Always swayed by religious influences, he was intolerant of the sects around him; habitually pious, he was not without superstition; he was not an unbeliever in ghostly apparitions, and had a great fear of death; he also had the touching mania—touching every post as he walked along the street, thereby to avoid some unknown evil.
Although of rural origin, he became a thorough London cockney, and his hatred of Scotchmen and dissenters is at once pitiful and ludicrous. His manners and gestures were uncouth and disagreeable. He devoured rather than eat his food, and was a remarkable tea-drinker; on one occasion, perhaps for bravado, taking twenty-five cups at a sitting.
Massive in figure, seamed with scrofulous scars and marks, seeing with but one eye, he had convulsive motions and twitches, and his slovenly dress added to the uncouthness and oddity of his appearance. In all respects he was an original, and even his defects and peculiarities seemed to conduce to make him famous.
Considered the first among the critics of his own day, later judgments have reversed his decisions; many of those whom he praised have sunk into obscurity, and those whom he failed to appreciate have been elevated to the highest pedestals in the literary House of Fame.
Style.—His style is full-sounding and antithetic, his periods are carefully balanced, his manner eminently respectable and good; but his words, very many of them of Latin derivation, constitute what the later critics have named Johnsonese, which is certainly capable of translation into plainer Saxon English, with good results. Thus, in speaking of Addison's style, he says: "It is pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; ... he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations; his page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendor." Very numerous examples might be given of sentences most of the words in which might be replaced by simpler expressions with great advantage to the sound and to the sense.
As a critic, his word was law: his opinion was clearly and often severely expressed on literary men and literary subjects, and no great writer of his own or a past age escaped either his praise or his censure. Authors wrote with the fear of his criticism before their eyes; and his pompous diction was long imitated by men who, without this influence, would have written far better English. But, on the other hand, his honesty, his scholarship, his piety, and his championship of what was good and true, as depicted in his writings, made him a blessing to his time, and an honored and notable character in the noble line of English authors.
Junius.—Among the most significant and instructive writings to the student of English history, in the earlier part of the reign of George III., is a series of letters written by a person, or by several persons in combination, whose nom de plume was Junius. These letters specified the errors and abuses of the government, were exceedingly bold in denunciation and bitter in invective. The letters of Junius were forty-four in number, and were addressed to Mr. Woodfall, the proprietor of The Public Advertiser, a London newspaper, in which they were published. Fifteen others in the same vein were signed Philo-Junius; and there are besides sixty-two notes addressed by Junius to his publisher.
The principal letters signed Junius were addressed to ministers directly, and the first, on the State of the Nation, was a manifesto of the grounds of his writing and his purpose. It was evident that a bold censor had sprung forth; one acquainted with the secret movements of the government, and with the foibles and faults of the principal statesmen: they writhed under his lash. Some of the more gifted attempted to answer him, and, as in the case of Sir William Draper, met with signal discomfiture. Vigorous efforts were made to discover the offender, but without success; and as to his first patriotic intentions he soon added personal spite, the writer found that his life would not be safe if his secret were discovered. The rage of parties has long since died away, and the writer or writers have long been in their graves, but the curious secret still remains, and has puzzled the brains of students to the present day. Allibone gives a list of forty-two persons to whom the letters were in whole or in part ascribed, among whom are Colonel Barré, Burke, Lord Chatham, General Charles Lee, Horne Tooke, Wilkes, Horace Walpole, Lord Lyttleton, Lord George Sackville, and Sir Philip Francis. Pamphlets and books have been written by hundreds upon this question of authorship, and it is not yet by any means definitely settled. The concurrence of the most intelligent investigators is in favor of Sir Philip Francis, because of the handwriting being like his, but slightly disguised; because he and Junius were alike intimate with the government workings in the state department and in the war department, and took notes of speeches in the House of Lords; because the letters came to an end just before Francis was sent to India; and because, indecisive as these claims are, they are stronger than those of any other suspected author. Macaulay adds to these: "One of the strongest reasons for believing that Francis was Junius is the moral resemblance between the two men."
It is interesting to notice that the ministry engaged Dr. Johnson to answer the forty-second letter, in which the king is especially arraigned. Johnson's answer, published in 1771, is entitled Thoughts on the Late Transactions respecting Falkland's Islands. Of Junius he says: "He cries havoc without reserve, and endeavors to let slip the dogs of foreign and civil war, ignorant whither they are going, and careless what maybe their prey." "It is not hard to be sarcastic in a mask; while he walks like Jack the giant-killer, in a coat of darkness, he may do much mischief with little strength." "Junius is an unusual phenomenon, on which some have gazed with wonder and some with terror; but wonder and terror are transitory passions. He will soon be more closely viewed, or more attentively examined, and what folly has taken for a comet, that from its flaming hair shook pestilence and war, inquiry will find to be only a meteor formed by the vapors of putrefying democracy, and kindled into flame by the effervescence of interest struggling with conviction, which, after having plunged its followers into a bog, will leave us inquiring why we regarded it."
Whatever the moral effect of the writings of Junius, as exhibited by silent influence in the lapse of years, the schemes he proposed and the party he championed alike failed of success. His farewell letter to Woodfall bears date the 19th of January, 1773. In that letter he declared that "he must be an idiot to write again; that he had meant well by the cause and the public; that both were given up; that there were not ten men who would act steadily together on any question."[35] But one thing is sure: he has enriched the literature with public letters of rare sagacity, extreme elegance of rhetoric and great logical force, and has presented a problem always curious and interesting for future students,—not yet solved, in spite of Mr. Chabot's recent book,[36] and every day becoming more difficult of solution,—Who was Junius?