accompanied the first Letter to Lord Mansfield he says, "The enclosed, though begun within these few days, has been greatly laboured."1 From this it may be inferred that each public Letter occupied, as a rule, several days in its production. The note which went to Woodfall with his last public letter remarks, "At last I have concluded my great work, and I assure you with no small labour." More emphatic still was his observation when he sent Woodfall the additional papers for the collected edition of 1772. "I weigh every word, and every alteration in my eyes at least, is a blemish." He wrote to Wilkes, "I am overcome with the slavery of writing. "2

In his Letter No. LIV. he asks, "Is there no labour in the production of those letters. Mr. Horne measures the facility of my writing by the fluency of his own." In such strong terms did he describe the process by which he built up from his first drafts, corresponding to his private letters to Woodfall, that powerful style which has been described as distinguished by

ardour, spirit, perspicuity, classical correctness, sententious epigrammatic compression; his characteristic ornaments-keen, indignant invective, audacious interrogation, shrewd, severe, antithetic retort, proud, presumptuous disdain of the powers of his adversary, pointed and appropriate allusions that can never be mistaken.

The class of writing of which that can be said is utterly different from the output of the novelist or the hurried paragraphist. It was the unsparing labour on blade and point of the weapon which gave it the keen edge with which this man cut and thrust so sharply at his opponents. And the greater the labour the keener the blade. It was specially polished up for use in the Address to the King, some passages of which may be quoted to shew the finished article. He is writing on December 19, 1769, about Wilkes, then in prison.

You have still an honourable part to act. The affection of your subjects may still be recovered. But before you subdue their hearts you must gain a noble victory over your own. Discard those little

personal resentments which have too long directed your public conduct. Pardon this man the remainder of his punishment; and if resentment still prevails, make it, what it should have been long since, an act not of mercy but contempt. He will soon fall back into his natural 2 lbid. p. 335.

1 Woodfall, 1814, i. p. 214.
3 Ibid.; Preliminary Essay, p. 89.

station, a silent senator and hardly supporting the weakly eloquence of a newspaper. The gentle breath of peace would leave him on the surface. It is only the tempest that lifts him from his place. Without consulting your Minister call together your whole Council. Let it appear to the public that you can determine and act for yourself. Come forward to your people. Lay aside the wretched formalities of a king, and speak to your subjects with the spirit of a man and in the language of a gentleman.1

Add to this a passage from the Letter of January 30, 1771:

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.

Having seen his views of the Sovereign's position and action we will now shew how faithfully he dealt with the Duke of Grafton, then at the head of the Ministry. We take the following from the Letter dated May 30, 1769 :—

The character of the reputed ancestors of some men has made it possible 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 man may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face. Charles the First lived and died a hypocrite. Charles the Second 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. . . . Lord Chatham

1 Mr. Griffin observes that the germ of these Letters from Junius to the King may be found in the wish expressed to Dr. Cooper that spring, April 27, 1769, by Pownall, that his letters purloined in the post office might be shewn by Ministers to the King. See ante, p. 220. These direct appeals to the throne by Junius correspond to Pownall's action described on p. 298, ante, and to his Memorial to the King, p. 407, post.

2 The first Duke was a natural son of Charles II.; at the Revolution he abandoned the Stuarts for William and Mary.

was the earliest object of your political wonder and attachment. Yet you deserted him upon the first hopes that offered of an equal share of power with Lord Rockingham. When the Duke of Cumberland's first negotiation failed, and when the favourite was pushed to the last extremity, you saved him, by joining with an administration in which Lord Chatham had refused to engage. Still, however, he was your friend, you are yet to explain to the world why you consented to act without him, or why, after uniting with Lord Rockingham, you deserted and betrayed him. . . . Your Grace, little anxious perhaps either for present or future reputation, will not desire to be handed down in these colours to posterity. You have reason to flatter yourself that the memory of your administration will survive even the forms of a constitution which our ancestors vainly hoped would be immortal; and, as for your personal character, I will not, for the honour of human nature, suppose that you can wish to have it remembered.

So much for the style and method of Junius. His writing was built up and elaborated by degrees from first drafts. To shew what it was in its original form, before that process was gone through, it may be well to give one of his private letters to Woodfall; No. 7 will answer our purpose:

Wednesday Night, August 16, 1769.

SIR-I have been some days in the country, and could not conveniently send for your letter until this night. Your correction was perfectly right. The sense required it, and I am much obliged to you. When I spoke of innumerable blunders, I meant Newberry's pamphlet, for I must confess that, upon the whole, your papers are very correctly printed. Do with my letters exactly what you please. I should think that, to make a better figure than Newberry, some others of my letters may be added, and so throw out a hint that you have reason to suspect they are by the same author. If you adopt this plan I shall point out those which I would recommend: for you know I do not, nor indeed have I time to, give an equal care to them all. I know Mr. Onslow perfectly.1 He is a false, silly fellow. Depend upon it he will get nothing but shame by contending with Horne. believe I need not assure you that I have never written in any other paper since I began with yours. As to Junius, I must wait for fresh matter as this is a character which must be kept up with credit. Avoid prosecutions if you can, but, above all things, avoid the Houses of Parliament-there is no contending with them. At present you are safe, for this House of Commons has lost all dignity, and dare not do anything.-Adieu, C.

I

The above is what Junius put into a note, written off hand; Junius, it says, "was a character to be kept up with credit," which meant that "weighing every word

1 The Rt. Hon. George Onslow.

which has been already quoted. We have in the above a sample of how his publisher was addressed by Junius, from whose style we now turn to consider, and to compare with it, that of Pownall.

How did he address Mr. Dodsley who was publishing his Treatise on the Study of Antiquities, a few years later? We have an answer to this question, derived from Nichols's Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century.1

June 30, 1782,

MR. DODSLEY-The person who corrects the press is so perfect a scholar and so accurate in his attentions that I not only think myself obliged to him, but shall take it as a particular favour if, where he sees any inaccuracy in the orthography or stopping or any intricacy in the diction of the sentences he will be so good as to put, at least, his mark against such; or even correct them.

T. POWNALL.

Compare those two. They are both very courteous ; they are written, as from the same plane, to men in exactly similar positions. The writer of the first says he cannot give an equal care to all he sends in for publication; he is grateful for corrections made. The writer of the second is conscious that in the process of elaboration he may have allowed some errors of orthography, punctuation or diction, to pass notice, and requests they may be corrected. There is more than a family likeness between them, they coincide in thought and habit of mind.

Another specimen of Pownall's unelaborated style can now be given. It is placed in facsimile opposite. On the back it is addressed to his solicitor, Mr. Sharpe of Lincoln's Inn. It is a very usual unstudied note on a subject not infrequently dealt with in that quarter,—how some person too keenly desirous of payment should be managed-so much a matter of everyday life that it seems curious the document should have been kept so long. But it was included in that packet of the Governor's letters which the present writer inherited, and owes its preservation to having been kept with the others, some of which have also been here reproduced in facsimile so that they may give further examples of how Pownall turned out his letters. Copied from originals, they are now published for the first time. This one is dated from the same address at Marlow as that to Grenville of July 14, 17682 but a 2 See ante, p. 344.

1 1814, vol. viii., note to p. iii.