hether the
publication was 'false and malicious,' these being mere formal words, and
that whether the letter was libellous or innocent was a pure question of
law, upon which the opinion of the court might be taken by a demurrer, or
a motion in arrest of judgment."

The jury retired, and after some hours deliberation returned a verdict of
"Guilty of the printing and publishing only." The attempt of Lord
Mansfield to withdraw the cognizance of the question of libel from the
jury to vest it in the court, contrary, as it unquestionably was, both to
liberty and law, had high authorities for its justification, and was
supported by the unanimous opinion of the judges who sat at his side.
Posterity will acquit the otherwise upright judge of the moral obliquity
of which his living enemies, with regard to this proceeding, pronounced
him guilty, and for which Junius would have crushed the Chief Justice,
had his ability been equal to his will.

It behooves the present generation to approach the lucubrations of the
redoubted Junius in a spirit of enlightened discrimination. We must bear
in mind that the poisoned arrows of the unseen combatant were discharged
at a period peculiarly favorable for the exercise of his destructive
skill; when startling invective was in fashion; when the mercenary acts
of the foremost public man excused, if they did not justify, wholesale
and unreflecting chastisement; when the public press was in its earliest
infancy, and public writers had not yet educated the audience whose good
sense now holds the libertinism of even the public censor in check, and
provides its own best remedy against the crimes or follies of the pen.
Junius but imitated the example of his betters when he fastened upon a
foe, guilty or innocent, and heaped upon his head every opprobrious term
a heated imagination could supply. A statesman's policy had but to be
inconvenient to his adversary in order to prove the Minister "hateful,"
"execrable," "abominable," "wicked," a traitor to his country, and a
conspirator against the liberties of the people. Pitt honored Walpole
with such vituperation, and when Walpole went out, and Carteret came in
without Pitt, the same expressive language was transferred by the
illustrious commoner from Minister to Minister, as though no virtue
could possibly be found in any Government without his presence. When
Junius affected to regard Lord Mansfield as the incarnation of all that
is odious in humanity, hi