they are arms that may be easily turned against himself. I could, by malicious interrogations, disturb the peace of the most virtuous man in the kingdom; I could take the decalogue, and say to one man, Did you never steal? To the next, Did you never commit murder? And to JUNIUS himself, who is putting my life and conduct to the rack, Did you never bear false witness against thy neighbour? JUNIUS must easily see, that unless he affirms the contrary in his real name, some people who may be as ignorant of him as I am, will be apt to suspect him of having deviated a little from the truth: therefore let JUNIUS ask no more questions. You bite against a file: cease viper. W.D.

LETTER VII.

TO SIR WILLIAM DRAPER, KNIGHT OF THE BATH. SIR, 3 March, 1769. AN academical education has given you an unlimited command over the most beautiful figures of speech. Masks, hatchets, racks, and vipers dance through your letters in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion. These are the gloomy companions of a disturbed imagination; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration. I will not contend with you in point of composition. You are a scholar, Sir William, and, if I am truly informed, you write Latin with almost as much purity as English. Suffer me then, for I am a plain unlettered man, to continue that stile of interrogation, which suits my capacity, and to which, considering the readiness of your answers, you ought to have no objection. Even Mr. Bingley* promises to answer, if put to the

torture.

*This man, being committed by the court of King's Bench for a contempt, voluntarily made oath, that he would never answer interrogatories, unless he should be put to the torture. AUTHOR.

Bingley was by trade a bookseller; and in the character here referred to, a witness for the crown, in a cause between government and Wilkes. It is difficult to say for what purpose this man was subpoenaed on either side; for his obstinacy was so extreme, that he could not be induced to answer the interrogatories addressed to him on the part either of the

plaintiff

Do you then really think that, if I were to ask a most virtuous man whether he ever committed theft, or murder, it would disturb his peace of mind? Such a question might perhaps discompose the gravity of his muscles, but I believe it would little affect the tranquillity of his conscience. Examine your own breast, Sir William, and you will discover, that reproaches and enquiries have no power to afflict either the man of unblemished integrity, or the abandoned profligate. It is the middle compound character which alone is vulnerable: the man, who, without firmness enough to avoid a dishonourable action, has feeling enough to be ashamed of it.

I thank you for your hint of the decalogue, and shall take an opportunity of applying it to some of your most virtuous friends in both houses of parliament.

You seem to have dropped the affair of your regiment; so let it rest. When you are appointed to another, I dare say you will not sell it either for a gross sum, or for an annuity upon lives.

I am truly glad (for really, Sir William, I am not your enemy, nor did I begin this contest with you*) that you plaintiff or defendant. It was on this account he was committed to the King's Bench prison, where he continued as refractory as in the King's Bench court-he was at length discharged, on the motion of the attorney general, without any submission on his own part, from the mere idea that he had suffered severely enough for his contumacy.-See a further account of this transaction, JUNIUS, Letter XLI. EDIT.

* The politics of Sir William Draper were certainly not violent, and he appears to have been rather a private friend of the Marquis's than a partisan on either side of the question. The following letter, published by him in the Public Advertiser, in the very midst of his dispute with JUNIUS, is highly creditable to his liberality, and sufficiently proves the truth of the assertion of JUNIUS, that he could not be, at least upon political principles, Sir William's enemy.

SIR,

TO THE PRINTER.

Clifton, February 6th, 1769. If the voice of a well-meaning individual could be heard amidst the clamour, fury, and madness of the times, would it appear too rash and presumptuous to propose to the public that an act of indemnity and oblivion may be made for all past transactions and offences, as well with respect to Mr. Wilkes as to our colonies? Such salutary expedients have been embraced

have been able to clear yourself of a crime, though at the expense of the highest indiscretion. You say that your halfpay was given you by way of pension. I will not dwell upon the singularity of uniting in your own person two sorts of

embraced by the wisest of nations: such expedients have been made use of by our own, when the public confusion had arrived to some very dangerous and alarming crisis; and I believe it needs not the gift of prophecy to foretel that some such crisis is now approaching. Perhaps it will be more wise and praiseworthy to make such an act immediately, in order to prevent the possibility (not to say the probability) of an insurrection at home and in our dependencies abroad, than it will be to be obliged to have recourse to one after the mischief has been done, and the kingdom has groaned under all the miseries that avarice, ambition, hypocrisy, and madness, could inflict upon it. An act of grace, indemnity, and oblivion, was passed at the restoration of King Charles the second; but I will venture to say that had such an act been seasonably passed in the reign of his unhappy father, the civil war had been prevented, and no restoration had been necessary. It is too late to recal all the messengers and edicts of wrath. Cannot the money that is now wasted in endless and mutual prosecutions, and in stopping the mouth of one person, and opening that of another, be better employed in erecting a temple to Concord? Let Mr. Wilkes lay the first stone, and such a stone as I hope the builders will not refuse. May this parliament, to use Lord Clarendon's expression, be called "The healing parliament!" May our foul wounds be cleansed and then closed! The English have been as famous for good-nature as for valour: let it not be said that such qualities are degenerated into savage ferocity. If any of my friends in either house of legislature shall condescend to listen to and improve these hints, I shall think that I have not lived in vain. WILLIAM DRAPER.

Sir William, in return, if he ever had any personal enmity against JuNius, appears to have relinquished it completely a short time after the contest, if we may judge from the following anecdote given by Mr. Campbell in his life of Hugh Boyd, p. 185.

"Some months after the Letters of JUNIUS were published collectively, Boyd met Sir William Draper at the tennis court, where their acquaintance was originally formed in the year 1769, and where (being both great tennis players) they used often to meet; the conversation turning upon JUNIUS, Sir William observed, "That though JUNIUS had treated him with extreme severity, he now looked upon him as a very honest fellow; that he freely forgave him for the bitterness of his censures, and that there was no man with whom he would more gladly drink a bottle of old Burgundy." EDIT.

It has been said, and I believe truly, that it was signified to Sir William Draper, as the request of Lord Granby, that he should desist from wri ting in his Lordship's defence. Sir William Draper certainly drew JUNIUS VOL. I. forward

I

provision, which in their own nature, and in all military and parliamentary views, are incompatible; but I call upon you to justify that declaration, wherein you charge your Sovereign with having done an act in your favour, notoriously forward to say more of Lord Granby's character, than he originally intended. He was reduced to the dilemma of either being totally silenced, or of supporting his first letter. Whether Sir William had a right to reduce him to this dilemma, or to call upon him for his name, after a voluntary attack on his side, are questions submitted to the candor of the public.— The death of Lord Granby was lamented by JUNIUS. He undoubtedly owed some compensations to the public, and seemed determined to acquit himself of them. In private life, he was unquestionably that good man, who, for the interest of his country, ought to have been a great one. Bonum virum facilè dixeris;-magnum libenter. I speak of him now without partiality; I never spoke of him with resentment. His mistakes, in public conduct, did not arise either from want of sentiment, or want of judgment, but in general from the difficulty of saying No to the bad people who surrounded him.

As for the rest, the friends of Lord Granby should remember, that he himself thought proper to condemn, retract, and disavow, by a most solemn declaration in the House of Commons, that very system of political conduct, which JUNIUS had held forth to the disapprobation of the public. -AUTHOR.

This took place January the 30th, 1770, in a committee on the state of the nation, in which the affair of the Middlesex election was particularly discussed; and on which occasion the Marquis of Granby delivered himself as follows:

"I am sorry I am obliged to declare myself against the motion; but I cannot see what right this House can have to receive any person into it as a member except by the full choice of his constituents. It was for want of considering the nice distinction between expulsion and incapacitation that I gave my vote for the sitting of a member who was not returned in the last session of this parliament. That vote I shall always lament as the greatest misfortune of my life. I now see the Middlesex election in another light: I now see that though this House has an unquestionable and long established right to expel, yet that a right to incapacitate is lodged only in the legislature collectively. I see that I was in an error, and I am not ashamed to make this public declaration of it, and give my vote for the amendment."

The belief of JUNIUS, "that it was signified to Sir W. D. as the request of Lord G. that he should desist from writing in his Lordship's defence," is farther confirmed by the following notice appended to a letter on the subject of this controversy, signed Aurelius, inserted in the Public Advertiser, March 11, 1769. "We must now beg leave to drop this dispute, as the printer has received a hint that its continuance will be disagreeable."

Sir

against law. The half-pay, both in Ireland and England, is appropriated by parliament; and if it be given to persons who, like you, are legally incapable of holding it, it is a breach of law. It would have been more decent in you to

Sir W. Draper, as far as Lord Granby was implicated, dropped the subject; though he subsequently wrote the following letter in defence of his own conduct, in which he again calls upon JUNIUS to avow himself.

TO THE PRINTER OF THE PUBLIC ADVERTISER.

SIR, Clifton, April 24th, 1769. A Gentleman who signed himself An Half-pay Subaltern, has called upon me to stand forth in the behalf of the much distressed officers now upon half-pay. He was pleased to say, that I have an effectual method of being really serviceable to the officers of my reduced regiment. I should have been happy in receiving, by a private letter, that gentleman's idea of relief for them; could have wished he had made use of a more agreeable mode of application than a public newspaper; as unluckily these ill seasoned provocatives are more apt to disgust than quicken the desire of doing good, especially when they are accompanied by invidious reflections, both rash and ill founded: at present I am quite at a loss to find out by what means a person out of parliament, who has long retired from the great world, and who of course has but very little influence or interest, can be of nuch use to those gallant and distressed gentlemen; to many of whom I have the greatest obligations; of which I have upon all occasions, made the most public and grateful acknowledgments; nor was there the smallest necessity to wake me in this loud manner to a remembrance of their important services, although the writer has been pleased to charge me with forgetfulness; a most heavy imputation! as it implies ingratitude towards those by whom I have been so essentially assisted, and to whom I am so much indebted for my good fortune; which however is not so great as the gentleman imagines: he himself forgets that the Spaniards have also forgot to pay the ransom. If he could quicken their memory, instead of mine, the officers would be more obliged to him.

Their bravery has given me a competency, a golden mediocrity, but not much affluence or luxury, which is a stranger to my house as well as to my thoughts; and I here most solemnly declare (notwithstanding the false assertions of a JUNIUS, who has told the world that I had sold the partners of my victory, and then gravely asked me if I were not guilty of perjury) that my income is now less than when I first went to Manilla. It is true, that its being so is by my own choice: I am voluntarily upon an equivalent for half-pay; and although I would most willingly stand forth in the service of my king and country, should the necessity of the times demand my poor assistance, yet I would not again accept of any regiment whatsoever, or interfere with the pretensions of those officers, whose good fortune has been less than their merits; and I here most solemnly declare, that I never received either from the East India Company, or from the Spaniards,

directly