LETTER XLIII.

TO THE PRINTER OF THE PUBLIC ADVERTISER.

SIR,

6th Feb. 1771.

I HOPE your correspondent JUNIUS is better employed than in answering or reading the criticisms of a newspaper. This is a task, from which, if he were inclined to submit to it, his friends ought to relieve him. Upon this principle, I

try to muster the whole of his political and argumentative powers. His answer, published in 1771, is entitled, "Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland's Islands:" from which the following is worth transcribing:

"To considerations such as these, it is reasonable to impute that anxiety of the Spaniards, from which the importance of this island is inferred by JUNIUS, one of the few writers of his despicable faction whose name does not disgrace the page of an opponent. The value of the thing disputed may be very different to him that gains and him that loses it. The Spaniards, by yielding Falkland's Island, have admitted a precedent of what they think encroachment, have suffered a breach to be made in the outworks of their empire, and, notwithstanding the reserve of prior right, have suffered a dangerous exception to the prescriptive tenure of their American territories."

“An unsuccessful war would undoubtedly have had the effect which the enemies of the ministry so earnestly desire; for who could have sustained the disgrace of folly ending in misfortune? but had wanton invasion undeservedly prospered, had Falkland's Island been yielded unconditionally with every right prior and posterior, though the rabble might have shouted, and the windows have blazed, yet those who know the value of life, and the uncertainty of public credit, would have murmured, perhaps unheard, at the increase of our debt, and the loss of our people. "This thirst of blood, however the visible promoters of sedition may think it convenient to shrink from the accusation, is loudly avowed by JuNIUS, the writer by whom his party owes much of its pride, and some of its popularity: Of JUNIUS it cannot be said, as of Ulysses, that he scatters ambiguous expressions among the vulgar; for he cries havock without reserve, and endeavours to let slip the dogs of foreign and of civil war, ig. norant whither they are going, and careless what may be their prey. JuNIUS has sometimes made his satire felt, but let not injudicious admiration mistake the venom of the shaft for the vigour of the bow. He has sometimes sported with lucky malice; but to him that knows his company, it is not hard to be sarcastic in a mask. While he walks like Jack the Giant Killer in a coat of darkness, he may do much mischief with little strength.

shall undertake to answer Anti-Junius, more I believe, to his conviction than to his satisfaction. Not daring to attack the main body of JUNIUS's last letter, he triumphs in having, as he thinks, surprised an out-post, and cut off a detached

strength. Novelty captivates the superficial and thoughtless; vehemence delights the discontented and turbulent. He that contradicts acknowledged truth will always have an audience; he that villifies established authority will always find abettors.

"JUNIUS burst into notice with a blaze of impudence which has rarely glared upon the world before, and drew the rabble after him as a mon. ster makes a show. When he had once provided for his safety by impenetrable secrecy, he had nothing to combat but truth and justice, enemies whom he knows to be feeble in the dark. Being then at liberty to indulge himself in all the immunities of invisibility; out of the reach of danger, he has been bold; out of the reach of shame, he has been confident. As a rhetorician, he has the art of persuading when he seconded desire; as a reasoner, he has convinced those who had no doubt before; as a moralist, he has taught that virtue may disgrace; and as a patriot, he has gratified the mean by insults on the high. Finding sedition ascendant, he has been able to advance it; finding the nation combustible, he has been able to inflame it. Let us abstract from his wit the vivacity of insolence, and withdraw from his efficacy the sympathetic favour of plebeian malignity; I do not say that we shall leave him nothing; the cause that I defend scorns the help of falsehood; but if we leave him only his merit, what will be his praise?

"It is not by his liveliness of imagery, his pungency of periods, or his fertility of allusion, that he detains the cits of London and the boors of Middlesex. Of stile and sentiment they take no cognizance. They admire him for virtues like their own, for contempt of order, and violence of outrage, for rage of defamation and audacity of falsehood. The supporters of the Bill of Rights feel no niceties of composition, nor dexterities of sophistry; their faculties are better proportioned to the bawl of Bellas or barbarity of Beckford; but they are told that JUNIUS is on their side, and they are therefore sure that JUNIUS is infallible. Those who know not whither he would lead them, resolve to follow him; and those who cannot find his meaning, hope he means rebellion.

"JUNIUS is an unusual phænomenon on which some have gazed with wonder, and some with terror, but wonder and terror are transitory passions. He will soon be more closely viewed, or more attentively examined, and what folly has taken for a comet that, from its flaming hair, shook pestilence and war, enquiry will find to be only a meteor formed by the vapours of putrefying democracy, and kindled into flame by the effer vescence of interest struggling with conviction, which, after having

plunged

argument, a mere straggling proposition. But even in this petty warfare, he shall find himself defeated.

JUNIUS does not speak of the Spanish nation as the natu

plunged its followers in a bog, will leave us enquiring why we regard ed it.

"Yet though I cannot think the stile of JUNIUS secure from criticism, though his expressions are often trite, and his periods feeble, I should never have stationed him where he has placed himself, had I not rated him by his morals rather than his faculties. 'What,' says Pope, 'must be the priest, where the monkey is a god? What must be the drudge of a party of which the heads are Wilkes and Crosby, Sawbridge and Townshend?

"JUNIUS knows his own meaning, and can therefore tell it. He is an enemy to the ministry, he sees them hourly growing stronger. He knows that a war at once unjust and unsuccessful would have certainly displaced them, and is therefore, in his zeal for his country, angry that war was not unjustly made, and unsuccessfully conducted; but there are others whose thoughts are less clearly expressed, and whose schemes perhaps are less consequentially digested, who declare that they do not wish for rupture, yet condemn the ministry for not doing that from which a rupture would naturally have followed."

Of this pamphlet the ministry were not a little proud; and especially as they made no doubt that JUNIUS would hereby be drawn into a paper contest with Johnson, and that hence they would possess a greater facility of detecting him. JUNIUS seems to have been aware of the trap laid for him, and made no direct reply whatever. How far the Doctor was correct in asking the question, what must be the drudge of a party of which the heads are Wilkes and Crosby, Sawbridge and Townshend, may be seen by referring to the protest entered on the Lord's journals against the address voted in consequence of the communications made to both houses of parliament on the conclusion of the Spanish convention, which adopts most of the sentiments here so ably expressed, and which will be found in a note to Miscellaneous Letters, No. LXXXVIII.

In effect the doctor did not fairly meet his argument; and a reply was not altogether necessary.

With one part of this celebrated pamphlet the minister himself was displeased, and actually suppressed the sale till his own correction was sub. stituted for the obnoxious passage. The reader shall receive the account from the following letter inserted in the Public Advertiser, which is sufficiently explicit, and was incapable of contradiction.

April 2, 1771.

TO THE PRINTER OF THE PUBLIC ADVERTISER. SIR, SOME little time ago there was published a pamphlet, intitled, "Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland's Islands,"

said

ral enemies of England. He applies that description with the strictest truth and justice to the Spanish Court. From the moment, when a Prince of the House of Bourbon ascended that throne, their whole system of government was

said, upon good grounds, to have been written by the learned Dr. Johnson, under the special direction of the minister-apparent. Scarce were a few copies got abroad, before the sale of the edition, which had been advertised, was stopped, by order of the minister, for the sake of an alteration, which was made (as there is reason to believe) without the consent of the doctor having been asked or had; after which it was set agoing again, and the public is now happily once more in possession of it. But as some may be curious to know in what it was that the alteration particularly consisted, and may not have by them both the first published and the altered pamphlet to compare, the following account will solve the question:

In the first publication, pages 67 and 68, you have the following paragraph:

"The Manilla ransom has, I think, been most mentioned by the inferior bellowers of sedition. Those who lead the faction know that it cannot be remembered much to their advantage. The followers of Lord Rockingham remember that his ministry begun and ended without obtaining it: the adherents to Grenville would be told that he could never be brought to understand our claim. The law of nations made little of his knowledge. Let him not, however, be depreciated in his grave; he had powers not universally possessed: if he could have GOT the MONEY he could have COUNTED it."

Upon calling in the pamphlet, this sarcastic pretty epigram, at the close of the paragraph, was struck out, the two pages being cancelled, and a carton substituted, with the following alteration after the word "possessed:"

"And if he sometimes ERRED, he was likewise sometimes RIGHT."

And thus it now stands in the second publication. And here the exquisite stupidity of the words which were substituted, to the words expung. ed, would not be worth remarking, as if it was very possible to name that personage in the world of whom it was not predicable, that “if he sometimes erred, he was also sometimes right;" but that there occurs upon it a not uncurious question, to which of the two motives of the minister this notable alteration was most probably owing; a question which it is left to the candour of the reader to decide with himself.

Whether was it owing to the premier's scrupulous delicacy of not wounding the memory of the dead (a man who with a knowledge of the laws, and of the finances, infinitely superior to his, had however, if possible, as little of the genius for managing affairs as himself), that he caused the close of the paragraph in the first publication to be cancelled, to make

way

inverted and became hostile to this country. Unity of possession introduced a unity of politics, and Lewis the Fourteenth had reason when he said to his grandson, “The Pyrenees are removed." The History of the present century is one continued confirmation of the prophecy.

The assertion "That violence and oppression at home can only be supported by treachery and submission abroad,” is applied to a free people, whose rights are invaded, not to the government of a country, where despotic, or absolute power is confessedly vested in the prince; and with this application, the assertion is true. An absolute monarch having no points to carry at home, will naturally maintain the honour of his crown in all his transactions with foreign powers. But if we could suppose the Sovereign of a free nation, possessed with a design to make himself absolute, he would be inconsistent with himself if he suffered his projects to be interrupted or embarrassed by a foreign war; unless that war tended, as in some cases it might, to promote his principal design. Of the three exceptions to this general rule of conduct, (quoted by Anti-Junius) that of Oliver Cromwell is the only one in point. Harry the eighth, by the submission of his parlia ment, was as absolute a prince as Lewis the fourteenth. Queen Elizabeth's government was not oppressive to the people; and as to her foreign wars, it ought to be considered that they were unavoidable. The national honour was not in question. She was compelled to fight in defence of her own and of her title to the crown. In the common course of person selfish policy, Oliver Cromwell should have cultivated the friendship of foreign powers, or at least have avoided disputes with them, the better to establish his tyranny at home.

way for foisting into the second an alteration that mended nothing, being manifestly an exquisite chip of nonsense?

Or, was it that those unlucky words in the first, relative to the counting of money, struck the conscious premier, in the light of the obvious danger of the public's being reminded by them of that rich story of a high cha racter's having, upon a time, been observed busily employed in the noble act of COUNTING money at CHURCH? EDIT.