sensibly alive, from the recollection that he had been selected by the partiality of one, who is no more, to fill the first situation in the management of the East India Company's affairs.'

On the 29th of October, 1806, his Majesty, at the recommendation of Lord Grenville, was pleased to invest Mr. FRANCIS with the expensive honour of the Order of the Bath. A wiser man would have preferred some profit to so much honour, or have contrived, by the usual courses, to have united them; and especially as he professes, and has publicly declared that, since 1770, he has never received a shilling of the public money of England, in any shape, or on any account.

"This is but a slight sketch of the subject, and a very hasty view of the person. The public life of such a man, so well acquainted with the principal persons of his time, and intimate with many of them, conversant in all the transactions of his country, and mixed in some of them, though barren of events for the Gazette, would be interesting and instructive, if it were undertaken and executed by himself. The history of an ardent mind in perpetual action or pursuit, never succeeding, but never courting repose or yielding to despondence, could not fail to communicate a projectile motion to other minds in parallel directions, and to similar objects. They would see that success is not necessary to happiness, much less to

honour, and that he, who contends against adversity and persists without hope, cannot be wholly disappointed.

“Human virtue should be encouraged to believe, what this man's life has proved to be true, that, in some shape or other, though not in prosperity, there is a reward for perseverance in doing right.

"Tho' still by folly, vice, and faction crost,
He finds the generous labour was not lost."

"The approbation of posterity would be no recompense if it could not be anticipated. The posthumous praise, the statue, and the monument, are incentives to others, but are lost upon the dead. He virtually and immediately receives the tribute, who is sure it will be paid to his memory;

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Enjoys the honours destin'd to his name,

And lives instanter with his future fame *."

Thus far proceeds the author of the Memoirs, evidently with good authority for all he says; so that if any thing adverse to our view appears on the face of this record, there can be no contending with it. Of equal validity is what fell from Sir PHILIP in the course of a speech on India affairs, when he gave a short account of "such particular circumstances of his public life as bore any relation

* Monthly Mirror, May and June, 1810.

to his going to India, his conduct there, and his conduct since his return to England." As this account will throw additional light upon the information derived from his biographer, it is useful to our present inquiry. Mr. FRANCIS observed, "That he had been bred up in the Secretary of State's office, where he had the happiness to possess the favour of the late Earl of Egremont, then Secretary of State. That in 1763, Mr. Ellis had appointed him to fill a station of great trust in the War-office that Lord Barrington, who succeeded Mr. Ellis, had recommended him to a noble Lord (whose absence, and more particularly the cause of it, he very sincerely lamented) as a fit person to be sent out to India as a member of the government of Bengal: till that recommendation, he had not (Mr. FRANCIS declared) the honour of being known to Lord North. He had, therefore, obtained a seat in the council at Calcutta, not through any private interest or intrigue, but he was taken up upon recommendation, and that the recommendation of persons of high rank, those who best knew his character and qualifications, and who certainly would not have so far disgraced themselves as to have recommended an improper person, knowing him to be such, to go out to India in a station of so much power and importance. He had, accordingly, been nominated with General Clavering and Colonel Monson in the bill of 1773*."

Parliamentary Debates, vol. xxii. p. 97.

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CHAPTER III.

IN my former publication I was led into an error which I must acknowledge, and I am glad to have this opportunity of making the correction. In the Memoirs of Sir PHILIP FRANCIs there quoted, it is said that he was born in the year 1748. By the preceding Life, which is unquestionably the more correct, it appears that he was born in 1740. This fact is important. Instead of being nineteen, Sir PHILIP was twenty-seven years old, when the first of the Miscellaneous Letters, being the earliest of the known productions of JUNIUS, made its appearance. All the Letters, under the name of JUNIUS, were written when Sir PHILIP was passing from his twenty-ninth to his thirty-second year :-a time of life in which it has been often remarked, men generally undertake the greatest designs of which they are capable. And surely he, who is at any time able to compose such Letters as these, is even more likely to produce them during such a period than at any other; since the ardour of youth, which alone could stimulate and carry him through such great exertions, is yet in full action, while the judgment

D

has received such lessons from experience, as naturally fortify opinion. To this ardour of JUNIUS in the cause he had espoused, the Author of the Essay, prefixed to the last edition, bears the following testimony. "No man but he, who with a thorough knowledge of our author's style, undertakes to examine all the numbers of the Public Advertiser for the three years in question, can have any idea of the immense fatigue and trouble he submitted to."-" Instead of wondering that he should have disappeared at the distance of about five years, we ought much rather to be surprised that he should have persevered through half this period, with a spirit at once so indefatigable and invincible*." Yet under the conviction of this singular enthusiasm of JUNIUS, the same writer thinks it "absurd to suppose that he could be much less than fifty;" grounding his supposition on the following passage in one of the letters to Woodfall:

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After a long experience of the world, I affirm before God, I never knew a rogue who was not unhappy."

"Now when this declaration," says the author of the Essay," is coupled with the two facts, that he made it under the repeated promise and intention of speedily disclosing himself to his correspondent, and that the correspondent thus schooled, by a

* JUNIUS, i. 47. Preliminary Essay.