"Erskine, like many other characters of peculiar liveliness, had a morbid sensibility to the circumstances of the moment, which sometimes strangely enfeebled his presence of mind; any appearance of neglect in his audience, a cough, a yawn, or a whisper, even among the mixed multitude of the courts, and strong as he was there, has been known to dishearten him visibly. This trait was so notorious, that a solicitor, whose only merit was a remarkably vacant face, was said to be often planted opposite to Erskine by the adverse party, to yawn when the advocate began.
"The cause of his first failure in the house, was not unlike this curious mode of disconcerting an orator. He had been brought forward to support the falling fortunes of Fox, then struggling under the weight of the 'coalition.' The 'India Bill' had heaped the king's almost open hostility on the accumulation of public wrath and grievance which the ministers had with such luckless industry been employed during the year in raising for their own ruin. Fox looked abroad for help; and Gordon, the member for Portsmouth, was displaced from his borough, and Erskine was brought into the house, with no slight triumph of his party, and perhaps some degree of anxiety on the opposite side. On the night of his first speech, Pitt, evidently intending to reply, sat with pen and paper in his hand, prepared to catch the arguments of this formidable adversary. He wrote a word or two; Erskine proceeded; but with every additional sentence Pitt's attention to the paper relaxed; his look became more careless; and he obviously began to think the orator less and less worthy of his attention. At length, while every eye in the house was fixed upon him, he, with a contemptuous smile, dashed the pen through the paper, and flung them on the floor. Erskine never recovered from this expression of disdain; his voice faltered, he struggled through the remainder of his speech, and sank into his seat dispirited and shorn of his fame.
"But a mind of the saliency and variety of Erskine's, must have distinguished itself wherever it was determined on distinction; and it is impossible to believe, that the master of the grave, deeply-reasoned, and glowing eloquence of this great pleader, should not have been able to bring his gifts with him from Westminster-hall to the higher altar of parliament. There were times when his efforts in the house reminded it of his finest effusions at the bar. But those were rare. He obviously felt that his place was not in the legislature; that no man can wisely hope for more than one kind of eminence; and except upon some party emergency, he seldom spoke, and probably never with much expectation of public effect. His later years lowered his name; by his retirement from active life, he lost the habits forced upon him by professional and public rank; and wandered through society, to the close of his days, a pleasant idler; still the gentleman and the man of easy wit, but leaving society to wonder what had become of the great orator, in what corner of the brain of this perpetual punster and story-teller, this man of careless conduct and rambling conversation, had shrunk the glorious faculty, that in better days flashed with such force and brightness; what cloud had absorbed the lightnings that had once alike penetrated and illumined the heart of the British nation."
The following investigation of the authorship of Junius will be read with interest.
"The trial of Hastings had brought Sir Philip Francis into public notice, and his strong Foxite principles introduced him to the prince's friends. His rise is still unexplained. From a clerk in the War-office, he had been suddenly exalted into a commissioner for regulating the affairs of India, and sent to Bengal with an appointment, estimated at ten thousand pounds a-year. On his return to England he joined Opposition, declared violent hostilities against Hastings, and gave his most zealous assistance to the prosecution; though the house of commons would not suffer him to be on the committee of impeachment. Francis was an able and effective speaker; with an occasional wildness of manner and eccentricity of expression, which, if they sometimes provoked a smile, often increased the interest of his statements.
"But the usual lot of those who have identified themselves with any one public subject, rapidly overtook him. His temperament, his talents, and his knowledge, were all Indian. With the impeachment he was politically born, with it he lived, and when it withered away, his adventitious and local celebrity perished along with it. He clung to Fox for a few years after; but while the great leader of opposition found all his skill necessary to retain his party in existence, he was not likely to solicit a partisan at once so difficult to keep in order and to employ. The close of his ambitious and disappointed life was spent in ranging along the skirts of both parties, joining neither, and speaking his mind with easy, and perhaps sincere, scorn of both; reprobating the Whigs, during their brief reign, for their neglect of fancied promises; and equally reprobating the ministry, for their blindness to fancied pretensions.
"But he was still to have a momentary respite for fame. While he was going down into that oblivion which rewards the labours of so many politicians; a pamphlet, ascribing Junius's letters to Sir Phillip, arrested his descent. Its arguments were plausible; and, for a while, opinion appeared to be in favour of the conjecture, notwithstanding a denial from the presumed Junius; which, however, had much the air of his feeling no strong dislike to being suspected of this new title to celebrity. But further examination extinguished the title; and left the secret, which had perplexed so many unravellers of literary webs, to perplex the grave idlers of generations to come.
"Yet the true wonder is not the concealment; for a multitude of causes might have produced the continued necessity even after the death of the writer; but the feasibility with which the chief features of Junius may be fastened on almost every writer, of the crowd for whom claims have been laid to this dubious honour: while, in every instance, some discrepancy finally starts upon the eye, which excludes the claim.
"Burke had more than the vigour, the information, and the command of language; but he was incapable of the virulence and the disloyalty. Horne Tooke had the virulence and the disloyalty in superabundance; but he wanted the cool sarcasm and the polished elegance, even if he could have been fairly supposed to be at once the assailant and the defender. Wilkes had the information and the wit; but his style was incorrigibly vulgar, and all its metaphors were for and from the mob: in addition, he would have rejoiced to declare himself the writer: his well-known answer to an inquiry on the subject was, 'Would to Heaven I had!' Utinam scripsissem! Lord George Germaine has been lately brought forward as a candidate; and the evidence fully proves that he possessed the dexterity of style, the powerful and pungent remark, and even the individual causes of bitterness and partisanship, which might be supposed to stimulate Junius: but, in the private correspondence of Junius with his printer, Woodfall, there are contemptuous allusions to Lord George's conduct in the field, which at once put an end to the question of authorship.
"Dunning possessed the style, the satire, and the partisanship; but Junius makes blunders in his law, of which Dunning must have been incapable. Gerard Hamilton (Single-speech) might have written the letters, but he never possessed the moral courage; and was, besides, so consummate a coxcomb, that his vanity must have, however involuntarily, let out the secret. The argument, that he was Junius; from his notoriously using the same peculiarities of phrase at the time when all the world was in full chase of the author, ought of itself to be decisive against him; for nothing can be clearer, than that the actual writer was determined on concealment, and that he would never have toyed with his dangerous secret so much in the manner of a school-girl, anxious to develop her accomplishments.