knew it to be Boyd's on this very account. Now it so happened that Mr. Woodfall was also well acquainted, in consequence of a similar correspondence, with the hand-writing of Mr. Boyd; and Woodfall, whose veracity could not be questioned, and who had far better opportunities of comparing the autographs together, denied, that the letters of JuNIUS were written in the hand-writing of Boyd; adding, that Almon, from the casual glance he had obtained, had conjectured erroneously. The difficulty was felt and acknowledged; and the following ingenious expedient was devised to get rid of it. It was contended that Boyd had, about the period of JUNIUS's first appearance, accustomed himself to what he used to call, and his commentators and biographers call after him, a disguised hand; and that he uniformly employed this disguised hand in writing these letters, in order to prevent detection. And this ingenious discovery was afterwards brought forward as an evidence of Boyd's good sense and discretion, and an additional demonstration that he was the actual writer of these letters. "It would require strong proof indeed," says Mr. Chalmers, " to satisfy a reasonable mind, that the writer of JUNIUS's Letters would send them to the printer in his real hand-writing. It is impossible to conceive, that such a man, as Boyd, would take such successful pains to disguise his hand-writing, if he had not had some design to deceive the world."

But this is to involve the argument in even more selfcontradiction than ever. JUNIUS, whoever he was, wrote his letters, we are told, in a disguised hand-writing, in order to avoid detection: the letter which Almon saw was not in a disguised hand writing, but in the open and avowed handwriting of Boyd, with which Almon was well acquainted, and which was made use of by Boyd in his common transactions and correspondence. Upon their own reasoning therefore, Boyd could not have been the author of the letters of JUNIUS.

But we are told, in reply to this second difficulty, that the disguised hand-writing of Boyd, though different from his common hand-writing, was nevertheless not so different, but that those who were familiar with the latter could easily trace its origin, and identify it with the former: "I have already proved," says Mr. Campbell, "that those who were acquainted with the one would, upon inspection of the other, discover a strong resemblance between them1." The result of course is, that Almon penetrated the deception, although from a momentary glance, while Woodfall was incapable of doing so, notwithstanding his superior opportunities. Yet surely never was such a disguise either attempted or conceived before. The author wishes, we are told, to dissemble his hand-writing, in order to avoid detection; and he devises a disguised hand-writing that can only be traced home, and identified by those who are acquainted with his common hand-writing; as if his common hand-writing could be identified by strangers as a matter of course.

A disguised hand-writing that should conceal him from all who were ignorant of his real hand-writing, and expose him to all who were acquainted with it, was a truly brilliant invention, and altogether worthy of Mr. Boyd's country and pretensions. Yet after all, we must not forget, that the handwriting supposed to have been seen by Almon, if Boyd's at all, was not the mystical, esoteric autography, the ἱερα γραμματα of the initiated, the disguised character that could be detected by nobody but those who were acquainted with his common writing, but the common and undisguised character itself, his general and avowed hand-writing employed on purposes of ordinary business, and which, says Mr. Almon, "I knew," in consequence of "having received several letters from him CONCERNING BOOKS."

But this is not the only disguise which Mr. Boyd must have had recourse to, and which he is admitted to have had recourse to, if he were the real author of these celebrated epistles. He must have disguised his usual style even more than his usual hand-writing, and that by the very extraordinary assumption of an excellence which does not elsewhere appear to have belonged to him; for it is not pretended by any of his advocates that the general merit of any one of his acknowledged productions is equal to the general merit of the letters of JUNIUs; but merely asserted that there is in his works a general imitation of the manner of the latter, together with an occasional copy of his very phrases and images, and that he has at times produced passages not inferior to some of the best that Junius ever wrote. " Of all the characters," says Mr. Chalmers himself, "who knew Boyd personally, I have only met with one gentleman who is of opinion that he was able to write JUNIUS's letters1." And Mr. Campbell has hence conceived it necessary to offer two reasons for this palpable inferiority of style. The one is, that all the acknowledged productions of Boyd were written in a hurry, stans pede in uno-while the letters of JUNIUS, contrary indeed to his otherwise uniform method, were possibly composed with considerable pains, and corrected by numerous revisions. The other consists of a long extract from the Rambler, in denial of the position that "because a man has once written well, he can never under any circumstances write ill."

Now the whole of this reasoning, if reasoning it may be called, is founded on gratuitous assumptions alone, and may be just as fairly applied to any one else of the supposed writers of the Letters of JUNIUS as to Mr. Boyd. It is admitted that he occasionally wrote passages of considerable merit; and it is admitted also, that he was an imitator of JUNIUS's style, and a frequent copyist of his very words and images. But this last fact is against Boyd, instead of being in his favour, for the style of JUNIUS is original and strictly his own, he is nowhere a copyist, and much less a copyist of himself. Boyd might characteristically write, as he has done in his Freeholder, "long enough have our eyes ached over this barren prospect, where no verdure of virtue quickens," because JUNIUS before him had written " I turn with pleasure from that barren waste in which no salutary

1

plant takes root, no verdure quickens;" but JUNIUS could not write so, because his genius was far too fertile for him to be driven to the dire necessity of copying from his own metaphors, and even had he done it in the present instance, he was too manly a writer to have introduced into the simile the affected and contemptible alliteration of " verdure of virtue."

If Boyd therefore wrote JUNIUS, he must have been possessed of powers of which he has never otherwise given any evidence whatever, and must not only have disguised his hand, but as was well observed on a former occasion by the late Mr. W. Woodfall, have disguised his style at the same time; and this too " in that most extraordinary way of writing above his own reach of literary talent," judging of his abilities from every existing and acknowledged document. To conceive that a man of versatile genius might disguise his accustomed style of writing by adopting some other style on a level with his own, is not difficult; but to conceive, under the circumstances of his authenticated talents, that Boyd could disguise his avowed style by assuming that of JUNIUS, is to conceive, though the difference between them was not altogether so extreme, that a sign-post painter might disguise himself under the style of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or a street-fiddler under that of Cramer.

In effect Boyd appears to have been an enthusiastic admirer of the writings of JUNIUS, ambitious enough to try to imitate them, and vain enough to wish to be thought the author of them. By the deep interest he displayed in their behalf, he once or twice induced his wife to challenge him with having written them;-when accidentally taxed by Almon with the same fact, he could not restrain his feelings, and his cheeks flushed with rapture beneath the suspicion; and when, upon a visit to Ireland in the year 1776, he wrote his address to the electors of Antrim, under the title of "The Freeholder," he so far succeeded by eulogizing JUNIUS, by quoting his letters, and imitating his manner,

VOL. I.

1 Campbell's Life of Boyd, p. 136.

* M

as to induce a few other persons to entertain the same idea, and, what was of no small gratification to him, to acquire the honour of being generally denominated Junius the second. Yet, say his advocates, he never dared to avow that he was JUNIUs, because JUNIUS had declared in his Dedication, "I am the sole depository of my own secret, and it shall perish with me."

Upon the whole, however, these visits to Ireland are by no means favourable to Mr. Boyd's claims; for the letters of JUNIUS published in August, 1768, under the signatures of Atticus and Lucius, were written during one of them; and from the rapidity with which they seized hold of the events of the moment, and replied to the numerous vindications and apologies of the government-party, must have been written (not at Belfast) but in London, or its immediate vicinity1. While his visit to the same country in 1772 was

1 Campbell, in his Life of Boyd, p. 22, relates the following anecdote of that gentleman, which occurred during the before-mentioned visit to Ireland in the summer of 1768. "One evening while Mr. Flood sat at his own table, after dinner, entertaining a large company, of which Mr. Boyd was one, he received an anonymous note, enclosing a letter on the state of parties, signed Sindercombe. The note contained a request that Mr. Flood would peruse the inclosed letter, and that if it met his approbation he would get it published, which he accordingly did in a paper of the following morning, and the letter produced a very strong sensation on the public mind." Mr. Campbell proceeds to state that "every endeavour was made, without effect, to discover the author: that Mrs. Boyd always thought that Sindercombe was her husband's production, and that many years afterwards she was satisfied that her conjecture was founded in fact." If Mrs. Boyd were correct in her conjecture, as to her husband being the author of the letter under this signature, it would, of itself, all but indisputably, prove that he was not the writer of the Letters of JUNIUS; as on Dec. 26, 1772, nearly twelve months after JUNIUS had ceased to publish under this signature, and many months after he had declined to write under any other, Sindercombe addresses the following card to him:

"SINDERCOMBE laments that JUNIUS is silent at a season that demands his utmost eloquence. Sindercombe has long waited with impatience for the completion of that promise, in which every friend to liberty is so deeply interested. JUNIUs has long since pledged himself that the