to be let, as advertisements and notices will shew every reader and passenger.

"Still foreign trade continues rather to diminish than increase, and probably only waits the doubtful period of peace to disappear altogether. The war therefore, if not just, is now become fatally necessary; at least for our existence. There are many reasons why peace would be of little or no benefit. In the first place, it would add some hundred thousands to an idle population, for whom, in consequence of the operation of our restrictions on the trade of the continent, it would be physically and morally impossible to find employment; consequently the starvation or emigration of thousands must take place, and not carrying money out of the kingdom with them, in what character must they leave it? As servants! What a humiliation! But is there no remedy? No; there can be no remedy, unless the government can afford to give up more than half of its present revenues. The enormous height of the taxes, of house-rent, and provisions, have long compelled our manufacturers to do infinitely more work for a bare subsistence, and to answer the demands of the present war, than the people of any other nation do for theirs; consequently, the foreign markets have been long glutted. Add to this cause, the mischievous introduction of machinery has still lowered the price of labour, which Mr. Tooke would have proportioned to that of provisions.

"If then in time of war, when so many thousands of our people are in arms in different parts of the world, there be not by any means sufficient employment for those that are at home, what are to be done with the additional hands which would be thrown upon us by a peace? If, while our island has become, as it were, the counting-house of the creation, and if with the sweep of the whole sea in every part of the globe, and the exclusive command of every port in the world, in consequence of the continuation of the war, we barely exist as a commercial people, what must be the result of admitting any rival in the case of a peace? Much less can we bear the idea of the liberty of the seas to all nations; we who subsist as a commercial country wholly and solely by our peculiar possession of the ocean, and the exclusion of others from equal privileges! This must be the effect of our turning commerce into a sword.' And as the present war differs from former wars in many respects, so will the peace that must follow it sooner or later differ from any other peace; unless all Europe, and we may now add South America also, should be again disorganized in our favour.

6

All this dread order break-for what? for thee?
Vile worm! Oh, madness, pride, impiety!"

"And yet it must be so, if we are saved as a nation without such a radical reform as Mr. Tooke and his friends sought to

obtain."

Such is the writer who has got the start of all others in pay

ing the tribute of posterity to the memory of Mr. Tooke. And upon our consciences we can say, that excepting the philological part of that gentleman's character, we do not see that the task could have fallen into better hands.

We cannot boast of having enjoyed any personal acquaintance with the subject of these memoirs. We know him only from his works; and from those public scenes in which he has been equally observable by all. Of his private life we could say nothing, if, as reviewers, it was our province to speak of it. We have learned only through the common channels of information what others have learned. Of his public life Mr. Reid seems to be a most determined admirer. With a zeal, falling little short of adoration, he has sacrificed to his manes a hecatomb of great characters, and among these victims we find, in the 7th page of the introduction, those whom we confess ourselves to regard with feelings of affectionate homage. In the same page, the same patriotic writer talks of the unhappy disagreement between "these two great men," meaning Mr. Horne Tooke and Mr. Wilkes. Every one has an undoubted right to bestow the epithet "great" upon whomsoever he pleases, according to his fancy. And so far are we from feeling angry with the application of the epithet in this instance, that we are rather pleased with it than otherwise, as thinking the effect of it was to convert into panegyric the preceding invective against the sovereign and his son.

With this taste for greatness, the author of the memoirs commences his labour of love in recording for the example of his countrymen, the virtuous struggles of the suffering patriot. He takes him up at the period of his intimacy and co-operation with the great Mr. Wilkes. The beautiful confederacy of such minds in the correction of ministerial profligacy, and the protection of riotous Spitalfields weavers from the sacrilegious hands of justice, seems to fill our biographer's mind with the greatest admiration. The struggles of Cato against his country's degeneracy did not obtain for him a higher eulogy from the real patriots of Rome. This solemn league and covenant between Mr. Horne and Mr. Wilkes was farther cemented by the assistance voluntarily afforded by Mr. Horne in promoting Mr. Wilkes's election for Middlesex. We find at this period the reverend gentleman opening houses for the "great man" at Brentford. But alas! how fragile are all human alliances, though settled upon the purest principles. There was something perhaps of delicacy in the composition of this amiable union, which rendered it unable to sustain the rude collision of political contests. It gave way on a sudden; and as susceptible minds are subject to extremes, a

fierce hostility succeeded, in which each of the parties found, in the circumstances of their former intercourse, an ample fund of crimination and retort.

The writer of the book before us lays the whole blame on the great Mr. Wilkes, who, he admits, with an amiable air of mild disapprobation, was certainly far from being a spotless character. The author of the letters signed Junius, declared in favour of Mr. Wilkes, whom he seemed to think a much less exceptionable character than his reverend antagonist. For our own parts, we must fairly confess that, in this interesting comparison, we find it absolutely impossible to settle the point of deteriority. The biographer of Mr. Tooke observes that Mr. Wilkes was too sparing of his person and his purse, while Mr. Tooke was lavish of both in the great cause in which they were engaged. Junius, however, entertained an opposite opinion. "Mr. Horne," says he," enlarges with rapture upon the importance of his services, the dreadful battles which he might have been engaged in, and the dangers he had escaped; but he cannot help admitting the superiority of Mr. Wilkes in this line of service. On the one side we see nothing but imaginary distresses; on the other we see real prosecutions; real penalties; real imprisonment; life repeatedly hazarded; and at one moment almost the certainty of death." What these memorable patriots and champions of liberty predicate of each other, will only meet in one point of consistency. We believe it to be safest, as well as most complaisant, to agree with each concerning the other.

With respect to Wilkes, whom our author, with such an interesting naiveté, calls "a great man," we do not conceive there is another person in the country who does not esteem him one of the most desperately wicked men whom political agitations and the accidental posture of the times have rescued, for a season, from merited infamy.

Who Junius was seems yet to be a profound secret, and will, probably, for ever remain so. What he was may be in a moment collected. Hardly a letter, or a line of his imposing compositions, is without strong indications on this head. His politics are the politics of a party, full of ephemeral cant-of the grossest inconsistencies, and of the most slanderous, aspersions; and the mode of his attack upon individuals was such, as to render his declamation detestable, even where it was true. We agree with Mr. Tooke that he was a skulking assassin. His morality seems, in some measure, to identify itself with that of Mr. Wilkes, whose excesses both in public and private conduct, with a most prostitute urbanity, he ascribes to the liberal sentiments by which he was governed; and in a language re

plete with insult to his own country, claims, for an English gentleman, that latitude in vice by which the mock assertor of liberty was above all men distinguished. “Mr. Wilkes," says this admired writer, in his letter to the King, "brought with "him into politics the same liberal sentiments by which his "private conduct had been directed; and seemed to think, that as there were few excesses in which an English gentleman may not be permitted to indulge, the same latitude was al"lowed him in the choice of his political principles, and in "the spirit of maintaining them." This is one of Junius's curious paragraphs, and a specimen of his art in placing his meaning out of the reach of criticism, by refining it into a sort of exquisite nonsense. Enough, however, is discernible in it to shew his fitness to be a censurer of public conduct, or a judge of private worth.

His notions of a true patriot, he gives us in his letter dated the 5th of October, 1771. "He must be a person obstinate, intrepid, and fertile in expedients, and must found his popularity upon such a conduct towards government, as may preclude the possibility or hope of reconciliation with his sovereign." He need not have told us after this, that "it was not necessary for "his patriot to have the virtues of a stoic," or "that it would "be impossible to find a man with purer principles than Mr. "Wilkes, prepared to go the lengths, and run the hazards that "he had done." The letter to the Duke of Grafton, on the subject of cutting timber on Whittlebury forest, contains a -dastardly attack on his Majesty, and among the compositions of Junius stands foremost for malignity, meanness, and falsehood. That the charge of hypocrisy upon the king, and an attempt to betray his subjects by a pretended zeal for religion, should find reception among educated persons, is not to be imagined, but by what perversion of intellect, rational and moral men have been induced to give to the tawdry antitheses, and insolent verbiage of Junius the credit of grave and dignified satire, we are unable to conceive. The whole substratum of this most vile and venomous epistle was well known to have been totally false in fact, as was declared by Mr. John Pitt, the surveyor general of the king's woods; by whom the last editor of Junius states himself to have been assured, that so far from any blame in this respect attaching upon the king or his minister, the utmost regard to the public interest had been always manifested in respect to the timber of Whittlebury forest. Such were the weapons with which Junius attacked the sacred honour of a young prince, and murdered the reputation of his fellow-subjects. To the ferocity of the beast, that rushes from

his lair on his prey, he added the cruelty of the human savage, that prefaces destruction by torture.

That the style of Junius possesses point and brilliancy, can not be denied. But it is a brilliancy more successful in captivating the judgments of young readers, than in compelling the admiration of men of ripe understandings. Dazzled by the specious rhetoric, and antithetical structure of the sentences, but still more by the seeming courage of the invective, the student, bred in obedience to authority, surrenders himself to the imposing spectacle of a subject flinging his unmeasured abuse upon the magistracy and nobility of his country, and insulting his sovereign with impunity in terms which, between gentlemen, (to speak in popular language,) could only be expiated in the field of honour.

Among the vulgar, the popularity of these letters is a problem of easy solution. He that, without flinching, can utter falsehoods of those who are in power, needs nothing but assertion to obtain implicit belief; and Junius, who with his usual dexterity in substituting paradox for depth of thought, has subjoined to his declaration in favour of monarchy a wish for a republican people, has, in his wicked endeavours to alienate the people from the prince, furnished the best comment on his meaning.

It was an event of happy omen to the ambition of Mr. Tooke to be engaged in a contest with Junius, in the outset of his political career. The moment and the occasion were singularly propitious. The malignancy of Junius had been too strong for his discretion: encouraged and exasperated by the passive dignity of the monarch, he had shot his bolt so furiously wide of all semblance of truth, and, rendered wanton by success, had so carelessly developed the full scope and extent of his malice, that for the task of exposing him, little more was required than plain sense and sound mediocrity of talent.

Mr. Tooke brought too much of Junius to the conflict with Junius. In the style of his letters it was evidently his ambition to reflect the idiom and spirit of his antagonist upon himself. This was not natural, and was, therefore, ungraceful. In the gaudy habiliments of Junius, he makes but an awkward figure. His own familiar dress and ordinary manner would have better suited the occasion. It was one of the disgusting sentiments of Junius, that as long as Wilkes should continue active in his hostility to the administration, and to be a thorn in the king's side, he would deserve the support of his country. For a proposition so foolish and so base, no terms of reproach could be excessive; and yet the reproaches of the Rev. Mr. Horne do not, we confess, much engage our sympathies in the perusal.