guilt in an indiscriminate charge of sanguinary and profligate ambition. The public voice might be excused for thus pronouncing one undistinguishing sentence of condemnation upon them at the time, and while the sentiments that had been raised by so bloody a tragedy retained their force. But subsequent authors and reasoners have too frequently fallen into the same error, and treated the subject as superficially as the ephemeral writers and the speakers of the day. The common, almost the invariable, course has been to make no distinction whatever between the different actors in the drama. Danton has been treated with the same severity as Robespierre; Camille and St. Just have received the same award of condemnation. Nay, the wretched Marat, whom it would be a profanation of the name to call a statesman, has not been held up to greater execration and scorn, than those who really, more or less, were entitled to be so called. A more calm examination of their history, for which survey the time may be admitted now to have arrived, begets far more than doubts upon the soundness of the commonly received opinion, and teaches us to distribute in very different and very unequal shares our praise and our censure. Even respecting Robespierre himself, it is probable that the pitch of the public voice has been somewhat too high, and that his bad and despicable character, dark as undeniably it was, had still some few redeeming traits to distinguish it from the Collots and the Billauds, by far the worst of the whole.

Allowance, too, must be made for the exaggerated, the exalted state of political feeling that prevailed among party leaders, and even among their followers, very generally in those dismal times. There can be no more certain proof of this than the fact that even at the present day, when time might be supposed to have calmed all the fervour of the revolutionary crisis, and reflection to have opened men's eyes to the degree in which they had been formerly misled, we find persons of unquestionably virtuous principles unable to bestow the just portion of censure upon the companions of their earlier years, and most reluctant to look back upon those scenes with a natural regret. I have been astonished to hear such persons characterize Collot d'Herbois as a well-meaning though misguided man (bon homme, mauvaise tête); and somewhat less struck, indeed, though still surprised, to find them hankering after the belief that whatever was done had been the fault of the Royalists and the Allies,

while the all-atoning name of "patriot" covered the multitude of Decemviral sins, and the sole regard of every one who acted in those days was deemed to have been "La Patrie."

It would be extremely wrong to suffer ourselves to be warped in our opinions by such prejudices, or to let them arrest the judgment required by the interests of truth and justice. Yet it would be equally contrary to both were we to exclude from our consideration the extenuating tendency of the undeniable fact, that all men in those times were more or less under the influence of the temporary delirium which the great change had produced; a delirium which rendered them alike insensible to their own sufferings, blind to their own perils, neglectful of their duties, and regardless of other men's rights.

JOHN, FOURTH DUKE OF BEDFORD.

THE purpose of the following observations is to rescue the memory of an able, an amiable, and an honourable man,long engaged in the public service, both as a minister, a negotiator, and a viceroy,* long filling, like all his illustrious house, in every age of our history, an exalted place among the champions of our free constitution,-from the obloquy with which a licentious press loaded him when living, and from which it is in every way discreditable to British justice, that few if any attempts have, since his

* He was in 1744, when thirty-four years of age, First Lord of the Admiralty, in which capacity he brought forward Keppel, Howe, and Rodney. In 1748 he became Secretary of State, and continued in that office till 1751. In 1756 he went to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, and remained there with extraordinary popularity till 1761, when he was made Lord Privy Seal. Next year he went as Ambassador to Paris, and after his return was made President of the Council. He retained this office till 1766. He was in 1768 chosen Chancellor of the University of Dublin; and died in 1771. All who have ever spoken of this excellent person, with the exception of Junius, have praised his frank and honest nature, wholly void of all dissimulation and all guile; and have borne a willing testimony to the soundness of his judgment, as well as his unshaken firmness of purpose.

death, been made to counteract the effects of calumny, audaciously invented, and repeated till its work of defamation was done, and the falsehood of the hour became confounded with historical fact.

Beside the satisfaction of contributing to frustrate injustice, and deprive malice of its prey, there is this benefit to be derived from the inquiry upon which I am about to enter. We shall be enabled to test the claims of a noted slanderer to public confidence, and to ascertain how little he is worthy of credit in his assaults upon other reputations. But we shall also be enabled to estimate the value of the class to which he belongs, the body of unknown defamers, who, lurking in concealment, bound by no tie of honour, influenced by no regard for public opinion, feeling no sense of shame, their motives wholly inscrutable, gratifying, it may be, some paltry personal spite, or actuated by some motive too sordid to be avowed by the most callous of human beings, vent their calumnies against men whose whole lives are before the world, who in vain would grapple with the nameless mob of their slanderers, but who, did they only know the hand from whence the blows are levelled, would very possibly require no other defence than at once to name their accuser. That the efforts of this despicable race have sometimes prevailed against truth and justice; that the public, in order to indulge their appetite for abuse of eminent men, have suffered the oft-repeated lie to pass current without sifting its value, and have believed what was boldly asserted, with the hardly-credible folly of confounding with the courage of truth, the cheap daring of concealed calumniators, cannot be doubted. The effects produced by the vituperation of Junius upon the reputation of the Duke of Bedford, would at once refute any one who should assert the contrary. It becomes of importance then to prove how entirely groundless all his charges were; to show how discreditable it was to the people of this country that they should be led astray by such a guide; and to draw from this instance of delusion a lesson and a warning against lending an ear to plausible, and active, and unscrupulous calumniators.

Before proceeding with our subject, however, we may stop to consider an example of the effect produced upon public opinion, even permanently, by the invention of some phrase easily remembered, and tending to preserve the ma

lignity of the fiction by the epigram that seems in some sort to embalm an otherwise perishable slander. At a moment of great popular excitement (July, 1769), the Livery of the city of London presented an address to the Sovereign, in which they closed a long list of grievances with the statement that "instead of punishment, honours had been bestowed upon a paymaster, the public defaulter of unaccounted millions." The recent elevation to the peerage of Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland, lately Paymaster of the Forces, was plainly here signified; and it is a humiliating reflection to those who justly prize public opinion, that it should be the sport and the dupe of such audacious impostures. For it is vain to deny that the epithet here bestowed upon that statesman, has, in a certain degree, clung to his memory, and given an impression injurious to the purity of his character. The calumny being promulgated by an irresponsible body, and in an address to the throne, no proceedings at law were possible, at least none that would not have been attended with extreme difficulty in a technical view. Lord Holland, however, lost no time in giving the tale his most peremptory contradiction, and by an appeal to facts as notorious to all the world as the sun at noonday-tide. The falsehood, like most others, rested upon a truth, but a truth grossly perverted. The moneys which had passed through the Paymaster's hands were, in one sense, wholly unaccounted; that is, the accounts of his office had not yet been wound up; but they had been delivered in, were under the examination of the auditors, and awaited the final report of these functionaries. It was shown that those accounts, which extended over the years 1757, 1758, and 1759, had reference to military expeditions in many distant parts of the globe, and that they related to a larger expenditure than in any former war had ever been incurred. Yet they were declared nine years after they closed. But Mr. Winnington's for 1744, 1745, and 1746, were only declared in 1760, or fourteen years after their close; and Lord Chatham's, which closed in 1755, were not declared in 1769. It is also to be observed, that Lord Chatham had ceased to hold the office in 1755, and had not declared his accounts fourteen years after; whereas Lord Holland had only resigned the paymastership three years and a half before the charge was made. He had also paid over in eight years balances to the amount of above

900,000l., arising from savings which he had effected in the sums voted for different services. It would certainly not be easy to furnish a more complete answer than the calumnious assertion of the Livery thus received. But it is also certain that the calumny long survived its triumphant refutation. Even in the later periods of party warfare it was revived against the illustrious son of its object; men of our day can well remember Mr. Fox having it often flung in his teeth, that he was sprung from the "defaulter of unaccounted millions."

The foul slanders of Junius upon the Duke of Bedford differ from the calumny of the Livery in this; that they plainly furnish to any one who attentively considres them, complete proof of their own falsehood, in by far the most material particular, and consequently should at once fall to the ground as generally discredited. And they would so fall did not men make it a rule to encourage slander and defeat the ends of truth and justice, by lending a willing ear to all that is alleged against their follow-creatures, and overlooking, or straightway forgetting, all that is urged in their defence.

The hatred which this writer evinced towards the Duke rests, as far as it has any public ground to support it, upon the junction of the Bedford party with Lord Bute against Lord Chatham; but in all probability there was some sordid or spiteful feeling of a personal kind at the root of it. Lord Chatham had been, like all the great men of the day, the object of the slanderer's fiercest vituperation. He had repeatedly treated him as a "lunatic," and frequently as a "tyrant;" lurking under the name of Publicola, he had lavished upon him every term of gross abuse which his vocabulary supplied; a "inan purely and perfectly bad;" a "traitor;" an "intriguer;" a" hypocrite;"" so black a villain, that a gibbet is too honourable a situation for his carcass" (Woodfull's Junius, ii. 458). But in the course of a few months from his last attack, which was in 1770, he became appeased; and, whether from beginning to favour Lord Chatham the year before, or from mere hatred towards Lord Bute, his fury broke forth against the Bedford party, in the letter to its chief, which has been the subject of so much observation, and is certainly the most scurrilous of any that were printed under the name of Junius.

This letter, beside a number of vague charges, amount