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PRELIMINARY ESSAY.

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Ir was not from personal vanity, but a fair estimate of his own merit, and the importance of the subject on which he wrote, that the author of the ensuing letters predicted their immortality. The matter and the manner, the times and the talents they disclose, the popularity which attended them at their outset, the impression they produced on the public mind, and the triumph of the doctrines they inculcate, all equally concur in stamping for them a passport to the most distant posterity.

In their range these letters comprise a period of about five years; from the middle of 1767 to the middle of 1772: and never has the history of this country, from its origin to the present hour, exhibited a period of equal extent that more peremptorily demanded the severe, decisive, and overpowering pen of such a writer as JUNIUS. The storms and tempests that, within the last twenty years, have shaken the political world to its centre, have been wider and more tremendous in their operation; but they have, for

VOL. I.

the most part, discharged their fury at a distance. The constitutions of other countries have been swept away by the whirlwind; but that of England still towers, like the pyramids of Egypt, a wonderful and immortal fabric, overshadowing the desart that surrounds it, and defying the violence of its hurricanes. In the period before us, however, this stupendous and beautiful fabric itself was attacked, and trembled to its foundation: a series of unsuccessful ministries too often profligate and corrupt, and not unfrequently cunning, rather than capable; a succession of weak and obsequious parliaments, and an arbitrary, though able chief justice, addicted to the impolitic measures of the cabinet, fatally concurred to confound the relative powers of the state, and equally to unhinge the happiness of the crown and of the people; to frustrate all the proud and boasted triumphs of a glorious war, concluded but a few years before by an inglorious peace'; to excite universal contempt abroad, and universal discord at home. Hence France, humiliated as she was by her losses and defeats, did not hesitate to invade Corsica in open defiance of the remonstrances of the British minister; and succeeded in obtaining possession of it, whilst Spain dishonourably refused to make good the ransom

In 1763, through the negotiation of the Duke of Bedford.