collector was a man of this world, taking an interest in the everyday literature which occupies myself and those around me. There stands his copy of a memoir of some one whom both he and I knew well—he had just had time to read it, as I see by the date, and with interest, as I judge by the pencil marks—in what mysteriously separate relation do he and I now respectively stand towards that common acquaintance? There is his copy of the latest volume of Travels—he had only accompanied the adventurer, I see, as far as the First Cataract—what matters now to him the problem of the Source of the Nile? There is his last unbound number of the Quarterly—he had studied it for many a year: at such a page, the paper-cutter rested from its work, the marginal notes ended, the influx of knowledge stopped, the chain of thought was snapped, the mental perceptions darkened. Can it be, that the active mind of our fellow-worker ceased then and there from that continuous exertion of so many years, and became that we wot not of—a living Intelligence, it may be, but removed into another sphere, with which its habitual region of labour—the cycle in which it moved and had its being—had no connection whatever? Must it be (as Charles Lamb so quaintly expresses it) that "knowledge now comes to him, if it comes at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?"
But I do not wish to dally, here and now, with fancies like these. I only introduced the subject, because Sir Philip Francis' library was a good deal calculated to suggest this class of thoughts. He was a great marginal note-maker. He criticized all that came under his eye, and especially what related to political events, even to his latest hour. And—singular enough, yet in accordance with much that we know of him, and with all that we must suppose, if Junius he was—he had avoided keeping up, in this way, his connection with the time in which his sinister and anonymous fame was achieved. So far as I remember, his books of the Junian period were little noted. He seemed to have exercised his memory and judgment on the records of Warren Hastings' trial, the French Revolution, the revolutionary war—not on those of Burke and Chatham.
This, however, is all by the way, and I must crave pardon for the digression. I lost myself, and wandered off, it seems, just when I was reminding the reader that the subsidiary features of the Junian controversy have now become much more interesting than the old question of authorship itself, and that it is an admirable exercise for the intellectual faculties to trace the way in which different lines of reasoning, wholly distinct and yet severally complete, converge towards the "Franciscan" conclusion. It was in this light, especially, that the subject appeared to captivate the mind of that great historical genius whom we have lost: whom we have just seen in the ample enjoyment of most rare faculties, the fulness of fame, and the height of fortune, committed to the soft arms of an euthanasia such as has rarely waited on man. The "Junian controversy" was with Macaulay an endless subject of ingenious talk. It suited certain peculiarities of his mind. As he was the very clearest of writers, so he was also,
