21 66 If Francis really was Junius," Mr. Merivale shows how his success in this wonderful piece of anonymous satire threw a blight over his whole life. Junius than to the cloquence of Chatham or | patriot and a statesman. The fire which had Burke, the law of Camden and Dunning. It blazed thus brightly for a brief space sank is not too much to say that after the appearance again when its temporary fuel was consumed. of those writings, a new tone on these great Francis remained a powerful, often a commandsubjects is found to prevail in our political ing writer and speaker; but the oracular spirit literature. Doctrines which had previously breathed through Junius no more. met with almost general consent became exploded, truths which up to that time had been only timidly propounded were placed, in postJuniau times, on the order of the day. It is no don't very true that he was only fighting in the van of an advancing cause, and that these public benefits would as certainly have been secured to us if Junius had never written. But it is just as certain that America would have been discovered had Columbus never existed; yet no one therefore contests the greatness of Columbus, or the obligations under which mankind lies towards him. And these considerations help us to account for another great element in his success his literary merit. Most critics whose opinions are of value have joined in very high admiration of the letters of Junius, taken by themselves as works of art. The best of them are not only enormously superior to the ordinary political writing of that time-equal perhaps to the best political writing of any time -but they are certainly superior to anything else that Junius can be supposed or conjectured to have written. It has long been argued that Francis could not be Junius, because of that superiority; although those who study the remains of Francis, now given to the public, may perhaps modify that opinion. But then the letters are to the full as superior, generally speaking, to those which preceded them in the same newspapers under a variety of signatures, most or very many of which there can be no doubt were written by Junius, whoever he was. The riddle, therefore, remains thus far unsolved on any theory. But is there not really a ready solution? The letters signed Junius are of very various merit; but the best, as has been fully admitted, exceed in fire and force the writer's other productions. But the mind of Francis was singularly precocious: this the records of his earliest years plainly show; and intellectual powers of this description are apt to attain ripeness at a period of life when those of slower men are in course of development. And is not a still stronger reason for their superiority to be found in the fact that they were writ ten under peculiar and ardent political excitement? It will be observed that the period of their excellence is coincident with that during which Francis was in close and busy communication with Chatham, whom in earlier life he had depreciated; when he reported his speeches, watched his every movement, adopted all his tendencies, and himself suggested some of them. Francis was one of those whose spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues." It was this contagious enthusiasm, this passing fever of the brain, which made a great classic of him; which turned the newspaper scribe into an inspired writer, the coffee-house politician into a That his life was on the whole a failure; that, animated at once by very genuine public spirit and high-reaching ambition, he never succeeded in either achieving great political objects, although he often suggested and intimated their achievement by others, nor in attaining distinguished rank in his own person, - this must be attributed partly to faults of character and conduct which the reader of these pages will easily discover. But it was owing also, in great measure, to his own extraordinary suecess as Junius. He was scarcely thirty when that success was gained. From that moment his destiny was influenced by it. At first, when the wounds inflicted by the libeller were fresh, he was hampered in all his proceedings by the necessity of guarding a secret of which the disclosure would have been ruin. The habits of mystery thus engendered seem to have grown on him. Junius for a time was almost forgotten; the immediate political sting was past; the literary and historical interest attached to the "inquiry" respecting him had hardly commenced; but Francis during this middle period seems still to have been regarded as a character to which a mystery was attached, a controller of the secret influence of the press. And in later life, the suspicions of his connection with the famous letters gradually accumulated, until they culminated in 1814 with Taylor's celebrated pamphlet "Junius identified." Sir Philip thought proper to maintain, throughout, his attitude of secrecy, and of occasional denial; and thus the work of three busy years became, and remained, a burden on its author for nearly fifty. There is a striking, almost a terrible, passage in Lady Francis's Recollections of him, in which she says that it was the opinion of some of his intimate friends that his hesitation in Parliamentary speaking which was a main cause of his comparative failure was partly owing to the consciousness of his secret. He set so constant and habitual a guard on his lips, lest some compromising expression should find its way out of them, that the habit remained even in cases where the secret was not atnla il question. In 1772 the "Letters of Junius" ceased. ation in the War Office, and went to spend In the same year Francis threw up his situsome time and his small savings in travelling broken. those who had on the Continent. He returned to secure a | against them. I have felt at times, when falling legacy made in his favour by his old friend in with these productions of perverse malevoCalcraft, and to be appointed, through the lence, as if it was a violation of what is due to influence of Lord Barrington, who, as Sec- the dead to publish them; but, in point of fact, retary at War, had discovered his abilities, many of the documents which contain them were evidently intended by himself for posthu to a membership in the new Council of India, with a salary of 10,000l. and unlimit- altogether the sins of which Junius was guilty mous, if not earlier, publicity. Setting aside ed power and patronage. His widow said in this respect, those perpetrated in the unmasked that the appointment was a bribe; and that, person of Francis were sufficient to constihis authorship of the "Letters of Junius " tute a heavy indictment against him. One being known to the Ministry, he was thus friend, supporter, patron, and colleague, after pledged to silence in the future. This story another - Kinnoul, Chatham, Robert Wood, is improbable, and, if true, the pledge was Calcraft, D'Oyly, Clavering, Fowke, Coota, At any rate, Francis had earned Fox, the Prince of Wales a good post, and he made the most of it. wished well to him, defended him, showered benefits on him - appear at last, in his written Concerning his seven years of Indian life and its memorable result in the impeach- temptuous notice, some insinuated or prorecords, branded with some unfriendly or conment of Warren Hastings, Mr. Merivale nounced aspersion, ungrateful at best, but writes fully, and with much help from Fran- treacherous also, if, as has been already concis's own memoirs of the period. But the jectured, he meant those records to be known impression produced by his narrative differs some day to the world. From such displays of but slightly from that conveyed in Macau- character as these and it is of no use for the lay's eloquent Essay on Warren Hastings. honest biographer to attempt to disguise them "Thrown as he was," says Mr. Merivale, of the observer shrinks with natural aversion. Nor can we reconcile ourselves easily to anFrancis, entirely on his own resources when in India, almost without friends quali- ter-like habit of thought and conduct which he other serious, though minor, fault-the plot fied to be counsellors, between enemies on learnt from years of anonymous use of the the one hand and dependents on the other, press for personal objects, and which rendered the peculiarities of his disposition, which him an object of suspicion even among those comparative obscurity had hitherto kept in who were very imperfectly acquainted with the the background, exhibited themselves at secrets of his early life. So far it is difficult to once, and his merits aud demerits, as a chief judge him too severely. But, look at him from among men and administrator of a great another point of view, and we discover in him Empire, came prominently forward: the a man in whose domestic character great faults were redeemed, as far as they could be, by latter, unfortunately, counterbalancing the strong and disinterested affections: devoted to former, rendering his great abilities almost his father, his children, his kindred, and deeply useless, and casting a lurid shade even over loved in return; fond of social life, and gratethe real virtues which he possessed. ful in the acknowledgment of social friendliness: not only capable of acts of generosity, but thoughtful, constant, and attentive in his kindnesses, where his heart prompted him to bestow them. And, viewing him in still another direction, we discern one of a singularly masing ambition was united, as far as it ever can culine turn of mind; one in whom an absorbbe, with high-minded thoughts and honourable 66 Francis returned to England in 1781, and in the following year appeared an improved edition of "Junius." He was in Parliament for many years, was a favorite with the Prince of Wales, and an influential man in many ways. But the wit and force of expression that appeared in "Junius' were but faintly discernible in the speech or writing of his last fifty years. Mr. Merivale says the best that can be said for him: Assuredly there never was a character in which light and darkness were more strongly contrasted. The deeper shades of it are brought out only to powerfully by his own revelations of his conduct and motives. With the vindictive and rancorous quality of his animosities the world are already pretty well acquainted; not so wel, perhaps, with that unhappy nature which made him quarrel with one friend and benefactor after another, and leave on record public conduct; honourable in all respects, Francis died in 1818, nearly eighty years the most cutting memorials of his displeasure old. From The Spectator. THE JESUITS IN NORTH AMERICA. * MR. PARKMAN has done ample justice to his subject. Candid and impartial, with an insight into character unclouded by any mists of prejudice, he has succeeded in bringing before us in much of its primal freshness a canvas which has long seemed blackened with the marks of time, and on which the original picture was half effaced by the figures of a later date which crowded the foreground. It is difficult, amid the whirl of railways, the hurry of steamboats, and the hum of a countless population, to realize New York as a wild village, Quebec a mere dot in the else unbroken wilderness, and Montreal a solitude, its silence broken by the gathering together of wild Indians at the voice of the French Jesuit; the finger of the latest off spring of European civilization and priestly power touching the already rotting body of worn-out barbarism, and thinking with the magic touch to make the dry bones live. Nor can we arraign at the bar of human judgment the band of devoted men who left home, land, and whatever was most dear to men of gentle nurture and cultivated intellect, to carry into the wilderness a medicine which had no power against a disease whose name was Death. offer beneath her roof the long forbidden The were the members of these wild tribes sim ply degraded savages, with their minds a Mr. Parkman turns over for us a page of history, we may do well to pause and read, and get, perhaps, some dim insight into problems which seem at first hopelessly inexplicable. One has well said, "In all the soul's experiments there has always remained in the last analysis a residuum it could not resolve." And the science has yet to be born or revealed, which shall silence our questioning as to the why, the ground, yet with clearly defined rank, and in the "Senate," which held its meetings wherefore, and the end of the vast savage around the smoky fires of the blackened tribes which dwindle away before the foot-wigwams, any man took part in the discussteps of the white man as wild grasssions whose age and experience qualified before the ploughshare. But none the less him to do so. "It was," says Mr. Parkman, is it worth while to analyze the process of "merely the gathered wisdom of the nation." decay, to see the two forces in juxtaposition, and watch the issue. "God comes to see us without bell." And it may be, in the quietness we gather around our inner selves in the contemplation of a dead past, we may perceive more truth than is discernible by the spirit when its intensest side is turned towards the hum of the present. More than two hundred years have passed away since Le Jeune and his brother Jesuit, De Nouë, entered the cottage of the widow of the first settler in Canada, "to *The Jesuits in North America. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1867. And we find the younger men and the 1 meaning. And by this means their memo- | there was no doubt of the existence of canries were tasked and cultivated to a point nibalism among them, the practice of torwhich often astonished the European officials ture in its cruelest forms was their pastime, who were brought in contact with them. and their homes were a scene of wild, unThese tribes, too, were not without certain bridled license. Into their midst, with laws concering crime and its punishment. their lives in their hands, came the French Murder was not atoned for by the death of Jesuits. It is not for us, at this moment, the murderer, but by presents to the family nor does Mr. Parkman, pause to examine of the slain, which presents had to be sufficient critically the mighty machine of which the in value to satisfy their demands, otherwise individual Jesuit formed not so much as a the murderer was delivered over to them lynch-pin. Enough, that the men who in as a slave, but might in no instance be put obedience to its orders went out to Canada to death. In cases of robbery the injured were honest and devoted, burning with zeal, party might "not only retake his property holding their lives cheap, so that they might by force if he could, but also strip the rob- rescue these wild Indians from the Devil's ber of all he had." They had their own grip. We may smile at their rejoicings rough discipline, sternly enforced, by which over children clandestinely baptised with their bands were held together in war; sugared water, may even see a relation beeach band under its own chief, and yet tween their superstitious belief that every each man having "a voice in the conduct wild Indian so signed with the cross was of affairs, and never for a moment divorced safe, and the superstitions and necromancy from his wild spirit of independence." The they denounced; but by very force of their constant aim of the chief, Mr. Parkman own devotedness, their purer manners, and says, was to exercise authority without the Christianity which, apart from the rubseeming to do so, and adds that they were bish with which they had overlaid it, satuno richer, often poorer, than the others, as rated their lives, a result must have been foul. greasy, and unsavoury as the rest, yet attained, however little commensurate with in them withal was often seen a dignity of the idea on which their mission was founded. bearing which ochre and bear's grease The information they have handed down to could not hide. us of the innermost life of these wild tribes is in itself invaluable. Their religion, such as it was, amounted to little more than superstitious dread of every living thing, which from its very universality of object lost everything like a definite hold over their actions. They apologized to the very animals they killed, but killed them none the less. To them the sun was a beneficent being, the moon malignant and the Iroquois recognized another being, "Taounyawatha, or Hiawatha, said to be a divinely appointed messenger." But whatever might be the Indian's vague conception of some higher power than was visible around him, he never clothed this being with any attributes higher than those shared by the lowest and most degraded of the human race. The nearest approach they appear to have made to anything like a purer thought than their daily life afforded was in the belief that all Nature was sentient, sleeping in winter, but in summer keenly alive to their every utterance. So that tales embodying their religious belief were never told except in winter, lest the Spirits of Nature awake should hear and take offence. But there was a darker side to the picture, on which we do not care to dwell, nor does Mr. Parkman linger on it long; the habitations of these ends of the earth are full of cruelty, Never had men a better opportunity for forming a correct judgment. Determined to master the language, determined in its widest sense to become all things to all men if by any means some might be brought into the fold of the Church, the Jesuit, even such an one as Le Jeune, bore the hardships of an Indian's roving life, helped to carry the heavy burdens, sat in the filthy dens which served them for a home, and bore with patience the vile banter worse than blows heaped on him, spending months in the midst of a life which had reached the lowest depths of social degradation, and at the close of a toilsome winter had learned the little progress that could be made, unless these wandering hordes could be settled in fixed abodes, and determined to direct the eyes of the missionaries to where," by the vast lakes of the west dwelt numerous stationary populations, and particularly the Hurons, on the lake which bears their name." The way was full of peril," Toil, hardship, famine, filth, sickness, solitude, insult all that is most revolting to men nurtured among arts and letters, all that is most terrific to monastic credulity; such were the promise and the reality of the Huron Mission." He "But tasks in hours of insight willed have nothing to do with them. The hapCan be through hours of gloom fulfilled." less man who is forced into being the recipient of the smiles and glances and signs Brébeuf, Chaumonot, Garnier, Daniel, all of a general feminine partiality, is to be live before us in these pages, preserving pitied, not despised. Those who know their own individuality, while blending what he has to endure will feel for him. their efforts towards one common end. It is not as if he could help himself. He And with their names are united others not may have achieved a reputation for doing less worthy of notice. Joques, scholar and what he never even so much as meditated. martyr; Marie de St. Bernard, the young He may be good-looking, without any denun whose merriment was like the old famil-sire that his looks should invite so penal a iar music of home to the grave, weary sis- favouritism. He may have a becoming adters she helped so indefatigably in their dress, or waltz neatly, or have a white efforts to aid the pest-stricken natives; hand, or a small foot, or prospects, or monChomedey de Maisonneuve, the brave found-ey. The steady purpose with which ladies er of Montreal, these and many others are insist upon petting him is dreadful. carefully portrayed. Their labours were unwittingly provokes his fate wherever he all unavailing, the Indian's hour of doom goes. We do not say that there are many had struck, and he was to perish by suicide. such men. Yet few who know life well can Not by the sword of the white man, but by have failed to detect their existence. They deadly internal feud, famine, and disease are admirable in a multitude of points. the work of exterminatiom went on. A They have unconsciously committed the sin few "harmless weavers of baskets and sew- of being pleasing, and they have to expiate ers of moccasins" on "the banks of the St. their error by enduring the petting of Charles remain to recall the memory of the ladies. With these we have nothing to do. great Huron nation. The very demon of We repeat, that they are to be pitied, not war seemed to have entered into the Iro- despised. quois; they rushed from one scene of battle to another, till they had mown down all other tribes before them. 66 They made a solitude, and called it peace," but discovered too late that their triumphs had cost them their own life-blood; for more than half a century they remained "a terror and a Scourge to the colonists of New France," but it was but the feeble flickering of the candle in the socket. One act in the life of that great continent had closed. "New scenes succeed, and other actors enter on the stage." We hope Mr. Parkman will raise the curtain as speedily as possible. But the creature upon whom we have a few remarks to offer is of a very different kind. It is obvious that ladies are not silly enough to make pets of men who have not one single merit with which they can recommend themselves. Generally, however, it will take one a long time to discover what this merit is. This is only natural, considering that most often this merit happens to be a question of personal appearance, and tastes, we all know, are so curiously prone to differ. The most ordinary kind of ladies' pets is the individual to be met out at evening parties. A quick observer can detect him at a glance. There he stands, with his marvellously-parted hair, his immaculate necktie, which kept him. such a dreary while before the lookingglass; a simpering smile upon his lips, the precursor of a flood of silly talk when occasion shall demand him to prove his right to connect himself with his kind by the exercise of his tongue. Watch him for a few moments after he has entered: he stands awhile looking around him, alternating his glances at the company with glances into the nearest mirror. Now he approaches a group of ladies. There is no diffidence in his address. There is a sober certainty of being delightedly received which animates his manner with a species of impertinence truly commendable. By-and-by you will have some of these ladies tapping him with We their fans. Wherever he goes he is greeted From the London Review. 'LADIES' PETS. It is almost impossible to enter society without encountering ladies' pets. The name is doubtless suggestive enough, yet it is liable to many misinterpretations. A lady's pet may mean anything. A dog, a bird, a horse, or a squirrel might be as easily understood by the term as a man. Yet it is certain that when we talk of ladies' pets, we mean nothing more nor less than men. There is a vast variety of ladies' pets. It is not to be disputed that there are some ladies who insist upon making pets of men worthier a better fate. |