. But in this cause you are a volunteer. You engaged in it with the unpremeditated gallantry of a soldier. You were content to set your name in opposition to a man who would probably continue in concealment. You understood the terms upon which we were to correspond, and gave at least a tacit assent to them. After voluntarily attacking me under the character of JUNIUS, what possible right have you to know me under any other? Will you forgive me if I insinuate to you, that you foresaw some honour in the apparent spirit of coming forward in person, and that you were not quite indifferent to the display of your literary qualifications?"

In reality JUNIUS, though a severe satirist, was not in his general temper a malevolent writer, nor an ungenerous man. No one has ever been more ready to admit the brilliant talents of Sir William Blackstone than himself, or to apply to his Commentaries for legal information, while reprobating his conduct in the unconstitutional expulsion of Mr. Wilkes from the House of Commons. "If I were personally your enemy," says he in his letter to him upon this subject, "I VOL. I.

*C

should dwell with a malignant pleasure upon those great and useful qualifications which you certainly possess, and by which you once acquired, though they could not preserve to you the respect and esteem of your country. I should enumerate the honours you have lost, and the virtues you have disgraced: but having no private resentments to gratify, I think it sufficient to have given my opinion of your public conduct, leaving the punishment it deserves to your closet and to yourself."

The rescue of General Gansel, by means of a party of guards, from the hands of the Sheriff's officers after they had arrested him for debt, was an outrage upon the law which well demanded castigation; and the attempt to quash this transaction on the part of the minister, instead of delivering the culprits over to the punishment they had merited, was an outrage of at least equal atrocity, and demanded equal reprobation. The severity with which the minister was repeatedly attacked by JUNIUS on this subject is still well known to many: but the reason is not yet known to any one perhaps, why he suddenly dropped this subject, after having positively declared in his letter of November 15, 1769, Vol. I. p. 185, "if the gentlemen, whose conduct is in question, are not brought to a trial, the Duke of Grafton shall hear from me again." From his Private Letters to Mr. Woodfall, we shall now learn that he was solely actuated in his forbearance by motives of humanity: "The only thing," says he, in a note alluding to this transaction, "that hinders my pushing the subject of my last letter, is really the fear of ruining that poor devil Gansel, and those other blockheads1".

In like manner having been betrayed by the first rumours of the day into what he afterwards found to have been too atrocious an opinion, and expressed himself with too indignant a warmth upon the conduct of Mr. Vaughan in his well known attempt to purchase of the Duke of Grafton the reversion of a patent place in Jamaica, he hastened to make

1 See Private Letters, No. 11.

him both publicly and privately all the reparation in his power. "I think myself obliged," says he, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton, "to do this justice to an injured man, because I was deceived by the appearances thrown out by your Grace, and have frequently spoken of his conduct with indignation. If he really be, what I think him, honest, though mistaken, he will be happy in recovering his reputation, though at the expense of his understanding1." Vaughan himself had so high an opinion of our author's integrity, though a total stranger to him, that he entrusted him with his private papers upon the subject in question, which JUNIUS in return took care to employ to Vaughan's advantage2.

From the extraordinary effect produced by his first letter under the signature of JUNIUS, he resolved to adhere to this signature exclusively, in all his subsequent letters, in which he took more than ordinary pains, and which alone he was desirous of being attributed to himself; while to other letters composed with less care, and merely explanatory of passages in his more finished addresses, or introduced for some other collateral purpose, he subscribed some random name which occurred to him at the moment. The letters of Philo-Junius are alone an exception to this remark. These he always intended to acknowledge; and in truth they are for the most part composed with so much of the peculiar style, and finished accuracy of the letters of JUNIUS, properly so called, that it would have required but little discernment to have regarded the two correspondents as the same person under different characters, idem et alter-if JUNIUS himself had not at length admitted them to be his own productions, which he expressly did, in an authorized note from the printer, inserted in the Public Advertiser, October 19, 1771. "The auxiliary part of Philo-Junius," says he in his Preface, page

1 Vol. I. p. 215.

2 Compare his private letter to Woodfall, Dec. 12, 1769. No. 15. with his public letter to the Duke of Grafton, February 14, 1770, after he had examined these papers, and especially the passage, "You laboured then, by every species of false suggestion, and even by publishing counterfeit letters, &c." Vol. I. p. 215.

7,"was indispensably necessary to defend or explain particular passages in JUNIUS, in answer to plausible objections; but the subordinate character is never guilty of the indecorum of praising his principal. The fraud was innocent, and I always intended to explain it." Yet whatever were the signatures he assumed, or the loose paragraphs he occasionally addressed to the public, without a signature of any kind, we have his own assertion, that from the time of his corresponding, as JUNIUS, with the editor of the Public Advertiser, he never wrote in any other news-paper. “I believe," says he, "I need not assure you that I have never written in any other paper since I began with yours;" Private Letter, No. 7. So also in another Private Letter, No. 13. "I sometimes change my signature; but could have no reason to change the paper; especially for one that does not circulate half as much as yours."

That he was not only a man of highly cultivated general talents and education, but had critically and successfully studied the language, the law, the constitution, and history of his native country is indubitable. Yet this is not all; the proofs are just as clear that he was also a man of independent fortune, that he moved in the immediate circle of the court, and was intimately acquainted, from its first conception, with almost every public measure, every ministerial intrigue, and every domestic incident.

That he was a man of easy, if not of affluent circumstances, is unquestionable from the fact that he never could be induced in any way or shape to receive any acknowledgment from the proprietor of the Public Advertiser, for the great benefit and popularity he conferred on this paper by his writings, and to which he was fairly entitled. When the first genuine edition of his letters was on the point of publication, Mr. Woodfall again urged him either to accept half its profits, or to point out some public charity or other institution to which an equal sum might be presented. His reply to this request is contained in a paragraph of one of his Private Letters, No. 59, and confers credit on both the parties. "What you say about the profits is very handsome. I like to