writer on politics. He was, of course, in no want of an original in the last case; and Pitt, then rising into power on the popular favour, stood well enough for the other.

70. Brown, a clever pamphleteer, though no prophet, was speedily forgotten; but the denunciations of luxury, of which his book is perhaps the best English example, continued to be popular in literature and in society. It is written in Boswell how often they stirred the bile of Johnson; and indeed they are for the most part flimsy enough. They might have some significance when regarded as an implicit answer to a very awkward question. The poor and despised were saying to their masters, through the mouth of Rousseau, Is there any conceivable use in you? And their masters replied substantially, though without too much sincerity, On the whole, we are of no use whatever. We are simply a product of corruption. At the close of the seven years' war, ominous symptoms of discontent began to make themselves perceptible. Chatham had won for England the empire of the New World. The hands into which he resigned his power were utterly incapable of discharging so lofty a function. Colonial discontents were echoed by the widespread discontent at home; and the nation entered upon a period of vehement agitation such as had hardly been known since the Revolution. The popular excitement was the more dangerous from the imbecile vacillation of the rulers; the set of factions who plotted and struggled for power, forming and dissolving alliances with scandalous facility, bullying alternately the king and the people, and combining the faults of courtiers and demagogues, were unable to conceive or execute any decided line of policy. Their folly drove America to rebellion; and, at times, threatened to produce a rebellion at home. And yet, though allusions to the days of Cromwell were frequent in the mouths of agitators, the discontent had not as yet the true revolutionary ring. It is amusing to observe how carefully the popular leaders justified even revolution by precedent; and instinctively appealed to the leading cases of Hampden and Sidney rather than to the abstract rights of

man.

71. One literary product of that period has obtained a permanent celebrity, and may stand as a sufficient representation

of the contemporary phase of feeling. The famous Letters of Junius owe part of their reputation to the historical enigma as to their authorship; in purely literary merits, they are as inferior to Swift's concentrated satire as to Burke's sumptuous rhetoric. The eloquence is stilted; and the invective suggests rancorous ill-will rather than virtuous indignation. The hatred has not that dignity with which the greatest men can invest the expression of their evil passions. Yet Junius stands high above the mere hack pamphleteer. His polish has, to some degree, withstood the corroding influences of time. Once for all,' writes Philip Francis to Burke, 'I wish you would let me teach you to write English. . . . Why will you not allow yourself to be persuaded that polish is material to preservation?'1 When we remember by whom and to whom these words were written, and on what occasion-the publication, namely, of one of Burke's masterpieces of invective against the French Revolution-their arrogance may seem to confirm the ordinary theory as to the authorship of the letters. At any rate, they express the literary doctrine of Junius. Polish was to preserve what was else little worth preservation. For the absence of any speculative thought in Junius's Letters is even more remarkable than in the case of Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke, at least, aims at being philosophical. Junius makes personal denunciations almost the exclusive substance of his letters. He has no affectation of theory. Avowing his belief that a revolution might be approaching, he never invokes those principles a belief in which should inflame the popular passions, and guide men who have for the time abandoned all conventional formulas. Wilkes writes to him professing his readiness 'to plunge the patriot dagger in the bosom of the tyrants of his country.'2 Wilkes was a mere comedian; but one may fancy that in some popular tumult Junius could have put on a mask and taken advantage of the confusion to plunge a dagger in some hated antagonist. Each object of his wrath-Grafton, Bedford, Mansfield, or George III.—seems for the time to occupy his whole field of vision and stir the depths of his malignity. But the ferocious onslaught turns generally upon some personal scandal, upon the stories that one duke had been. horsewhipped and another had taken his mistress to the

1 Burke's Correspondence, iii. 162.

2 Junius, i. *302.

opera; whilst constitutional principles are invoked to injure his enemy, rather than defended at his enemy's cost.

72. The principles are of a characteristically narrow kind. Junius strains his powers to the utmost in order to prove, not that all men are free and equal, that monarchy is a delusion and the Church an imposture, but that the legal effect of expelling a member of Parliament is at most to nullify that election, and give the constituents a chance of re-electing him if they please, without disqualifying him, so as to nullify all votes given for him hereafter. On that distinction the liberty of England depends. Or, again, Junius assures the livery of London that 'The very being of that law, of that right, of that constitution, for which we have been so long contending, is now at stake.' The law and the constitution depend upon the question whether the livery will or will not adhere to the ordinary system of rotation by which the alderman next in seniority to the Lord Mayor was clected to succeed him. Wider questions are characteristically narrowed in the mode of statement. Junius can only argue the great question of the liberty of the press under form of an attack upon Lord Mansfield for maintaining that a jury is judge of the facts, but not of the law. The general principle must be translated into the concrete, and be thus reduced to a statement to which precedents are applicable, before it comes within the sphere of his intelligence. The Letters of Junius, therefore, whatever their ability, belong rather to the historian of fact than to the historian of thought. The weapon already used by men like Swift, De Foe, or Bolingbroke, acquired fresh power in his hands; but he contributed nothing to the development of political speculation. The British Constitution is his ultimate appeal ; Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights were to him what the Bible was to Chillingworth; there was no going behind them; and a man who should appeal to abstract principles would be travelling out of the record into arguments irrelevant, or, at all events, superfluous. His political principles, so far as they appear, involve a rigid adherence to precedent, and to purely technical arguments. In the letter to Wilkes, which most fully expounds his opinions, he declares that the 'extermination of corruption' is impossible, and that to pro'Junius, ii. 340.

pose it is to be ridiculous. He is in favour of triennial, but objects to annual, Parliaments. He opposes Parliamentary reform in its later sense, because he holds that, if Parliament could disfranchise a borough, it could disfranchise a whole kingdom, or elect itself for life.' Though approving Chatham's plan for increasing the number of county members, he would not enfranchise the large towns. He would prefer to see merchants and manufacturers becoming freeholders by their industry, to making more boroughs as seats of rest and cabal.2 Obviously the demagogue is still tied and bound by chains of red tape.

73. One tendency, indeed, which resulted from the peculiar conditions of the struggle has a democratic aspect. The House of Commons was at this time the object of popular distrust instead of the organ of the popular will, and Junius tries to assign limits to the supremacy of the legislature, and asserts in strong language the subordination of the House to the people. The liberty of the press is, of course, the 'palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman,' and the 'right of juries to return a general verdict, in all cases whatsoever, is an essential part of our constitution, not to be controlled or limited by the judges, nor in any shape questionable to the legislature.' 4 In short, the old constitutional precedents are sacred, and the best means of preserving them is to allow Junius an unlimited right of abusing the king and his ministers, without danger of prosecution to his printers. Granting this, no constitutional change was desirable. Junius's pet statesman was George Grenville, whose masterly portrait by Burke has made him the model and antitype of all constitutional pedants. The new impulse as yet showed no signs of a tendency to desert the old channels. The most powerful representative of popular discontent was an embodiment of personal spite, to whom the mouldy parchments of constitutional privileges were as sacred as the laws of nature. Junius, in virtue of the narrowness of his views, has become antiquated more rapidly than almost any writer of at all equal power; and already has less interest for modern readers than Locke or Hume.

4

Junius, i. *289.

2 Ib. i. * 291.

E.g. 'Dedication to English People, and Letter to the King,' i. 62. * Junius, i. 4.

74. Thoughts, however, were slowly fermenting even amidst the dogged conservatism of the English mind, which were destined to produce work of far more permanent value, or to affect more deeply the history of the country. As I am only indirectly concerned with the history of events, I shall quit the order of time in order to give something like a logical scheme of the various phases of opinion. The relation between opinion and practice, the way in which political philosophising governed the expression of political passions, is not easy to trace in detail, though the general relations are sufficiently obvious. Politicians, in truth, cared little enough for logic, and in the shifting phantasmagoria of English politics down to the revolutionary period, it would be rash to assign too confidently any definite theory to the various sections engaged in this partisan warfare. Yet, roughly speaking, we may discriminate four, or perhaps five, separate movements in the political world, to each of which corresponds, roughly and incoherently enough, a certain theoretical impulse. Four factions wrangled and struggled, and went through almost every possible combination and permutation during the early years of George III.

75. The king himself was at the head of a party personally contemptible. Stranger irony of fate can hardly be imagined than that which placed this stupidest of rulers at the head of a great people during one of its most trying crises; as if to show how much mischief can be worked by wrong-headed honesty, and how little the stupidity or the mischief wrought by a ruler can affect loyalty. Poor George III. became highly popular in later years, partly because he was blind and mad; titles to the affection of his people which he had enjoyed in a figurative sense long before they came to him in good earnest. But his popularity was also due in part to the fact that he represented fairly enough those qualities of dogged courage and honesty, shading by imperceptible degrees into sheer pigheadedness and insensibility to new ideas, upon which we are accustomed, rightly or wrongly, to pride ourselves. It was natural enough that such a man should fail to recognise the fact that his aristocracy regarded him as, in right, a mere figurehead and bit of State ceremonial. And, therefore, with a courage which was re