Extreme cases try principles. The history of Jeffreys and the corrupt judges of the period, has not been without its benefit. Without it the full value of jury-trial could never have been clearly and practically demonstrated to a nation at large. However a pannel might be swerved occasionally by venality, or brow-beat by an overbearing magistracy, their feelings as citizens could not be suppressed, and their acquittal of oppressed innocence let the people know and feel that their rights were in their own hands, so long as they preserved intact their constitutional mode of trial. To this institution we trace that idea of right, that love of liberty that has at all times marked the various states under the common law. Notwithstanding the praises bestowed upon it, we doubt whether in one respect its beneficial effects have ever been duly appreciated. We mean the knowledge of law that it diffuses through the community. Called on to form a part of the tribunals of the country, every class become acquainted with the ordinary regulations as to property and personal right, and are both zealous in maintaining their own immunities and fearful of infringing those of others. Every Englishman and American knows that his person is inviolable from every one, and that his house is his castle against all the world. The extreme ignorance of law, in countries under the code of Justinian, even among well informed people, is striking to those acquainted with Great Britain or the United States.

Not one of the least important deductions from the life of Jeffreys, is the necessity of a general diffusion of knowledge with any form of government to the enjoyment of liberty. Has the English constitution changed? Not at all. The rights of the people are precisely the same, but the mass of the people know them better. In the present enlightened condition of England, such a judge as Jeffreys could not maintain his place on the bench a single year. We might extend the reasoning farther, and show that the security of all rights mainly depends on a due understanding of them. Under a monarchy, British dissenters could only obtain freedom of conscience, when true notions of toleration had become widely diffused; can we, under a purer form of government, expect permanent liberty unless in a population that understands fully in what liberty consists?

ART. IX.-An Essay on Junius and his Letters; embracing a sketch of the life and character of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and Memoirs of certain other distinguished individuals; with reflections historical, personal and political, relating to the affairs of Great Britain and America, from 1763 to 1785. By BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE, M. D. Member of several Medical, Philosophical and Literary Societies in Europe and America. Boston. 1831.

FEW questions have more powerfully stimulated, and less adequately satisfied literary curiosity than those, which relate to the authorship of anonymous or pseudonymous books. Whether the tyrant of Agrigentum, Phalaris, or the royal martyr of England composed, the one his epistles, and the other the Eixwv Baoiλixn); who was the writer of the dialogue "De causis corrupta Eloquentia," whether Quinctilian or Tacitus or Pliny the younger, or Suetonius; who was Junius, whether the most exalted by rank, or the most accomplished in letters; whether the most renowned of authors and statesmen or one of the ordinary retainers of that modern pandemonium, a printing-house-are all inquiries, which have been zealously prosecuted, but hitherto without eliciting any very satisfactory replies.

It is not very easy to account for the extreme anxiety which has been manifested to disperse the cloud, which, in these and similar instances, has veiled the idol to whom so many ignorant worshippers have burnt incense, and bowed the knee in mysterious and soul-compelling adoration. It may be remarked, however, that it is chiefly in examples of great notoriety or of great excellence, that this goaded excitement has been evinced. No one feels great interest to know, who penned the last paragraph of a newspaper of the same fabric and tissue as countless hosts of its predecessors. But in the deepest gloom of national adversity, when the ship-of-state is tossed by every angry billow, with her tackle and equipments strained even to snapping, without helm, or compass, or reckoning, and with chinks, that at each struggle of the gallant bark, admit the subtle destroyer, it is no common voice that stills the tumult, no common hand, that, on some far-off promontory, lights the beacon fires of rescue and comfort. It is then that a people with one voice, call aloud to their deliverer, and give their eyelids no rest until they behold him face to face. It is then that

searching question occurs-do his principles and practices coincide? Say what we will, abstractions form too light a diet for the mass of those who crave intellectual refreshment. These understand better what is said or spoken, than what is thought or merely insinuated; what reaches them through the corporeal eye, than what addresses itself to their mental vision. To admire an anonymous author, is like falling in love with a ghost; it has form and seeming, but we cannot touch it; it wanders through an undefined vacuity, alarming us in its windings, but we cannot fix it; it utters its chill warning, but we cannot trace its direction. It is not enough to hear, and to be heard, but the reader, like Eneas, shouts with irrepressible transport

Akin to these feelings, must, we apprehend, have been those, with which the British public listened to the oracular responses of Junius, which, with more than Delphic solemnity, yet without any tincture of its ambiguity, he scattered among the rapt and astonished multitude, like arrows dipped in unquenchable light, at once transfixing the victims, and presenting them as a spectacle to present and to future ages. No shaft flies random, but reaches its destination, aimed by a practised eye, and sent home by a giant's arm, dealing out glory and shame with the exactest retribution :

Who was this god in disguise: this invisible arbiter of human fates? Was he a mere literary Ganymede or the very Apollo himself? Whoever he may have been, we have his own testimony, that it had cost him "no small labour" to conclude his work. Yet, strange to tell, persons of the most opposite characters, and of all possible degrees of merit, from the very highest to the very lowest, have been pointed at as the author of Junius. What a precious assortment is that, which is to be found in the following paragraph:

"The persons to whom this honour, (the authorship of Junius,) has, at different times, and on different grounds, been attributed, are the following: Charles Lloyd, a clerk of the Treasury, and afterwards a deputy-teller of the Exchequer; John Roberts, also a clerk in the Treasury, at the commencement of his political life, but afterwards successively private secretary to Mr. Pelham, when chancellor of the Exchequer, member of Parliament for Harwich, and Commissioner of the Board of Trade; Samuel Dyer, a man of considerable learning, and a friend of Mr. Burke and Dr. Johnson; William Gerard Hamilton, another friend and patron of Mr. Burke; Edmund Burke himself; Dr. Butler, late Bishop of Hereford; the Rev. Philip Rosenbagen; Major-General Charles Lee, well known for his activity during the American war; John Wilkes; Hugh Macauley Boyd; John Dunning, Lord Ashburton; Henry Flood; and Lord George Sackville."*

In addition to these, Mr. William Greatrakes, private secretary to the Earl of Shelburne; Glover, the author of Leonidas; De Lolme; Wedderburn, have been mentioned as putative proprietors of the talents and reputation of Junius. Finally, the writer, under review, suggests the great Lord Chatham. It is difficult, not to say hopeless, to discover any common principle, which has directed the judgments of men, who have arrived at such opposite results. The error appears to have arisen from having seized some striking peculiarity in the character of Junius, leaving the imagination to reconcile contradictions, however violent. Hence, because Lord George Germain entertained a dislike for, and rivalry with the Marquis of Granby, and Junius also visits him with no sparing castigation, an identity of persons is immediately presumed, yet Lord George is well known to have been destitute of classical acquirement, and by no means addicted to the cultivation of letters. The secretaries, who occupy so large a space in the list just quoted, seemed to have been elevated into the rank of pretenders, for no better reason, than that their office implies a knowledge of secrets, and the mighty unknown seems to be well acquainted with the transactions of all persons, whether in high station or private life, who possessed the slightest claims to consideration. The author of Leonidas was a great lover of liberty, and well acquainted with the affairs of the city of London; moreover, an accomplished scholar. But his son, who was most likely to know, entertained not the slightest suspicion, that his father was the author of these celebrated epistles. De Lolme, who,

without being educated to the common law, yet wrote well on the constitution, must be Junius, because the latter sometimes trips when he would appeal to this great exemplar of the most perfect human reason. Burke was an Irishman, of large grasp of mind, sensitive, choleric, an able critic, yet not always under the guidance of the severest taste in his compositions, he must therefore be the original of the shadow, whatever other difficulties may be found incompatible with this supposition. John Horne Tooke, whose style, though bold and correct, is yet hard and unmellowed, and destitute of that blending in the tints, without which there can be no beauty, because, with the intrepidity of a successful demagogue, he dared to array himself in opposition to potentates and princes, must also be thrust into the armour of this intellectual Achilles, at the risque of being made ridiculous, if not odious to posterity. What man, possessing the lowest degree of common sense, would, for the sake of securing the inviolability of the secret, which he had concealed under his mask, be contented to fix an indelible brand upon his proper character and reputation? Could the great philologist ever be induced to apply, even in fiction, the following language to himself?

"You, (the Duke of Grafton,) will find him copiously gifted with those qualities of the heart, which usually direct you in the choice of your friendships. He, too, was Mr. Wilkes' friend, and as incapable as you are, of the liberal resentment of a gentleman. No, my Lord; it was the solitary, vindictive malice of a monk, brooding over the infirmities of his friend, until he thought they quickened into public life, and feasting with a rancorous rapture, upon the sordid catalogue of his distresses. Now, let him go back to his cloister. The church is a proper retreat for him. In his principles he is already a bishop.*

However complete the mystery of his incognito, it is outrageously unnatural for a man to say of himself :

"But perseverance, management, and a determined good humour, will set every thing right, and, in the end, break the heart of Mr. Horne."t

Contrary to his poetic vein, which, like his subject, is laconic, the periods of Glover, in prose, are diffuse and disjointed, and deprived of all rythmical modulation. In the following sentence, the principles professed are elevated and commendable in themselves, but clothed in a style almost pedestrian, and scenting not a little of the shop. Addressing the Livery of

* Letter I. + Private Letters, No. 75.