Writing the dedication of the letters, when the battle was over in 1772, he employs a favorite mode of expression; and frequently afterwards, as he had, doubtless, done previously. He says: "If, when the opportunity offers, you neglect to do your duty to yourselves and your posterity, to God and your country, I shall have one consolation left in connection with the meanest and basest of men-civil liberty may still last the life of Junius." A short time before his death, the thoughts of Chatham, running in the old channels, are expressed in words pretty similar to the foregoing, in a letter to Dr. Addington: "Where is this ruin to end? Heaven only knows. I hold out hitherto. Perhaps I may last as long as Great Britain."* At another time, in conversation with the Earl of Buchan, on the never-exhausted subject of the national disasters and grievances, he consoles himself by saying, the gout, however, will end him before the end of England comes. In January, 1772, he writes to Calcraft: "With regard to that larger home, our country, that house so fatally divided against itself-little presents itself to view but infatuation and degeneracy. I do not see the smallest good can result to the public from my going up to the meeting of parliament. A headlong, self-willed spirit has sunk the city into nothing." The city was always the grand ally of Lord Chatham. Writing, for the last time, to Woodfall, in 1773, he says, in the same mood of mind: "In the present state of things, if I were to write again, I must be as silly as any of the horned cattle (Junius loved a pun on occasion) that *"Chatham Correspondence," vol. iv., p. 484. + Ibid., vol iv., p. 197.

run mad through the city, or any of your wise aldermen. I meant the cause and the public; both are given up. I feel for the honor of this country, when I see that there are not ten men in it who will unite and stand together on any one question. But it is all alike, vile and contemptible."* There is yet another parallel, which still more remarkably identifies the language of Junius with the feelings of the Earl of Chatham, and also shows the implacable tenacity of the man's mind. In the last letter with his signature, Junius, in pose plastique, stands for ever in the attitude of hauling Lord Mansfield forward to be stabbed at the altar. In the last scene of all, that ended the parliamentary history of the elder William Pitt, the dying man, wrapped in flannels and leaning on his crutch, bent his angry brow, and delivered his last missile in the direction of that abhorred Scotchman. In one part of his speech, as appears from a letter of Sir Matthew Featherstonhaugh to Lord Clive (for the rest of the reports are silent on this significant fact), he ridiculed the fears of invasion, enumerating those formerly threatened a Spanish invasion, a French invasion, a Dutch invasion. "Many noble lords," he went on, "have read in history, and some noble lords may, perhaps, remember a Scotch invasion"-holding Lord Mansfield, all the time, with his glittering eye! This was the last genuine undeni

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* Private Letter No. Ixiii., Jan. 19, 1773.

t In "Rogers' Table Talk" we find a notice of one of the great orator's assaults on his enemy, the Chief Justice. No," said Foote to Murphy, we will not leave the gallery; let us wait till he has made the little man (Murray) vanish entirely." It is a pity such onslaughts are merely matters of hearsay and tradition, while the ballyragging of Cicero and Clodius, in the other House of Lords, remains on record.

able flash of Junius. To the last, he turned an angry face on the Lord Chief Justice, mindful of that poetical prize at college, and the rivalry continued through all the stormier scenes of his life.

CHAPTER VIII.

A CONSIDERATION OF THE CURIOUS AND COMPLICATED SYSTEM OF ATTACKS AND DEFENSES ADOPTED BY LORD CHATHAM IN THE MANAGEMENT OF HIS MYSTERY.

Sometimes I'd divide

And burn in many places; on the topmast,

The yards, the bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join.

ARIEL (in the Tempest).

Trinculo, come forth; I'll pull thee by the lesser legs. If any be Trin culo's legs, these are they.

STEPHANO (in the Tempest).

In this chapter we offer considerations and a course of evidence never yet, that we know, set forth in any Junian investigation. The reader is requested to bewilder himself a little here, plunge somewhat further below the surface for what we seek, though it does not, by any means, need a diver of Delos to come at it. In the foregoing pages we have identified the angry heart of the thwarted politician and the powerful and versatile brain of the educated statesWe have now to point to the subtlety of the first of strategists. Until that subtlety be shown, Junius is not shown.

man.

Reading over his Miscellaneous Letters, we are apt to feel as Gyblin, the goblin-page of Scott's romance, does

over the book of gramarye. No true critic ever doubted they came from the pen which wrote the letter to the king; yet what a coil and a complication they present! Instead of one man, there is the appearance of half-a-dozen, skirmishing in various places—a series of scuffles all over the field. Junius seems to divide and go to buffets with himself, in a manner utterly bewildering to our common conceptions of the duello. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at, that hasty inquirers should turn aside from such an entanglement to the more open tracts of theory, or that people should be so ready to say, of the letters of the Miscellaneous collection that seem in opposition to the Mask, "these are not by Junius." Nevertheless, they are certainly by Junius. They greatly mistake, who try to circumvent a riddle by the ordinary rules of ratiocination.

In these Miscellaneous Letters, which are, as it were, the tirailleurs and voltigeurs of the more regular battle moving under the sign of Junius, we must be struck with numerous instances of that curious legerdemain, and led to the conviction that a crowd of epistles, not recognized as his, would be found on a critical examination of the journals of his time.

We would direct the reader's attention to a few instances of his cunning generalship. And, first, we shall look at the assaults upon Lord Hillsborough, who, as Secretary of State for the colonies, was the agent in General Amherst's dismissal from the governorship of Virginia -an act designed to punish Lord Chatham for his savage retreat. "L. L."* opens the attack, stating the dismissal of

* Miscellaneous Letter xxx., August 5, 1768.