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been the condition of the gift. He called Burke a bearEt. 43. garden railer and declaimer; charged his companions with the malignity of treason, and himself with things dangerous and desperate; told him the world cried out against such arrogance in a man of his condition, and warned him against turning his house into a hole of adders.* The ministry seconded these exertions of its zealous supporters, and went about to fasten Junius upon him. Their papers had been rife with that suspicion ever since the letters began. Even the whigs became alarmed, and sent the brother of Tommy Townshend to obtain his formal disclaimer. Burke gave it, though not without reluctant and galled submission to the right implied in demanding it; † and was thenceforth, beyond all question, to be for ever held acquitted of the charge.

of the impending voyage as an attempt to improve them, in a style which I cannot help thinking incompatible with the fact of any certain or settled appointment having as yet been obtained for him. "But it must be submitted to," Burke finely adds. "A peaceable, honorable, and affluent decline of life, must be purchased by a "laborious or hazardous youth; and every day I think, more and more, that it is "well worth the purchase." (Correspondence, i. 53-4.) At what would be pretty nearly the date of "poor Dick's" appointment to the Customs, if contemporaneous with his brother's acceptance under Lord Rockingham, Richard was again in London, and soon again, of course, he returned to Grenada.

* See Correspondence of Burke, i. 297-305. Mr. Croker may be accepted as a good authority on this point, and even he does not hesitate to say : "Markham "and Burke had been intimate political as well as private friends, but when the prospect of high church preferment opened upon Markham, he seems to have "broken off from Mr. Burke as too violent a politician." Cro. Bos. 274.

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+ His first letter was not thought sufficiently distinct in its denial by Townshend. He then sent another. "Surely my situation is a little vexatious, " and not a little singular. I am, it seems, called upon to disown the libels in "which I am myself satirised as well as others. If I give no denial, things are "fixed upon me which are not, on many accounts, very honourable to me. If I 'deny, it seems to be giving satisfaction to those to whom I owe none and intend none. In this perplexity all I can do is, to satisfy you, and to leave you to "satisfy those whom you think worthy of being informed. I have, I dare say, to "nine-tenths of my acquaintance, denied my being the author of Junius, or having any knowledge of the author, as often as the thing was mentioned, whether in "jest or earnest, in style of disapprobation or of compliment. Perhaps I may have "omitted to do so to you, in any formal manner, as not supposing you to have any "suspicion of me. I now give you my word and honour that I am not the author

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Sir," said Johnson, "I should have believed Burke to

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"be Junius, because I know no man but Burke who is Et. 43.

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capable of writing these letters; but Burke spontaneously "denied it to me.":

Better, however, than even such spontaneous denial, and satisfactory where Townshend's disclaimer had failed to satisfy, should have been the evidence afforded by the letters themselves. This was the year when Garrick, smiling and happy amid the great who fondled and flattered him; sending meddling messages to the palace that Junius would write no more; writing himself to "Carissimo mio Edmundo' that what alone prevents their meeting is a gouty twinge in the knee, from "dining yesterday with an archbishop; " + -found himself, in that supreme prosperity, suddenly and contemptuously struck in the face, with a blow that appalled him. To believe that Burke's was the hand so lifted against his friend; that the "vagabond" was told to "keep to his pantomimes," by one who so lately had confessed the dearest obligations to him; would be to fix upon Burke an incredible imputation of dishonour. I do not even believe, that, if he had taken any part in the letters (though far from asserting that some portion of the secret may not have fallen into his reluctant keeping), he would have continued to sit down at their common club-table, in all the frankness of familiar intercourse, with the well-abused

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"of Junius, and that I know not the author of that paper, and I do authorize you "to say so. This will, I suppose, be enough, without showing my letter." Burke's Correspondence, i. 274-5.

Boswell, vii. 2. Johnson added: "The case would have been different had I "asked him if he was the author; a man so questioned, as to an anonymous publication, may think he has a right to deny it." See Lord John Russell's note to Moore's Diary, vi. 30.

+ May 3, 1771. Burke's Correspondence, i. 253.

See Garrick Correspondence, i. 353-4.

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Anthony Chamier. The stronger presumption is, that in his Et. 43. ordinary daily duties in the War-office, Chamier sat much nearer Junius than ever he sat in Gerrard-street.*

But, in clearing Burke of this remarkable authorship, which would have detracted from his character in proportion as it added to his fame,-for it matters little that the hilt is diamond-studded or the blade of unequalled temper, if the rapier be drawn only in the dark,—it is not so easy to clear him of having so shaped his course somewhat later, as to show that he still winced from the charge. Now was the time, profiting by the opportunities of George Grenville's death, and the general party confusion created by Wilkes and

*There is a curious account of Francis by one who knew him well, in Nicholls's Recollections and Reflections (i. 280, 291, &c.) He takes several occasions to repeat the idea with which he came to be impressed, as to the extraordinary abilities of Francis, to whom he was politically opposed, and he adds: "Strong resentment "was a leading feature in his character. I have heard him avow this sentiment "more openly and more explicitly, than I ever heard any other man avow it in "the whole course of my life." Of course Nicholls never connected him with Junius. I take the opportunity of appending a striking argument from a letter of Mr. Macaulay's (published in Lord Mahon's History, v. App. xxxii.), commenting on a recent attempt to disconnect Francis from Junius. "It is odd that the reviewer "should infer from the mistake about Draper's half-pay that Junius could not "have been in the War-office. I talked that matter over more than ten years 66 ago, when I was Secretary-at-War, with two of the ablest and best informed 66 gentlemen in the department; and we all three came to a conclusion the very "opposite of that at which the reviewer has arrived. Francis was chief clerk in "the English War-office. Everybody who drew half-pay through that office made "the declaration which Junius mentions. But Draper's half-pay was on the Irish "establishment; and of him the declaration was not required. Now, to me and "to those whom I consulted, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that "Francis, relying on his official knowledge, and not considering that there might "be a difference between the practice at Dublin and the practice at Westminster, "should put that unlucky question which gave Draper so great an advantage. "I have repeatedly pointed out this circumstance to men who are excellent judges "of evidence, and I never found one who did not agree with me." Let me add to what I formerly remarked (ante, 92), that I can give no stronger evidence of my faith in Francis's authorship of Junius having survived all the many ingenious surmises of recent critics, than that, knowing Francis could not have written both those letters and a pamphlet entitled Letter to a Brigadier-General, published ten years earlier, I yet continue to think he was Junius. The style is remarkably similar, but conclusions founded on such comparisons are always fallacious.

Junius, to have freed both himself and the Rockinghams; 1771. now was the time to have so enlarged the battle-field for Et. 43. both, as to bring in issue something greater than the predominance of whig families with whig principles: yet now, even while his was the solitary voice that invoked retribution for the most infamous crime of nations, the partition of Poland, he had no thought or wish to throw for a higher stake in politics and government, than a premiership for Rockingham and a paymastership (without seat in the cabinet) for himself." My dear Lord," he said to the Duke of Rich"mond, you dissipate your mind with too great a variety of "minute pursuits." "My dear Burke," said the Duke to him, "you have more merit than any man in keeping us "together." And with that he was content. He kept them together. They became in time of greater importance to him than those pure principles, than that practically just and disinterested policy, with which his counsels had first helped to connect them; and which, carried now to their farther verge and just extent, might have freed both the party and the country from all the trammels that distressed them. He drew himself more and more within the Rockingham ranks;t toiled more and more to keep the popular power within a certain magic circle; and, while his genius was at work for the age that was to come, in eloquence as

* What Goldsmith would have said of such a consummation to all Burke's labours and services, had he lived to see it, may be inferred from the language of his epitaph. Boswell gives us amusing evidence, by an allusion in one of his letters to Burke, that, at this time, any possible party triumph of the whigs and patriots could mean nothing, according to Goldsmith, if not a deification of Burke, their leading orator, their first of men. "Dear Sir," he writes (3rd March, 1778), upon my honor, I began a letter to you some time ago, and did not finish it, "because I imagined you were then near your apotheosis-as poor Goldsmith said upon a former occasion, when he thought your party was coming into adminis"tration." Burke Corresp. ii. 207.

+"Lord Rockingham's Governor," Walpole calls him in 1770. ii. 95.

Lett, to Mann,

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X

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rich and various as its intuition seemed deep and universal, Et. 43. his temper was satisfied that the age in which he lived

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should be governed exclusively by the Richmonds and Rockinghams. "You people of great families and hereditary "trusts and fortunes, the great oaks that shade a country "and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation, are not like such as I am, mere annual plants that perish with our season, and leave no sort of traces behind "us." And so around that perishable fancy he placed all the supports of his noble imagination; till that which he thought eternal melted from his grasp, and left what he believed its mere transitory graces to survive and endure alone.* He lived to see the greatest event which the history of the world had witnessed,-for surely so, with all salutary protest against its crimes and sympathy for its sufferings, we must hold the first French Revolution to have been,— and lived even so to misjudge it. What was temporary in its sin and terror, he shrank from as eternal; what was eternal in its heroism and grandeur, he spat upon as the folly of a day. There was not an intellect then existing in Europe to which this sudden advent and triumph of democracy should have appealed so strongly as to Burke: yet, through the mist of blood that surrounded its uprising, he saw nothing but a demon-dance of exaggerated horror; and the noble, the beautiful, the ornamental, he thought blotted out of France, because at last, in the hollow semblances of these things,

* I cannot regard as a mere eloquently-turned sentence what he so finely says to Robertson in thanking him for his history. Here, as often elsewhere, I seem to discern his melancholy sense of the disproportion of the objects sought to the means employed, in that political struggle of the time which absorbed his wonderful powers. "Adieu, sir! Continue to instruct the world; and, whilst we carry on a poor unequal conflict with the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps "with no better weapons than other passions and prejudices of our own, convey "wisdom to future generations." Burke Correspondence, ii. 165.