gible to Mr. Lecky unless Junius and Francis were one and the same. But it is intelligible at once if we approach the question with the idea that Pownall was Junius and had arranged with Francis to transcribe the Letters and take them to Woodfall. If this had gone on till Lord Barrington discharged Francis who was about to leave London Pownall would naturally be upset because this branch of his work must cease when Francis was no longer available. When Lord Barrington sent that particular clerk away from the War Office he had, by pure accident, done what the Government had long desired, he had stopped the publication of the Letters of Junius, and it is no wonder that their Author was furious. It is probable that when Pownall began to dictate, and Francis to write, the first letter of April 1767, which was signed "Poplicola," neither of them had any idea of what they were undertaking would develop into. It was not till nearly two years later that the first letter signed Junius attracted attention.

If we assign to Pownall the chief, and to Francis the subordinate part, the whole thing dovetails together perfectly. We see why the latter so long remembered those phrases which he had copied under conditions of such difficulty and danger. The suspicion of complicity which, at the time, and afterwards, attached to him is not ignored, but justified. Lord Campbell's positive assertion that it was Francis who took the letters to Woodfall is quite in order; though he was not their author he did take them, it would fall to him and not to his principal to do that; it was as the above-quoted gentleman who transacts the conveyancing part of our correspondence" that he was acting. As an implicated subordinate it was just as natural and obvious that he should prefer to take them to Woodfall, his old schoolfellow, as it would have been if doing so on his own account. Chatham and Woodfall were, in this aspect of the matter, perfectly correct in declaring that Francis was not the writer. In the sense of being the author he was not.

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On the other hand, the statement of Chabot, otherwise in flat contradiction to theirs, that Francis was the writer is equally correct, for it was he who guided the pen. On no other lines can these conflicting statements, each with the weight of authority behind it, be reconciled. Much has been made of the ascertained fact that gaps in the

Junius correspondence were found to coincide with known absences of Francis from town. It was inferred from this that their temporary cessation was due to his not being on the spot to compose them. That inference equally holds good if his presence was necessary in order that he might transcribe them into the disguised hand and then take them to their destination. His absence blocked their appearance in the newspaper just as much in this way as in the other. Mr. Dilke, weary of the vagueness of the Francis claim, expressed a hope that he might never again hear that name coupled with Junius till "some one fact shall have been established shewing a connection between them." Not one fact only but two pages summarising facts which connect Pownall and Junius, in their circumstances and opinions, will be found later in this chapter.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE

2

That Junius was a corpulent man, no longer young in 1771, may be inferred from the words he used when he declined the offer of ball tickets made to him by Mr. Wilkes, "Alas my age and figure would do but little credit to my partner.' It has been mentioned that when he was in Boston Pownall was described as a thick-set man of medium height, when he was under forty. A dozen years had passed, just those in which, as a man becomes middle-aged, any tendency to corpulence shews itself. By 1771 it is probable that he would answer very well to the description Junius then gave of himself, and that idea is confirmed by looking at the frontispiece of this book.

PRACTISED WRITER

To Pownall belonged the long-practised pen which the biographer of Francis recognised as essential. His Principles of Polity of 1752; the four editions of his Administration, 1764, 1765, 1766, 1768 have been mentioned. The topic of his first book, The Principles of Polity, which preceded the Junius Letters by seventeen years 2 Woodfall, 1814, i. p. 325.

1 Athenæum, 1850, p. 996.

is noticeable. Like them it dealt with constitutional questions. Page 106 contains this passage:

Although I do from my conscience venerate the sacred powers and majesty of Government, yet have I so established a persuasion that there are some liberties, some rights so peculiarly the individual's own that no government can have any right to extend itself over, or have any claim upon, them. And where governments are such as to interfere with them I think such governments worse than none.

The first Letter of Junius opens in the same strain :Loyalty, in the heart and understanding of an Englishman is a rational attachment to the guardian of the laws.

From this it proceeds to criticise the manner in which the laws had been tampered with, and it may not be too much to say that the Principles of Polity was a steppingstone to the Letters of Junius. When we are noticing how much and how long Pownall wrote before and after the Junius period it is worth observing that in the years it covered he published nothing. In 1768 he had brought out the fourth edition of the Administration, a book that was in demand and selling well. Yet he put it aside altogether, and the fifth edition did not appear till 1774. Reference to the list of his works in the Appendix1 shews a blank in the dates between 1768 and 1771. That was exactly the time when the Letters, signed Junius, were being written. It may be inferred that they occupied so much of his time that he was unable to produce anything else then. While Junius was writing in 1771 Pownall had not even time for his private correspondence with Dr. Cooper, which will be noticed later. He got others to write this for him and only signed his name. When Junius disappeared Pownall wrote his own letters to Cooper, and the stream of his writing for publication began again and continued to the end of his life. There must have been some reason for its abrupt cessation in those three years.

ANONYMOUS WRITINGS

Though it was Pownall's habit to sign his name to what he wrote he never did so when he thought his work had better appear on its merits. His name was associ1 Which may be turned to for this purpose.

ated with such fierce opposition to the Government that he not infrequently withheld it in order that his views might be regarded apart from the prejudice which he knew that he had himself incurred. Sometimes he avowed the authorship in a second edition when the first one had appeared anonymously in order to produce more effect. This happened with his Administration, which was published without his name in the first edition of 1764, but with it in the second edition of 1765. He wrote to Mr. Grenville that he doubted whether to publish the Dedication to the third edition of 1768 as his own. His Memorial to the Sovereigns of Europe in 1780 was anonymous,' but when he republished this as part of the Three Memorials in 1784 he avowed the authorship saying: "I wished that the world should receive the state of the case solely on the authority of the facts and not on the authority of any name. . . . I therefore withheld my name." His book called Live and let Live of 1787 was anonymous first, and afterwards acknowledged. An unsigned letter of considerable importance, which was addressed to Lord Chatham in November 1775, has been here identified as in the handwriting of Pownall, and another in the Public Advertiser of October 25, 1773 has been attributed to him.2 This last-named letter was signed "A Member of Parliament.' To those words are added "in mourning for the honour of his country" in the Miscellaneous Letter of Junius which is dated February 13, 1771. We have here a letter of Junius with a signature corresponding to that of one by Pownall, who not infrequently wrote anonymously when there was reason for so doing. The view here expressed is that the whole of the Junius correspondence was a branch of precisely similar work which Pownall was doing in Parliament while Junius wrote. With that work Pownall had been busy since 1764, writing in his own name before he went into Parliament. It is suggested that he then began to write under an assumed name these letters which were his second line of attack on the Government.

1 Rich's Bibl. Amor. 1835, i. p. 284, speaks of this as "written with so much clearness of information and strength of argument that it is probably the work of some great master, who chooses to conceal himself behind a peculiar style and a fictitious tale." See p. 396, post.

2 See ante, pp. 277, 252.

This theory of duplex action on Pownall's part conforms exactly to what we know was the method of Junius. Some of his letters were above that signature, some others, intended to elucidate them, were signed "Philo Junius." Those he afterwards acknowledged and published with the others in collected form saying in his Preface "the fraud was innocent and I always intended to explain it." This is just what Pownall did with the first edition of the Administration and the Memorial to the Sovereigns above alluded to in this connection. In the case of Pownall and of Junius we find the same policy of auxiliary writing which may reasonably be ascribed to the same person.

WELL INFORMED

Nothing was more remarkable about Junius than the early and accurate information he obtained on all current topics and put into his Letters. It was one of his strongest claims to attention. He must have been indeed a man very well placed, and in close touch with the Government offices, to know as much as he did of what passed in their inner circles.

No man of that day had better opportunities than Pownall of hearing in advance of others what was happening. An old Civil servant he would have access to officials. The names of many distinguished men with whom he was on friendly terms have been mentioned above, and the last three chapters have shewn that he was not only in the House of Commons but playing a prominent part there during the period covered by the Junius Letters.

FRENCH

In those days, when the two countries were so much at war, there were but few Englishmen proficient in the French language. That Junius was one of them appears from the note to his Letter of January 30, 1771,' where he comments on Lord Rochford having made seven false concords in three lines of a despatch. Pownall knew French well, and Paris was familiar to him. In

1 Woodfall, 1814, ii. note to p. 191.