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 Barre, 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?