ENGLISH LITERATURE. himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even [The British Monarchy.] The learned professors of the rights of man regard prescription, not as a title to bar all claim, set up against old possession, but they look on prescription itself as a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long continued, and therefore an aggravated injustice. Such are their ideas, such their religion, and such their law. race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our But as to our country and our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dikes of the low fat Bedford Level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm-the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitutional frankpledge of this nation; the firm guarantee of each other's being and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity-as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe; and we are all safe together the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. [Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.] [From 'Reflections on the Revolution in France.'] It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in-glittering like the morning star full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to that enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry | EDMUND BURKE. the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to lant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of galfrom their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submisthe heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, sion, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired cour ever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half age whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatits evil by losing all its grossness. [The Order of Nobility.] [From the same.] opinions, and inveterate usages of our country, growing out of the prejudice of ages, has nothing to To be honoured and even privileged by the laws, provoke horror and indignation in any man. to be too tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The strong struggle in every indivi dual to preserve possession of what he has found to Even belong to him, and to distinguish him, is one of the in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure securities against injustice and despotism implanted property, and to preserve communities in a settled state. What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society. Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus, was the saying of a wise and good man. benevolent mind to incline to it with some sort of partial propensity. He feels no ennobling principle It is, indeed, one sign of a liberal and in his own heart who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive esteem. It is a sour, malignant, and envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or represen tation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see anything destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face of the land. [Dependence of English on American Freedom.] must be left to the colonies. A military government is the only substitute for civil liberty. That the To leave any real freedom to parliament, freedom establishment of such a power in America will utterly ruin our finances (though its certain effect), is the smallest part of our concern. It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the destruction of our a contempt of popular assemblies representative of an freedom here. Great bodies of armed men, trained to English people, kept up for the purpose of exacting impositions without their consent, and maintained by that exaction; instruments in subverting, without any process of law, great ancient establishments and respected forms of governments, set free from, and therefore above the ordinary English tribunals of the country where they serve; these men cannot so transform themselves, merely by crossing the sea, as to behold with love and reverence, and submit with profound obedience to the very same things in Great Britain which in America they had been taught to [From Address to the King. 1777.] 231 despise, and had been accustomed to awe and humble. All your majesty's troops, in the rotation of service, will pass through this discipline, and contract these habits. If we could flatter ourselves that this would not happen, we must be the weakest of men: we must be the worst, if we were indifferent whether it happened or not. What, gracious sovereign, is the empire of America to us, or the empire of the world, if we lose our own liberties? We deprecate this last of evils. We deprecate the effect of the doctrines which must support and countenance the government over conquered Englishmen. As it will be impossible long to resist the powerful and equitable arguments in favour of the freedom of these unhappy people, that are to be drawn from the principle of our own liberty, attempts will be made, attempts have been made, to ridicule and to argue away this principle, and to inculcate into the minds of your people other maxims of government and other grounds of obedience than those which have prevailed at and since the glorious Revolution. By degrees these doctrines, by being convenient, may grow prevalent. The consequence is not certain; but a general change of principles rarely happens among a people without leading to a change of government. by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation, into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on the menacing meteor which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of wo, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants flying from the flaming villages, in part were slaughtered: others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but, escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. Sir, your throne cannot stand secure upon the principles of unconditional submission and passive obedience; on powers exercised without the concurrence of the people to be governed; on acts made in defiance of their prejudices and habits; on acquiescence procured by foreign mercenary troops, and secured by standing armies. These may possibly be the foundation of other thrones; they must be the subversion of yours. It was not to passive principles in our ancestors that we owe the honour of appearing before a sovereign who cannot feel that he is a prince, without knowing that we ought to be free. The Revolution is a departure from the ancient course of the descent of this monarchy. The people at that time re-entered into their original rights; and it was not because a positive law authorised what was then done, but because the freedom and safety of the subject, the origin and cause of all laws, required a proceeding paramount and superior to them. At that ever-memorable and instructive period, the letter of the law was superseded in favour of the substance of liberty. To the free choice, therefore, of the people, without either king or parliament, we owe that happy establishment out of which both king and parliament were regene-out complaint, perished by a hundred a day in the rated. From that great principle of liberty have originated the statutes confirming and ratifying the establishment from which your majesty derives your right to rule over us. Those statutes have not given us our liberties; our liberties have produced them. Every hour of your majesty's reign, your title stands upon the very same foundation on which it was at first laid, and we do not know a better on which it can possibly be laid. Convinced, sir, that you cannot have different rights, and a different security in different parts of your dominions, we wish to lay an even platform for your throne, and to give it an unmovable stability, by laying it on the general freedom of your people, and by securing to your majesty that confidence and affection in all parts of your dominions, which makes your best security and dearest title in this the chief seat of your empire. [Destruction of the Carnatic.] [From speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts, 1785.] When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal; and all was done by charity that private charity could do: but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation that stretched out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost with streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions. For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march did they not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one fourfooted beast of any description whatever. One dead uniform silence reigned over the whole region. The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure to yourself, Mr Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful country from Thames to Trent, north and south, and from the Irish to the German sea east and west, emptied and embowelled (may God avert the omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation! [The Difference Between Mr Burke and the [The Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale attacked Mr Burke and his pension in their place in the House of Lords, and Burke replied in his Letters to a Noble Lord,' one of the most sarcastic and most able of all his productions.] merit of his own, to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal; his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said, 'tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law; what have I to do with it or its history? He would naturally have said on his side, 'tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions; he is an old man with very young pensions-that's all. Since Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of * I possessed not humble and laborious individuals? the new grantees have war made on them by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the heroic origin of their house. I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator-Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me. one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even for me. I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand. * * I know not how it has happened, but it really seems that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter from the crown-grants to his own family. This is the stuff of which his dreams are made.' In that way of putting things together, his Grace is perfectly in the right. The grants to the house of Russel were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst ‘he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray-everything of him and about him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour? I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at all the honour of acquaintance with the noble duke. But I ought to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves the esteem and love of all who live with him. But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr Russel, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a minion of Henry VIII. As there generally is some resemblance of character to create these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood much such another as his master. The first of these immoderate grants was not taken from the ancient demesne of the crown, but from the recent confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite's first grant was from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on the enormity of the first, was from the plunder of the church. In truth, his Grace is somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind so different from his own. Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his from Henry VIII. Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. The merit of the grantee whom he derives from, was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on everything that was great and noble. Mine has been in endeavouring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent, who in the bad times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief governors, or confiscating dema gogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy. The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil with a prince, who plundered a part of the national church of his time and country. Mine was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal desolation. The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favourite and chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to his native country. My endeavour was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to support, with unrelaxing vigilance, every right, every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer and more comprehensive country; and not only to preserve those rights in this chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language, and religion in the vast domain that still is under the protection, and the larger that was once under the protection, of the British crown. His founder's merits were by arts in which he served his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation on his country. Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of his king dom; in which his majesty shows an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil. [Character of Howard the Philanthropist.] I cannot name this gentleman without remarking, that his labours and writings have done much to open the eyes and hearts of all mankind. He has visited all Europe-not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to make accurate measurements of the remains of ancient grandeur, nor to form a scale of the curiosities of modern art; nor to collect medals, or collate manuscripts, but to dive into the depths of dungeons, to plunge into the infection of hospitals, to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries. His plan is original: it is as full of genius as of humanity. It was a voyage of discovery; a circumnavigation of charity. Already, the benefit of his labour is felt more or less in every country: I hope he will anticipate his final reward by seeing all its effects fully realised in his own. JUNIUS. On the 21st of January 1769 appeared the first of a series of political letters, bearing the signature of JUNIUS, which have since taken their place among the standard works of the English language. Great excitement prevailed in the nation at the time. The contest with the American colonies, the imposition of new taxes, the difficulty of forming a steady and permanent administration, and the great ability and eloquence of the opposition, had tended to spread a feeling of dissatisfaction throughout the country. The publication of the North Briton, a periodical edited by John Wilkes, and conducted with reckless violence and asperity, added fuel to the flame, and the prime minister, Lord North, said justly, that 'the press overflowed the land with its black gall, and poisoned the minds of the people.' Without any wish to express political opinions, we may say that the government was not equal to the emergency, and indeed it would have required a cabinet of the highest powers and most energetic wisdom to have triumphed over the opposition of men like Chatham and Burke, and writers like Junius. The most popular newspaper of that day was the Public Advertiser, published by Woodfall, a man of education and respectability. In this journal the writer known as Junius had contributed under various signatures for about two years. The letters by which he is now distinguished were more carefully elaborated, and more highly polished, than any of his previous communications. They attacked all the public characters of the day connected with the government, they retailed much private scandal and personal history, and did not spare even royalty itself. The compression, point, and brilliancy of their language, their unrivalled sarcasm, boldness, and tremendous invective, at once arrested the attention of the public. Every effort that could be devised by the government, or prompted by private indig nation, was made to discover their author, but in vain. It is not in the nature of things,' he writes to his publisher, 'that you or anybody else should know me, unless I make myself known: all arts or inquiries or rewards would be ineffectual.' In another place he remarks, I am the sole depository of my secret, and it shall die with me.' The event has verified the prediction: he had drawn around himself so impenetrable a veil of secrecy, that all the efforts of inquirers, political and literary, failed in dispelling the original darkness. The letters were published at intervals from 1769 to 1772, when they were collected by Woodfall and revised by their author (who was equally unknown to his publisher), and printed in two volumes. They have since gone through innumerable editions; but the best is that published in 1812 by Woodfall's son, which includes the letters by the same writer under other signatures, with his private notes to his publisher, and fac-similes of his handwriting. The principles of Junius are moderate, compared with his personalities. Some sound constitutional maxims are conveyed in his letters, but his style has undoubtedly been his passport to fame. His illustrations and metaphors are also sometimes uncommonly felicitous. The personal malevolence of his attacks it is impossible to justify. They evince a settled deliberate malignity, which could not proceed from a man of a good or noble nature, and contain allusions to obscure individuals in the public offices, which seem to have arisen less from patriotism than from individual hatred and envy. When the controversy as to the authorship of these memorable philippics had almost died away, a book appeared in 1816, bearing the title of Junius Identified with a Celebrated Living Character.' The living character was the late Sir Philip Francis, and certainly a mass of strong circumstantial evidence has been presented in his favour. The external evidence,' says Mr Macaulay,* is, we think, such as would support a verdict in a civil, nay, in a criminal proceeding. The handwriting of Junius is the very peculiar handwrit ing of Francis, slightly disguised. As to the position, pursuits, and connexions of Junius, the following are the most important facts which can be considered as clearly proved :-First, that he was acquainted with the technical forms of the secretary of state's office; secondly, that he was intimately acquainted with the business of the war office; thirdly, that he, during the year 1770, attended debates in the House of Lords, and took notes of speeches, particularly of the speeches of Lord Chatham; fourthly, that he bitterly resented the appointment of Mr Chamier to the place of deputy-secretary at war; fifthly, that he was bound by some strong tie to the first Lord Holland. Now, Francis passed some years in the secretary of state's office. He was subsequently chief clerk of the war office. He repeatedly mentioned that he had himself, in 1770, heard speeches of Lord Chatham; and some of these speeches were actually printed from his notes. He resigned his clerkship at the war office from resentment at the appointment of Mr Chamier. It was by Lord Hol *Edinburgh Review for 1841. and the rights of the people. This new idea has yet only been started in discourse; for, in effect, both objects have been equally sacrificed. I neither understand the distinction, nor what use the ministry propose to make of it. The king's honour is that of his people. Their real honour and real interest are the same. I am not contending for a vain punctilio. A clear unblemished character comprehends not only the integrity that will not offer, but the spirit that will not submit, to an injury; and whether it belongs to an individual or to a community, it is the foundation of peace, of independence, and of safety. Private credit is wealth; public honour is security. The feather that adorns the royal bird supports his flight. Strip him of his plumage, and you fix him to the earth.' land that he was first introduced into the public Of the literary excellences of Junius, his sarcasm, service. Now, here are five marks, all of which compressed energy, and brilliant illustration, a few ought to be found in Junius. They are all five specimens may be quoted. His finest metaphor (as found in Francis. We do not believe that more just in sentiment as beautiful in expression) is conthan two of them can be found in any other person tained in the conclusion to the forty-second letter:whatever. If this argument does not settle theThe ministry, it seems, are labouring to draw a question, there is an end of all reasoning on circum-line of distinction between the honour of the crown stantial evidence.' The same acute writer considers the internal evidence to be equally clear as to the claims of Francis. Already, however, the impression made on the public mind by the evidence for this gentleman seems to have passed away, and attention has recently been directed to another individual, who was only one of ten or more persons suspected at the time of the publication. This is Lord George Sackville, latterly Viscount Sackville, an able but unpopular soldier, cashiered from the army in consequence of neglect of duty at the battle of Minden, but who afterwards regained the favour of the government, and acted as secretary at war throughout the whole period of the American contest. A work by Mr Coventry in 1825, and a volume by Mr Jaques in 1842, have been devoted to an endeavour to fix the authorship of Junius upon Lord George, and it is surprising how many and how powerful are the arguments which have been adduced by these writers. It seems by no means unlikely that a haughty and disappointed man, who conceived himself to have suffered unjustly, should pour forth his bitter feelings in this form; but, again, if Lord George Sackville was really Junius, how strange to consider that the vituperator of the king, Lord Mansfield, and others, should in a few short years have been acting along with them in the government! Here, certainly, there is room to pause, and either to suspend judgment altogether, or to lean to the conclusion for Francis which has been favoured by such high authority. Thus also he remarks-'In the shipwreck of the state, trifles float and are preserved; while everything solid and valuable sinks to the bottom, and is lost for ever.' Of the supposed enmity of George III. to Wilkes, and the injudicious prosecution of that demagogue, Junius happily remarks- He said more than moderate men would justify, but not enough to entitle him to the honour of your majesty's personal resentment. The rays of royal indignation, collected upon him, served only to illuminate, and could not consume. Animated by the favour of the people on the one side, and heated by persecution on the other, his views and sentiments changed with his situation. Hardly serious at first, he is now an enthusiast. The coldest bodies warm with opposition, the hardest sparkle in collision. There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as well as religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves. The passions are engaged, and create a maternal affection in the mind, which forces us to love the cause for which we suffer.' Philip Francis was the son of the Rev. Philip Francis, translator of Horace. He was born in Dublin in 1740, and at the early age of sixteen was placed by Lord Holland in the secretary of state's office. By the patronage of Pitt (Lord Chatham), he was made secretary to General Bligh in 1758, and was present at the capture of Cherburgh; in 1760 The letter to the king is the most dignified of the he accompanied Lord Kinnoul as secretary on his letters of Junius; those to the Dukes of Grafton embassy to Lisbon; and in 1763 he was appointed and Bedford the most severe. The latter afford the to a considerable situation in the war office, which most favourable specimens of the force, epigram, and he held till 1772. Next year he was made a member merciless sarcasm of his best style. The Duke of of the council appointed for the government of Ben-Grafton was descended from Charles II., and this gal, from whence he returned in 1781, after being perpetually at war with the governor-general, Warren Hastings, and being wounded by him in a duel. He afterwards sat in parliament, supporting Whig principles, and was one of the 'Friends of the People' in association with Fox, Tierney, and Grey. He died in 1818. It must be acknowledged that the speeches and letters of Sir Philip evince much of the talent found in Junius, though they are less rhetorical in style; while the history and dispositions of the man-his strong resentments, his arrogance, his interest in the public questions of the day, evinced by his numerous pamphlets, even in advanced age, and the whole complexion of his party and political sentiments, are what we should expect of Woodfall's celebrated correspondent. High and commanding qualities he undoubtedly possessed; nor was he without genuine patriotic feelings, and a desire to labour earnestly for the public weal. His error lay in mistaking his private enmities for public virtue, and nursing his resentments till they attained a dark and unsocial malignity. His temper was irritable and gloomy, and often led him to form mistaken and uncharitable estimates of men and measures. afforded the satirist scope for invective: The character of the reputed ancestors of some men has made it impossible for their descendants to be vicious in the extreme, without being degenerate. Those of your Grace, for instance, left no distressing examples of virtue, even to their legitimate posterity; and you may look back with pleasure to an illustrious pedigree, in which heraldry has not left a single good quality upon record to insult or upbraid you. You have better proofs of your descent, my lord, than the register of a marriage, or any troublesome inheritance of reputation. There are some hereditary strokes of character by which a family may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face. Charles I. lived and died a hypocrite; Charles II. was a hypocrite of another sort, and should have died upon the same scaffold. At the distance of a century, we see their different characters happily revived and blended in your Grace. Sullen and severe without religion, profligate without gaiety, you live like Charles II., without being an amiable companion; and, for aught I know, may die as his father did, without the reputation of a martyr.' In the same strain of elaborate and refined sar |