the electors of Middlesex gave Junius the opportunity of
assailing Wilkes's enemies without appearing to champion Wilkes to the
utterance. Junius admitted that the Duke of Grafton might have had
some excuse in his opposition to Wilkes on account of Wilkes's
character, and might have earned the approval of men who, looking no
further than to the object before them, were not dissatisfied with
seeing Mr. Wilkes excluded from Parliament. But, Junius went on to
argue, "you have now taken care to shift the question; or, rather, you
have created a new one, in which Mr. Wilkes is no more concerned than
any other English gentleman. You have united the country against you
on one grand constitutional point, on the decision of which our
existence as a free people absolutely depends. You have asserted, not
in words but in fact, that representation in Parliament does not depend
upon the choice of the freeholders."

[Sidenote: 1769--The identity of Junius]

The authorship of the letters of Junius is one of those problems, like
the problems of the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, which have
never been settled with absolute certainty and which probably never
will be settled {131} with absolute certainty. But between absolute
certainty and the highest degree of probability there is no very great
gulf fixed, and it is in the highest degree probable that the author of
the letters was Philip Francis. The letters have been attributed to
all manner of men. They were ascribed, absurdly enough, to Wilkes.
Wilkes could write bitterly and he could write well, but he could write
neither so well nor so bitterly as Mr. Woodfall's correspondent. Dr.
Johnson, who ought to have known better, thought they were written by
Burke. It is his excuse that there did not seem at the time any man of
the same ability as the writer of the letters except Burke. But Dr.
Johnson, who had been quick enough to recognize the genius of the
anonymous author of the essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful," erred
when he thought that the same hand penned the anonymous letters. The
prose of Burke was as far above the prose of Junius as the prose of
Junius was above the prose of Wilkes. None of the letters surpasses in
ferocity, none approaches in excellence the letter which Burke wrote to
the noble Duke who had slandered him. The letters were attributed to
Barre; they were attributed to Lee, who was yet to earn another kind of
fame; they were attributed t