THE
CORNHILL MAGAZINE.
MARCH, 1860.
A Few Words on Junius and Macaulay.
The "secret of Junius" has been kept until, like over-ripe wines, the
subject has lost its flavour. Languid indeed is the disposition of mind in
which any, except a few veterans who still prefer the old post-road to
the modern railway, take up an essay or an article professing to throw
new light on that wearisome mystery, or to add some hitherto unknown
name to the ghostly crowd of candidates for that antiquated prize. And
yet there is a deep interest about the inquiry, after all, to those who, from
any special cause, are induced to overcome the feeling of satiety which it
at first excites, and plunge into the controversy with the energy of their
grandfathers. The real force and virulence of those powerful writings,
unrivalled then, and scarcely equalled since, let critics say what they may;
the strangeness of the fact that none of the quick-sighted, unscrupulous,
revengeful men who surrounded Junius at the time of his writing, who
brushed past him in the street, drank with him at dinner, sat opposite him
in the office, could ever attain to even a probable conjecture of his identity;
the irresistible character of the external evidence which fixes the authorship
on Francis, contrasted with those startling internal improbabilities which
make the Franciscan theory to this day the least popular, although the
learned regard it as all but established—the eccentric, repulsive, "dour"
character of Francis himself, and the kind of pertinacious longing which
besets us to know the interior of a man who shuts himself up against his
fellow-men in fixed disdain and silence:—these are powerful incentives,
and produce an attraction, of which we are sometimes ourselves ashamed,
towards the occupation of treading over and over again this often beaten
ground of literary curiosity.
Never have I felt this more strongly, than when accident led me, a few years ago, into Leigh and Sotheby's sale-room, when the library of Sir Philip Francis was on view previous to auction. I know not whether any reader will sympathize with me in what I am about to say: but to me there is a solemn and rather oppressive feeling, which attends these exposures of books for sale, where the death is recent, and where the owner and
