n
in the highest degree arrogant and insolent, a man prone to malevolence,
and prone to the error of mistaking his malevolence for public virtue.
"Doest thou well to be angry?" was the question asked in old time of the
Hebrew prophet. And he answered, "I do well." This was evidently the
temper of Junius; and to this cause we attribute the savage cruelty
which disgraces several of his letters. No man is so merciless as he
who, under a strong self-delusion, confounds his antipathies with his
duties. It may be added that Junius, though allied with the democratic
party by common enmities, was the very opposite of a democratic
politician. While attacking individuals with a ferocity which
perpetually violated all the laws of literary warfare, he regarded the
most defective parts of old institutions with a respect amounting to
pedantry, pleaded the cause of Old Sarum with fervor, and contemptuously
told the capitalists of Manchester and Leeds that, if they wanted votes,
they might buy land and become freeholders of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
All this, we believe, might stand, with scarcely any change, for a
character of Philip Francis.

It is not strange that the great anonymous writer should have been
willing at that time to leave the country which had been so powerfully
stirred by his eloquence. Everything had gone against him. That party
which he clearly preferred to every other, the party of George
Grenville, had been scattered by the death of its chief; and Lord
Suffolk had led the greater part of it over to the ministerial benches.
The ferment produced by the Middlesex election had gone down. Every
faction must have been alike an object of aversion to Junius. His
opinions on domestic affairs separated him from the ministry; his
opinions on colonial affairs from the opposition. Under such
circumstances, he had thrown down his pen in misanthropical despair. His
farewell letter to Woodfall bears date the nineteenth of January, 1773.
In that letter, he declared that he must be an idiot to write again;
that he had meant well by the cause and the public; that both were given
up; that there were not ten men who would act steadily together on any
question. "But it is all alike," he added, "vile and contemptible. You
have never flinched that I know of; and I shall always rejoice to hear
of your prosperity." These were the last words of Junius. In a year from
that time, Philip Francis was on his voyage to Bengal.

With the three