PRELIMINARY ESSAY.

Ir was not from personal vanity, but a fair estimate of his own merit, and the importance of the subject on which he wrote, that the author of the ensuing letters predicted their immortality. Their matter and their manner, the times they describe, and the talents they disclose, the popularity which attended them at their outset, the impression they produced on the public mind, and the triumph of most of the doctrines they inculcate, all equally concur in stamping for them a passport to the most distant posterity.

In their range these letters comprise a period of about five years; from the middle of 1767 to the middle of 1772: and never has the history of this country, from its origin to the present hour, exhibited a period of equal extent that more peremptorily demanded the severe, decisive, and overpowering pen of such a writer as JUNIUS. The storms and tempests that, within the last twenty years, have shaken the political world to its centre, have been wider and more tremendous in their operation; but they have,

for the most part, discharged their fury at a distance. The constitutions of other countries have been swept away by the whirlwind; but that of England still towers, like the pyramids of Egypt, a wonderful and immortal fabric, overshadowing the desart that surrounds it, and defying the violence of its hurricanes. In the period before us, however, this stupendous and beautiful fabric itself was attacked, and trembled to its foundation: a series of unsuccessful ministries, too often profligate and corrupt, and not unfrequently cunning, rather than capable; a succession of weak and obsequious parliaments, and an arbitrary, though able chief justice, addicted to the impolitic measures of the cabinet, fatally concurred to confound the relative powers of the state, and equally to unhinge the happiness of the crown and of the people; to frustrate all the proud and boasted triumphs of a glorious war, concluded but a few years before by an inglorious peace'; to excite universal contempt abroad, and universal discord at home. Hence France, humiliated as she was by her losses and defeats, did not hesitate to invade Corsica in open defiance of the remonstrances of the British minister, and succeeded in obtaining possession of it; whilst Spain dishonourably refused to make good

In 1763, through the negotiation of the duke of Bedford.

the ransom she had agreed to, for the restoration of the capital of the Philippine Isles, which had been exempted from pillage upon this express stipulation. They saw the weakness and distraction of the English Cabinet, and had no reason to dread the chastisement of a new war.

The discontents in the American colonies, which a little address might at first have stifled for ever, were blown into a flame of open rebellion, through the impolitic violence of the very minister who was appointed, by the creation of a new office at this very time and for this express purpose, to examine into the causes of dissatisfaction, and to redress the grievances complained of: while, at home, the whole of the ways and means of the ministry, instead of being directed against the insolence of the common enemy, were exhausted against an individual, who, perhaps, would never have been so greatly distin guished, had not the ill-judged and contumacious opposition of the cabinet, and their flagrant violation of the most sacred and important principles of the constitution in order to punish him, raised him to a height of popularity seldom attained even by the most successful candidates for public applause; and embroiled themselves on his account in a dispute with the nation at large, almost amounting to a civil war, and which, at length,

only terminated in their own utter confusion and defeat'.

It was at this period, and under these circumstances, that the ensuing letters successively made their appearance in the Public Advertiser, the most current newspaper of the day. The classical chastity of their language, the exquisite force and perspicuity of their argument, the keen severity of their reproach, the extensive information they evince, their fearless and decisive tone, and, above all, their stern and steady attachment to the purest principles of the constitution, acquired for them, with an almost electric speed, a popularity which no series of letters have since possessed, nor, perhaps, ever will; and what is of far greater consequence, diffused among the body of the people a clearer knowledge of their constitutional rights than they had ever before attained, and animated them with a more determined spirit to maintain them inviolate 3. Enveloped in the cloud of a

I

In the language of lord Chatham, delivered May 1, 1771, in the house of lords, "they rendered the very name of parliament ridiculous, by carrying on a constant war against Mr. Wilkes."

2 They were generally copied from the Public Advertiser into all the daily and evening papers.

3 That the same general impression was produced by the appearance of these letters in parliament, which is so well

known