Ægrotus then favours us with the anecdote about "old Mr. Cox" the printer, and that Maclean corrected the proofs of Junius' Letters at his printing-office. Of course, persons acquainted with the subject have heard the story before, though not with all the circumstantialities now given. Where, I might ask, is the authority for
this story? Who is responsible for it? But the emphatic question which common sense will ask is this: Why should Junius go to Mr. Cox's printing-office to correct his proofs? Where he wrote the letters he might surely have corrected the proofs. Why, after all his trouble, anxiety, and mystification to keep the secret, should he needlessly go to anybody's printing-office to correct the proofs, and thus wantonly risk the consequences?—in fact, go there and betray himself, as we are expected to believe he did? The story is absurd, on the face of it. But what authority has Ægrotus for asserting that Junius corrected proofs at all? Strong presumptive evidence leads me to believe that he did not: in some instances he could not. In one instance he specially desired to have a proof; but it was, as we now know, for the purpose of forwarding it to Lord Chatham. Junius was also anxious to have proofs of the Dedication and Preface, but it is by no means certain that he had them; the evidence tends to show that they were, at Woodfall's request, and to remove from his own shoulders the threatened responsibility, read by Wilkes: and the collected edition was printed from Wheble's edition, so far as it went, and the remainder from slips cut from the Public Advertiser, both corrected by Junius; but we have no reason to believe that Junius ever saw a proof, even of the collected edition,—many reasons that tend strongly to the contrary opinion. Under these circumstances, we are required to believe an anonymous story, which runs counter to all evidence, that we may superadd an absurdity.
Mr. Pickering further referred to Mr. Raphael West, as one who "could tell much on the subject." Here Ægrotus enlarges on the original, and tells us what this "much" consisted of. The story, professedly told by Benjamin West, about Maclean and Junius, on which Sir David Brewster founded his theory, may be found in Galt's Life of West. But Galt himself, in his subsequent autobiography, admits that the story told by West "does not relate the actual circumstances of the case correctly;" that is to say, Galt had found out, in the interval, that it was open to contradiction and disproof, and it has since been disproved in the Athenæum. So much for a story discredited by the narrator himself. Of these facts Ægrotus is entirely ignorant, and therefore proceeds by the following extraordinary circumstantialities to uphold it. "The late President of the Royal Academy knew Maclean; and his son, the late Raphael West, told the writer of these remarks [Ægrotus himself] that when a young man he had seen him [Maclean] in the evening at his father's house in Newman Street, and once heard him repeat a passage in one of the letters which was not then published;" and Ægrotus adds, "a more correct and veracious man than Mr. R. West could not be." So be it. Still it is strange that the President, who was said to have told his anecdote expressly to show that Maclean was Junius, never thought to confirm it by the conclusive proof of having read the letters before they were published! Further,—and we leave the question of extreme accuracy and veraciousness to be settled by Ægrotus,—the President West was born in 1738; he embarked from America for Italy in 1759; on his return he visited England in 1763, and such was the patronage with which he was welcomed, that his friends recommended him to take up his residence in London. This he was willing to do, provided a young American lady to whom he was attached would come to England. She consented; his father accompanied her, and they were married on the 2nd of September, 1765, at St. Martin's Church. Now Maclean embarked for India in December, 1773, or January, 1774, and was lost at sea, when "the young man," Master Raphael, could not have been more than seven years of age,—nay, to speak by the card, as Master Raphael heard one of Junius' letters read before it was published, and as the last was published in January, 1772, it follows, assuming that he was the eldest child, born in nine months to the hour, and that it was the very last letter that he heard read, he may have been five years and seven months old—a very "young man" indeed; or rather, all circumstances considered, as precocious a youth as he who found out the vellum-bound copy years before it was known to be in existence.
I regret to have occupied so much of your space. But speculation on this subject is just now the fashion. "Notes and Queries" is likely hereafter to become an authority, and if these circumstantial statements are admitted into its columns, they must be as circumstantially disproved.
M. J.
Replies to Minor Queries.
The Ten Commandments (Vol. iii., p. 166.).—The controversy on the division of the Ten Commandments between the Romanists and Lutherans on the one side, and the Reformers or Calvinists on the other, has been discussed in the following works—1. Goth (Cardinalis), Vera Ecclesia, &c., Venet., 1750 (Art. xvi. § 7.); 2. Chamieri Panstratia (tom i. l. xxi. c. viii.); 3. Riveti Opera (tom. i. p. 1227., and tom. iii. Apologeticus pro vera Pace Ecclesiastica contra H. Grotii Votum.); 4. Bohlii Vera divisio Decalogi ex infallibili principio accentuationis; 5. Hackspanii Notæ Philologicæ in varia loca S. Scripturæ; 6. Pfeifferi Opera (Cent. i. Loc. 96.); 7. Ussher's Answer to a Jesuit's Challenge (of Images) and his Serm. at Westminster before the House of Commons, out of Deuteronomy, chap. iv. ver. 15, 16., and Romans, chap. i. ver. 23.; 8. Stillingfleet's Controversies with Godden, Author of "Catholics no Idolaters," and
with Gother, Author of "The Papist Misrepresented," &c.
The earliest notices of the division of the Decalogue, are those of Josephus, lib. iii. c. 5. s. 5.; Philo-Judæus de Decem Oraculis; and the Chaldaic Paraphrase of Jonathan. According to these, the third verse of Exod. xx. contains the first commandment; the fourth, fifth, and sixth, the second. The same distinction was adopted by the following early writers:—Origen (Homil. viii. in Exod.), Greg. Nazienzen (Carmina Mosis Decalogus), Irenæus (lib. iii. c. 42.), Athanasius (in Synopsi S. Scripturæ), Ambrose (in Ep. ad Ephes. c. vi.).