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HARVARD

COLLEGE
LIBRARY

DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS, TO WIT.

DISTRICT CLERK'S OFFICE.

Be it remembered, that on the seventh day of March, A. D. 1831, in the fifty-fifth year of the Independence of the United States of America, Gray & Bowen, of the said district, have deposited in this office the title of a book, the right whereof they claim as proprietors, in the words following, to wit-:

"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. 'As to the Book itself, it can say this in its behalf, that it does not merely confine itself to what its title promises, but expatiates freely into whatever is collateral.' Harris's Hermes."

In conformity to the act of the Congress of the United States, entitled "An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein montioned"; and also to an act, entitled "An act supplementary to an act, entitled, An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned,' and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints."

JNO. W. DAVIS,

Clerk of the District of Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGE:

PRINTED BY E. W. METCALF AND COMPANY.

69-20

45

PREFACE.

E

We make books in America as we made our men-of-war,one man contrived and executed, what employed several in the ship-yards of Europe. If our ships be as good as the French and English, we do as well as they with less means. The time has been when one man procured the timber from our forests, planned and superintended the building of the ship even to its rigging, obtained and placed on board the warlike equipments and stores, collected the crew, and then commanded the very ship he had created, and came off conqueror,-necessity thus generating ambidexterity. So with our literary productions, we have less aid, and fewer helps, than they in the capital cities of the old world, where libraries and learned men abound, with oral information on every side. If we in these ends of the earth labor under these disadvantages, our work should be judged of accordingly. We have no guide but Truth, nor other ambition than to be thought to follow her.

We have taken hold of a gnarled question. Should we, like others, fail to maintain our long conceived hypothesis of the authorship of JUNIUS, we trust that our book will be found, nevertheless, to contain political and moral principles, and a spirit of rational liberty, worthy an American.

This essay is a new attempt to disentangle the most important and artfully contrived secret of modern times, the devellopement of which will open curious matter for speculation. It has already exercised the wits of the first men of the age; until conjecture has been wearied and fallen asleep.

The British reader may well ask-Who and what are you, who thus undertake to solve the greatest secret in our history ?—you, born and dwelling in a far distant region of the globe, which was unknown to the world four hundred years ago, and where, little more than two hundred years since, an English word had never been uttered. Is it likely that a native of the new-found quarter of the globe should untie a knot after all our efforts have failed; and unravel a snarl, the disentanglement of which we on the spot have given up in despair? I reply to such in the words of their great light and ornament, their polar-star and ours, Lord BACON. “Since a man who stands a little removed from a spot of ground, may often survey it better than those who are upon it, 'tis not impossible but that as a spectator, I may have observed some things which the actors themselves have not."* Still, however, when a man offers a book of this sort to the attention of a discerning public, they ought to know not only who the author is, but what he is; whether he has ever been in the way of correct information respecting private characters, facts, and circumstances, personages and affairs, of which he ventures to speak; and what portion of his time and thoughts has been given to the subjects he presumes to handle. Books on the healing art have been written in a confident style, with every mark of deep learning, and trait of genius:

* An Attempt to promote the Peace of the Church. Sect. II.

systems have even been built upon them, by able men, who in fact, knew nothing, from their own experience, of the diagnostics of diseases, adjunct or pathognomonic, nor of the natural course of distempers, nor of the operations within us, which, without the aid of art, tend to restore the disordered machine to its pristine regularity,-mere closet medical philosophers. No prudent man would take such a guide to health, or listen with patience to his speculations on life, health, disease, and its curative process.*

These considerations compel me to the disagreeable task of speaking of myself. But irksome as it is, "If these things be necessities, let's meet them like necessities," and speak like a man who has lived long enough in the world to have all his vanity evaporate into thin air.

After being under the instruction of an eminent practitioner of physic several years, I embarked in the early part of the year 1775, at my native place, Newport, RhodeIsland, in the last ship that escaped the interdicted port of Boston; and was consigned by my family to DOCTOR FOTHERGILL, in London, for farther improvement. He was a relation on my mother's side, and was born in the same neighbourhood with her in Yorkshire. After enjoying a cordial reception from the Doctor, he sent me in the autumn of the same year to Edinburgh, where I remained nine months, and then returned to the house of my patron in Harpur-street, London, in which I resided about three years, at the same time attending various lectures, expressly on or connected with my profession, also the hospitals, and occasionally some of Fothergill's own practice. In the lat

e. g. the Brunonian system.

ter part of the year 1778, he sent me to Leyden, to acquire, as he smilingly said, a little of the Dutch phlegm. To that renowned University I was attached four academical years, making excursions in the four months' vacation of every year to England, France, and elsewhere. When I entered the University, being requested, agreeably to custom, to inscribe my name and country on the records of matriculation, I wrote after it, "Libere ReipubLICE AMERICANÆ FœderaTÆ CIVIS"; which ultimately occasioned more talk and captious remark among some there, and at the Hague, than the subject of it was worth,* insomuch that, at my graduation a few years after, I was constrained to add after my name, subscribed to my Inaugural Dissertation, only the word Americanus, before I could obtain the imprimatur of the University, and this by the friendly advice and request of the Rector Magnificus and Professors: for the British Ambassador at the Hague knew all the gossip, through his agents, among the students (few of whom were under twenty-five years of age, and some were forty, and from almost every nation in Europe, while there was but one from America); and this at a time when the American struggle was the great topic of universal conversation, and her cause very popular; and when the British Ambassador at the Court of the Hague † domineered the Dutch as if they were English Colonists.

Our illustrious countryman, JOHN ADAMS, who succeeded WASHINGTON in the Presidency, was sent by Congress to Holland as to sister States to court an alliance. He sojourned in that country over a year before he was publicly

* President Adams notices this in his printed Correspondence, p. 572. † Sir Joseph Yorke. See Correspondence, ib.

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