quarrelled, cried, kissed, and been friends again*; as the objects of desire, the ministerial rattles have been put into their hands. But such proceedings are very unworthy of the gravity and dignity of a great nation. We do not want men of abilities; but we have wanted steadiness; we want unanimity: your letters, JUNIUS, will not contribute thereto. You may one day expire by a flame of your own kindling. But it is my humble opinion that lenity and moderation, pardon and oblivion, will disappoint the efforts of all the seditious in the land, and extinguish their wide spreading fires. I have lived with this sentiment; with this I shall die. WILLIAM DRAPER†. LETTER XXVII. TO THE PRINTER OF THE PUBLIC ADVERTISER. SIR, 13 October, 1769. IF Sir William Draper's bed be a bed of torture, he has made it for himself. I shall never interrupt his repose. Having changed the subject, there are parts of his last letter not undeserving of a reply. Leaving his private character and conduct out of the question, I shall consider him merely in the capacity of an author, whose labours certainly do no discredit to a newspaper. We say, in common discourse, that a man may be his own enemy, and the frequency of the fact makes the expression. * Sir William gives us a pleasant account of men, who, in his opinion at least, are best qualified to govern an empire. † A few days subsequent to the publication of this letter, a report was circulated, that Sir William Draper, in consequence of his defence of Lord Granby, had been appointed to a governorship in America, which Sir William contradicted, in the following short note, addressed to the Printer of the Public Advertiser, Oct. 20, 1769. "Sir, "You are desired to contradict the report that Sir William Draper is appointed a governor in America. The story has been raised to make the public believe that he has endeavoured to vindicate those whom he knows to have been most infamously traduced for the sake of a reward. His motive for this voyage is entirely curiosity. He has nothing to do with the politics of this ministry, or any other set of men whosoever." EDIT. intelligible. But that a man should be the bitterest enemy of his friends, implies a contradiction of a peculiar nature! There is something in it which cannot be conceived without a confusion of ideas, nor expressed without a solecism in language. Sir William Draper is still that fatal friend Lord Granby found him. Yet I am ready to do justice to his generosity; if indeed it be not something more than generous, to be the voluntary advocate of men, who think themselves injured by his assistance, and to consider nothing in the cause he adopts, but the difficulty of defending it. I thought however he had been better read in the history of the human heart, than to compare or confound the tortures of the body with those of the mind. If conscience plays the tyrant, it would be greatly for the benefit of the world that she were more arbitrary, and far less placable, than some men find her. But it seems I have outraged the feelings of a father's heart.-Am I indeed so injudicious? Does Sir William Draper think I would have hazarded my credit with a generous nation, by so gross a violation of the laws of humanity? Does he think I am so little acquainted with the first and noblest characteristic of Englishmen? Or how will he reconcile such folly with an understanding so full of artifice as mine? Had he been a father, he would have been but little offended with the severity of the reproach, for his mind would have been filled with the justice of it. He would have seen that I did not insult the feelings of a father, but the father who felt nothing. He would have trusted to the evidence of his own paternal heart, and boldly denied the possibility of the fact, instead of defending it. Against whom then will his honest indignation be directed, when I assure him, that this whole town beheld the Duke of Bedford's conduct, upon the death of his son, with horror and astonishment. Sir William Draper does himself but little honour in opposing the general sense of his country. The people are seldom wrong in their opinions,-in their sentiments they are never mistaken. There may be a vanity perhaps in a singular way of thinking; but when a man professes a want of those feelings, which do honour to the multitude, he hazards some thing infinitely more important than the character of his understanding. After all, as Sir William may possibly be in earnest in his anxiety for the Duke of Bedford, I should be glad to relieve him from it. He may rest assured this worthy nobleman laughs, with equal indifference, at my reproaches, and Sir William's distress about him. But here let it stop. Even the Duke of Bedford, insensible as he is, will consult the tranquillity of his life, in not provoking the moderation of my temper. If, from the profoundest contempt, I should ever rise into anger, he should soon find, that all I have already said of him was lenity and compassion*. Out of a long catalogue, Sir William Draper has confined himself to the refutation of two charges only. The rest he had not time to discuss; and indeed it would have been a laborious undertaking. To draw up a defence of such a series of enormities, would have required a life at least as long as that, which has been uniformly employed in the practice of them. The public opinion of the Duke of Bedford's extreme œconomy is, it seems, entirely without foundation. Though not very prodigal abroad, in his own family at least, he is regular and magnificent. He pays his debts, abhors a beggar, and makes a handsome provision for his son. His charity has improved upon the proverb, and ended where it began. Admitting the whole force of this single instance of his domestic generosity (wonderful indeed, considering the narrowness of his fortune, and the little merit of his only son) the public may still perhaps be dissatisfied, and demand some other less equivocal proofs of his munificence. Sir William Draper should have entered boldly into the detail-of indigence relieved-of arts encouraged-of science patronized; men of learning protected, and works of genius rewarded; in short, had there been a single instance, besides Mr. Rigbyt, of blushing merit brought forward by the Duke, for the service of the public, it should not have been omittedt. See Private Letters, No. 10. †This gentleman is supposed to have the same idea of blushing, that a man blind from his birth, has of a scarlet or sky-blue. In answer to this heavy charge, two instances of the noble Duke's benevolence I wish it were possible to establish my inference with the same certainty, on which I believe the principle is founded. My conclusion however was not drawn from the principle benevolence were brought forward in two separate letters in the Public Advertiser. The one dated Oct. 17, and signed Frances, which states his having relieved with a patent employment, the husband of the writer of a series of sentimental letters of “Henry and Frances," in which the author, a Mrs. Griffiths, fictitiously depicted their own real distress. The other dated Oct. 20, and signed Jere. Mears, Lieut. of the 29th Regt. relates the Duke's generous and unsolicited bestowment upon him of a pair of colours, upon a knowledge, when lord lieutenant of Ireland, of the writer's destitute situation. A much abler reply to JUNIUS's severe attack upon his Grace was afterwards introduced into the Public Advertiser in a letter to JUNIUS Subscribed M. Tullius, dated Dec. 8, from which the editor feels bound, on the score of impartiality, to make the following extract: "In these strictures I have principally in view the treatment which JuNIUS, in two publications has thought proper to offer to the Duke of Bedford. His animadversions on this illustrious nobleman, are intended to reflect both on his public and private character. With regard to the first of these, nothing of consequence is urged besides his Grace's conduct as ambassador at the court of Versailles in the making of the late peace. I mean not to enter here into the merits or demerits of that important transaction. Thus much is known to all, the riches of the nation were at that time well nigh exhausted, public credit was on the brink of ruin, the national debt increased to such an enormous height as to threaten us with a sudden and universal crush; and whatever be said of the concessions that were made to bring that memorable event to bear, Canada among other instances, will ever remain a glorious monument; the interests of this kingdom were not forgotten in that negotiation: But JUNIUS, hackneyed in the tricks of controversy, where a man's open and avowed actions are innocent, has the art to hint at secret terms and private compensations; and though he is compelled by the force of truth to own 'no document of any treasonable practice is to be found,' we are given plainly to understand so many public sacrifices were not made at that period without a valuable consideration, and that in practice there is very little difference in the ceremony of offering a bribe, and of that Duke's accepting it. To a charge that is alledged, not only without proof, but even with a confession that no proof is to be expected, no answer is to be returned but that of a contemptuous silence. When a writer takes upon him to attack the character of a nobleman of the highest rank, and in a matter of so capital a nature as that of selling his country for a bribe, common policy, as well as prudence, require that an accusation of such importance be supported with at least some show of evidence, and that even this be not done but with the utmost moderation of temper and expression: but so sober a conduct would have Been beside the purpose of JUNIUS, whose business it was not to reason, But alone. I am not so unjust as to reason from one crime to another; though I think, that, of all the vices, avarice is most apt to taint and corrupt the heart. I combined the known but rail. The Roman rhetorician, among the other arts of oratory, mentions one, which he dignifies with the title of a 'Canine eloquence,' that of filling up the empty places of an argument with railings, convitiis implere vacua causarum. In the knowledge of this rule JUNIUS is without a rival; and the present instance, among a thousand others, is a convincing testimony of his dexterity in the application of it. "But here it will be said, it is not from circumstance and conjecture alone that this charge against the Duke of Bedford is founded; the general character of every one takes its colour and complexion from that quality in him which predominates, and the allowed avarice of the man affords an evidence not to be resisted of the rapacity of the ambassador: and is it then so incontestible a point that the Duke is indeed the sordid man which JUNIUS has delineated? are there no instances to be produced that denote a contrary disposition? one would think if a vicious thirst of gain had borne so large a share, as is pretended, in his Grace's composition, this would have discovered itself in the pecuniary emoluments he had secured for himself when he engaged in a share of Government. But what advantages of this kind has he obtained; or to what bargains with the minister does JUNIUS allude, when he knows, that his Grace, though willing to assist the friends of Administration with his interest and weight, has not accepted any department either of power or profit? had JUNIUS and candour not shaken hands, this circumstance alone would have afforded him an evidence beyond all the legal proofs of a court of justice, of the iniquity of his own insinuations. But we are not at a loss for other instances, and those no ordinary ones, of the Duke's munificence. To what principle shall we attribute the payment of the elder Brother's debts to the amount of not much less than one hundred thousand pounds? the splendid provision he made for his unfortunate son; and afterwards for that son's more unfortunate Widow? what shall we say to his known attachments to the interests of his friends, his kindness to his domestics, and annual bounty to those who have served him faithfully? his indulgence to his dependants? or what are, if these be not, unequivocal proofs of genuine liberality and benevolence? "When to these symptoms of an enlarged and generous mind, we add' what are equally constituent parts of his Grace's character, the decency and decorum of his conduct in private life, his regularity in his family, and what is now so rare a virtue among the great, his constant attendance on all the public offices of Divine Worship, we shall hardly find in the whole circle of the nobility a man that has a juster and much more than a constitutional claim to respect, or one that less deserved the censures of a satirist, such as JUNIUS, than his Grace of Bedford. But in the reflections of JUNIUS there is a more surprising piece of profligacy yet behind. As if all the former instances of his malignity had been too little, he has filled up the |