now the only binding chain, extends from the lowest cobbler to the King's Prime Minister; but it is but a rope of sand, and the first shock will dissolve us into an 'infinity of factions.' Our colonies have outgone us in 'fashionable degeneracy,' and if the French take North America, we shall be confronted by a naval power equal to our own. Thus, by a gradual and unperceived decline, we seem gliding down from ruin to ruin; we laugh, we sing, we feast, we play,' and in blind security, though not in innocence, resemble Pope's lamb licking the hand just raised to shed his blood.2

6

68. Denunciations of this kind prove nothing less than the truth of statements on which they are professedly grounded. Brown's readers might console themselves with the reflection that similar lamentations have been raised ever since men discovered this world not to be Utopia. Events which soon belied part of his prophecies might justify the opinion that the whole represented a passing phase of ill temper rather than a deeply rooted discontent. The French,' he said, 'are now pursuing it '—that is, a system of military conduct, founded on the assumption that hardy troops will beat luxurious troops'on the plains of America, and if we hold to our dastardly maxim, they will pursue it on the plains of Salisbury.'3 The French superiority and Brown's credit received a death-blow on the heights of Abram; and Englishmen, finding that they had not become cowards, forgot the alarm or remembered it only as a good jest.

69. Yet Brown was not a contemptible writer; his style is clear, and his reasoning often vigorous. If the indignation to which his view of social evils prompts him is faint and colourless beside the deep passion which breathes through Rousseau's writings, he may, in a certain sense, be regarded as another indication of the same current of feeling. Brown, doubtless, would have disavowed any such complicity with horror. He was a believer in the British Constitution and the balance of power; a quoter of Montesquieu, Machiavelli, and Sir W. Temple, and an adherent, though not one of the most abject adherents, of the sham giant Warburton. A sound utilitarian, he cared nothing for the rights of man ;

1 Brown, i. 112.

2 Ib. i. 144.

Ib. i. 201.

1

and was much too willing to accept a good preferment to favour the absolute equality of mankind. He resembles Rousseau only so far as he endeavoured to express that vague feeling of unrest which was beginning to pervade all classes; and he gave pretty much the same theory as to its origin, though he would have shrunk from Rousseau's drastic remedy. The evils which afflicted society have taken many forms, and different names have come into fashion at different times. The cant of the day used the phrase 'luxury;' and luxury was admitted, on all hands, to consist in a departure from the simplicity of nature. Brown works out a pretty little theory, showing how commerce, necessary in the youth of a nation, and useful in its manhood, becomes in its old age the cause of avarice, luxury, and 'effeminate refinement.' It was now depopulating the country, as statistics were supposed to prove, as well as ruining our spirit. The remedy applied in France of forbidding the nobility to engage in trade was scarcely to be hoped for in England. Indeed, his proposals are of the vaguest. Some consolation might be found in the theory, in which Brown tells us that he had anticipated Montesquieu, that our liberty was the natural growth of a soil and climate which produce in us a certain 'spirit of chagrin ;'4 and it might seem that Britons would never be slaves as long as they had their fogs and their local spleen.' But the mode of applying this ill temper had to be left in judicious vagueness. He could not, like Rousseau, propose a summary return to a state of nature. Reform, he thought, must come from above; and it was precisely the governing classes who were most corrupt. They who should cure the evils are the very delinquents.'6 A foreign emigrant might startle us from repose, or, in some great emergency, the voice of an abused people' might rouse their rulers into fear.' Not, however, that Brown contemplated a revolution. The voice of the people was to find utterance through a great minister. A portrait of this ideal personage, the successor of Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King,' closes the second volume, or should close it, but that Brown adds a supplementary portrait of the ideal

Brown, i. 153.

2 Ib. i. 187.

Ib. i. 218.

4 Ib. ii. 31. 5 Ib. ii. 35.

• Ib. i. 220.

5

Ib. ii. 246. • Ib. i. 221.

writer on politics. He was, of course, in no want of an original in the last case; and Pitt, then rising into power on the popular favour, stood well enough for the other.

70. Brown, a clever pamphleteer, though no prophet, was speedily forgotten; but the denunciations of luxury, of which his book is perhaps the best English example, continued to be popular in literature and in society. It is written in Boswell how often they stirred the bile of Johnson; and indeed they are for the most part flimsy enough. They might have some significance when regarded as an implicit answer to a very awkward question. The poor and despised were saying to their masters, through the mouth of Rousseau, Is there any conceivable use in you? And their masters replied substantially, though without too much sincerity, On the whole, we are of no use whatever. We are simply a product of corruption. At the close of the seven years' war, ominous symptoms of discontent began to make themselves perceptible. Chatham had won for England the empire of the New World. The hands into which he resigned his power were utterly incapable of discharging so lofty a function. Colonial discontents were echoed by the widespread discontent at home; and the nation entered upon a period of vehement agitation such as had hardly been known since the Revolution. The popular excitement was the more dangerous from the imbecile vacillation of the rulers; the set of factions who plotted and struggled for power, forming and dissolving alliances with scandalous facility, bullying alternately the king and the people, and combining the faults of courtiers and demagogues, were unable to conceive or execute any decided line of policy. Their folly drove America to rebellion; and, at times, threatened to produce a rebellion at home. And yet, though allusions to the days of Cromwell were frequent in the mouths of agitators, the discontent had not as yet the true revolutionary ring. It is amusing to observe how carefully the popular leaders justified even revolution by precedent; and instinctively appealed to the leading cases of Hampden and Sidney rather than to the abstract rights of

man.

71. One literary product of that period has obtained a permanent celebrity, and may stand as a sufficient representation

...

of the contemporary phase of feeling. The famous Letters of Junius owe part of their reputation to the historical enigma as to their authorship; in purely literary merits, they are as inferior to Swift's concentrated satire as to Burke's sumptuous rhetoric. The eloquence is stilted; and the invective suggests rancorous ill-will rather than virtuous indignation. The hatred has not that dignity with which the greatest men can invest the expression of their evil passions. Yet Junius stands high above the mere hack pamphleteer. His polish has, to some degree, withstood the corroding influences of time. 'Once for all,' writes Philip Francis to Burke, 'I wish you would let me teach you to write English. . . . Why will you not allow yourself to be persuaded that polish is material to preservation?'1 When we remember by whom and to whom these words were written, and on what occasion-the publication, namely, of one of Burke's masterpieces of invective against the French Revolution-their arrogance may seem to confirm the ordinary theory as to the authorship of the letters. At any rate, they express the literary doctrine of Junius. Polish was to preserve what was else little worth preservation. For the absence of any speculative thought in Junius's Letters is even more remarkable than in the case of Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke, at least, aims at being philosophical. Junius makes personal denunciations almost the exclusive substance of his letters. He has no affectation of theory. Avowing his belief that a revolution might be approaching, he never invokes those principles a belief in which should inflame the popular passions, and guide men who have for the time abandoned all conventional formulas. Wilkes writes to him professing his readiness 'to plunge the patriot dagger in the bosom of the tyrants of his country.' 2 Wilkes was a mere comedian; but one may fancy that in some popular tumult Junius could have put on a mask and taken advantage of the confusion to plunge a dagger in some hated antagonist. Each object of his wrath—Grafton, Bedford, Mansfield, or George III.-seems for the time to occupy his whole field of vision and stir the depths of his malignity. But the ferocious onslaught turns generally upon some personal scandal, upon the stories that one duke had been horsewhipped and another had taken his mistress to the 1 Burke's Correspondence, iii. 162. 2 Junius, i. *302.

opera; whilst constitutional principles are invoked to injure his enemy, rather than defended at his enemy's cost.

72. The principles are of a characteristically narrow kind. Junius strains his powers to the utmost in order to prove, not that all men are free and equal, that monarchy is a delusion and the Church an imposture, but that the legal effect of expelling a member of Parliament is at most to nullify that election, and give the constituents a chance of re-electing him if they please, without disqualifying him, so as to nullify all votes given for him hereafter. On that distinction the liberty of England depends. Or, again, Junius assures the livery of London that 'The very being of that law, of that right, of that constitution, for which we have been so long contending, is now at stake.' The law and the constitution depend upon the question whether the livery will or will not adhere to the ordinary system of rotation by which the alderman next in seniority to the Lord Mayor was clected to succeed him. Wider questions are characteristically narrowed in the mode of statement. Junius can only argue the great question of the liberty of the press under form of an attack upon Lord Mansfield for maintaining that a jury is judge of the facts, but not of the law. The general principle must be translated into the concrete, and be thus reduced to a statement to which precedents are applicable, before it comes within the sphere of his intelligence. The Letters of Junius, therefore, whatever their ability, belong rather to the historian of fact than to the historian of thought. The weapon already used by men like Swift, De Foe, or Bolingbroke, acquired fresh power in his hands; but he contributed nothing to the development of political speculation. The British Constitution is his ultimate appeal ; Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights were to him what the Bible was to Chillingworth; there was no going behind them ; and a man who should appeal to abstract principles would be travelling out of the record into arguments irrelevant, or, at all events, superfluous. His political principles, so far as they appear, involve a rigid adherence to precedent, and to purely technical arguments. In the letter to Wilkes, which most fully expounds his opinions, he declares that the 'extermination of corruption' is impossible, and that to pro1 Junius, ii. 340.