No. 3. SIR, Saturday, July 15, 1769. I HAVE received the favour of your note. I am, Sir, your most obedient, and C. No. 4. SIR, (Private.) MR. NEWBERRY having thought proper to I wish at least he had done it correctly. much by giving him the following hint closed § when you think proper. July 17, 1769. reprint my Letters †, You will oblige me to-morrow. The in "Mr Newberry, having thought proper to reprint Junius's Letters, might at least have corrected the errata, as we did constantly. Page 1, line 13, for national 4, 3, was indisputable read rational. were. indispensable. indirect." *"Mr. William Middleton's letter is sent as desired." correspondents in the Public Advertiser of July 20, 1769. Answer to Newberry had thought proper at this time to publish a spurious and surreptitious edition of the first fifteen letters, as printed in the author's edition, under the title of The Political Contest; and it was these unauthorized publications that gave the first idea of publishing a genuine edition of the whole. This request does not appear to have been complied with, as the following answer to correspondents was inserted in the Public Advertiser of the 18th of July:-" Reasons why the hint was not printed are sent to the lastmentioned Coffee House in the Strand, from whence our old correspondent will be pleased to send for them." I did not expect more than the life of a newspaper, but if this man will keep me alive, let me live without being offensive. July 21, 1769, Friday Night. I CAN have no manner of objection to your reprinting the letters, if you think it will answer, which I believe it might before Newberry appeared. If you determine to do it, give me a hint, and I will send you more errata (indeed they are innumerable), and perhaps a preface. I really doubt whether I shall write any more under this signature *. I am weary of attacking a set of brutes, whose writings are too dull to furnish me even with the materials of contention, and whose measures are too gross and direct to be the subject of argument, or to require illustration. That Swinneyt is a wretched but a dangerous fool. He had the impudence to go to Lord G. Sackville, whom he had never spoken to, and to ask him, whether or no he was the author of Junius-take care of him. Whenever you have anything to communicate to me, let the hint be thus, C at the usual place, and so direct to Mr. John Fretly, at the same Coffee House, where it is absolutely impossible I should be known. * In his Dedication (p. 87), Junius alleges the " encouragement and applause" of the people to have been the reason the letters were continued.-ED. "A correspondent of the printer's," Dr. Good says, but this does not throw much light on the subject, and it may be doubted whether Junius knew a great deal of the person he stigmatizes so outrageously. But the manifest aim of Junius was to impress his printer with the belief that he knew everything and everybody. Who Swinney was, however, is a question that has been often asked, and seems satisfactorily answered in the following extract, cited by Barker from Dr. Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica :"Swinney, Sidney, D.D., F.R. and A.SS. The Battle of Minden, a Poem, in Three Books. Lond. 4to, 10s. A Sermon. Lond. 1769, 4to, 1s." The author of a poem on the Battle of Minden, if not on intimate terms with Lord George Sackville, was likely "enough to have spoken to him," especially if he had been, as has been stated, Lord George's chaplain.--ED. I did not mean the Latin to be printed. I wish Lord Holland may acquit himself with honour*. If his cause be good, he should at once have published that account to which he refers in his letter to the mayort. Pray tell me whether George Onslow means to keep his word with you, about prosecuting. Yes or No will be sufficient. Your Lycurgus§ is a Mr. Kent, a young man of good parts upon town. And so I wish you a good night ||. Yours, C. A. The "wish" expressed above, that "Lord Holland may acquit himself with honour," refers to a charge of peculation made in the City Petition presented to his Majesty, July 5, 1769, of which the following is a copy : "The humble Petition of the Livery of the City of London in Common Hall assembled. "Most Gracious Sovereign, "We, your Majesty's dutiful and loyal subjects, the Livery of the City of London, with all the humility which is due from free subjects to their lawful Sovereign, but with all the anxiety which the sense of the present oppressions, and the just dread of future mischiefs produce in our minds, beg leave to lay before your Majesty some of those intolerable grievances which your people have suffered from the evil conduct of those who have been intrusted with the administration of your Majesty's government, and from the secret unremitting influence of the worst of counsellors. "We should be wanting in our duty to your Majesty, as well as to *It has been already observed, in the Preliminary Essay, that Junius appears to have uniformly entertained a good opinion of, or at least a partiality for, Lord Holland. The remark is not new; it was noticed long ago by several of his opponents. Thus, in a letter subscribed by our author Anti-Fox, and inserted in the Public Advertiser of October 16, 1771, he thus speaks of him: "I know nothing of Junius; but I see plainly that he has designedly spared Lord Holland and his family." [The reason of Junius sparing the Fox family is apparent after the elucidation given of the authorship of the Letters, and it is now only surprising that so palpable a source of identification was not earlier and more forcibly dwelt upon.-ED.] See note A at the end of this letter. See note B, relative to Mr. Onslow, at the conclusion of the preceding note. § Lycurgus was a frequent writer in the Public Advertiser during the spring and summer of 1769; and opposed the ministry, but with less violence than most of his contemporaries. See, in the Editor's remarks on the authorship of Junius, the extract from a Letter of Sir Philip Francis to his children.-ED. ourselves and our posterity, should we forbear to represent to the throne the desperate attempts which have been and are too successfully made to destroy that constitution to the spirit of which we owe the relation which subsists between your Majesty and the subjects of these realms, and to subvert those sacred laws which our ancestors have sealed with their blood. "Your ministers, from corrupt principles, and in violation of every duty, have, by various enumerated means, invaded our invaluable and unalienable right of trial by jury. "They have, with impunity, issued general warrants, and violently seized persons and private papers. 66 They have rendered the laws non-effective to our security, by evading the Habeas Corpus. They have caused punishments, and even perpetual imprisonment, to be inflicted without trial, conviction, or sentence. They have brought into disrepute the civil magistracy, by the appointment of persons who are, in many respects, unqualified for that important trust, and have thereby purposely furnished a pretence for calling in the aid of a military power. "They avow, and endeavour to establish a maxim, absolutely inconsistent with our constitution, that an occasion for effectually employing a military force always presents itself when the civil power is trifled with or insulted;' and, by a fatal and false application of this maxim, they have wantonly and wickedly sacrificed the lives of many of your Majesty's innocent subjects, and have prostituted your Majesty's sacred name and authority to justify, applaud, and recommend, their own illegal and bloody actions. 66 They have screened more than one murderer from punishment, and in its place have unnaturally substituted reward. They have established numberless unconstitutional regulations and taxations in our colonies. They have caused a revenue to be raised in some of them by prerogative. They have appointed civil law judges to try revenue causes, and to be paid from out of the condemnation money. "After having insulted and defeated the law on different occasions, and by different contrivances, both at home and abroad, they have at length completed their design, by violently wresting from the people the last sacred right we had left, the right of election; by the unprecedented seating of a candidate notoriously set up and chosen only by themselves. They have thereby taken from your subjects all hopes of parliamentary redress, and have left us no resource, under God, but in your Majesty. "All this they have been able to effect by corruption, by a scandalous misapplication and embezzlement of the public treasure, and a shameful prostitution of public honours and employments, procuring deficiencies of the civil list to be made good without examination; and, instead of punishing, conferring honours on a paymaster, the public defaulter of unaccounted millions. "From an unfeigned sense of the duty we owe to your Majesty and to our country we have ventured thus humbly to lay before the throne these great and important truths, which it has been the business of your ministers to conceal. We most earnestly beseech your Majesty to grant us redress. It is for the purpose of redress alone, and for such occasions as the present, that those great and extensive powers are intrusted to the crown, by the wisdom of that constitution which your Majesty's illustrious family was chosen to defend, and which, we trust in God, it will for ever continue to support." Lord Holland, suspecting himself to be implicated in the last paragraph but one of the above petition, addressed the following letter to the Lord Mayor upon this subject : "MY LORD, TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE LORD MAYOR. "In a petition presented by your Lordship it is mentioned as a grievance, instead of punishing, conferring honours on a paymaster, the public defaulter of unaccounted millions. I am told that I am the paymaster here censured; may I beg to know of your Lordship if it is so? If it is, I am sure Mr. Beckford must have been against it, because he knows and could have shown your Lordship in writing the utter falsehood of what is there insinuated. "I have not the honour to know your Lordship, so I cannot tell what you may have heard to induce you to carry to our Sovereign a complaint of so atrocious a nature. "Your Lordship, by your speech made to the King at delivering the petition, has adopted the contents of it; and I do not know of whom to inquire but of your Lordship concerning this injury done to an innocent man, who is by this means (if I am the person meant) hung out as an object of public hatred and resentment. "You have too much honour and justice not to tell me whether I am the person meant, and if I am, the grounds upon which I am thus charged, that I may vindicate myself, which truth will enable me to do to the conviction of the bitterest enemy, and therefore I may boldly say to your Lordship's entire satisfaction, whom I certainly have never offended. "I am, with the greatest respect, my Lord, "Your Lordship's most obedient and most humble Servant, "Holland House, Kensington, "HOLLAND." "July 9, 1769." To this letter the Lord Mayor returned the following answer : "The Lord Mayor presents his compliments to Lord Holland, and in answer to the honour of his Lordship's letter delivered to him by Mr. Selwyn, he begs leave to say that he had no concern in drawing up the petition from the Livery of London to his Majesty; that he looks on himself only as the carrier, together with other gentlemen charged by the Livery with the delivery of it; that he does not, nor ever did, hold himself accountable for the contents of it, and is a stranger to the nature of the supposed charge against his Lordship. "Mansion House, July 10, 1769." Mr. Beckford, seeing his name implicated in this correspondence, wrote from the country the following letter to a friend, who was a liveryman of the city. "DEAR SIR, "I AM as much surprised as you seem to be, at in my possession appealed to by a noble Lord. city think it incumbent on me to vindicate (as "Fonthill, July 15, 1769. seeing my name and papers You and my friends in the they are pleased to express |