60 REVIEWS — JUNIUS DISCOTEEED. 



tainly, at least, the latter sentence has not prevented a Scotch 

 philosopher, Sir David Brewster, from adding a Mac to the name of 

 Junius, and putting him in kilts ! — any more than the " fact" of his 

 being "a Cambridge man," has prevented the discovery, by Grattan, 

 and other equally competent judges, " from the internal evidence of 

 the style, that Burke was the author of Junius." "Among other 

 instances," says Curran, " Grattan used to insist upon it that no 

 living man but Burke could have written that passage in one of the 

 letters to the Duke of Grafton : ' You have now fairly travelled 

 through every sign in the political Zodiac, from the Scorpion in 

 which you stung Lord Chatham, to the hopes of a Virgin in the house 

 of Bloomsbury.' " 



By logic not much better, or worse, Junius has long since been 

 identified as single-speech Hamilton ; Butler, Bishop of Hereford ; 

 Major General Lee; Lieut. Col. Barre ; Lord Ashburton; Lord 

 Lyttleton ; Lord George Sackville ; the Earl of Chatham ; the Duke 

 of Portland ; Wilkes ; Home Tooke ; and Sir Philip Francis ; to say 

 nothing of sundr}- names of little note among the contemporaries of 

 the long-sought letter-writer, yet not on that account less likely to 

 include the true one. He has now been incontestably proved to have 

 been a Peer, to have been a member of the House of Commons, to 

 have been a Bishop, a Lawyer, a General, and a Colonial Governor ; 

 and equally certain to have been none of the six ! Writer after writer 

 has undertaken to solve the riddle ; volume has succeeded volume 

 from able pens, in support of their several favourities ; and when our 

 Canadian discoverer of Junius adds to these one more, he must not 

 complain if we ask for conclusive proof before we can admit that 

 Thomas Powxall, Governor of Massachusetts Bay, is the real and 

 unquestionable Junius. 



The following passage may suffice to give some idea of our author's 

 style and treatment of his subject. The emphatic italics and capitals 

 are his own. Having established, as he conceives, Governor Pownall's 

 authorship of the well-known " Letter to an Honorable Brigadier- 

 General," immediately after his return from xVmerica in 1700, he 

 goes on to say : — 



1 Having now re-landed our worthy governor in his native country, and exhibited 

 him in such close connexion with the earliest of the writings of Junius, as — at the 

 least — to raise in the mind of the mo?t doubting reader, some faint idea that, after 

 all, our conjecture of the identity of the two, may, possibly, be well founded ; we 

 resume the narrative of such of the remaining events of Governor Pownall's life, as 

 tend to establish the truth of our hypotli 



'The energy and ability cf such a man could not be allowed to remain long idle; 



