Mr. Johnson did him the justice to say, it was one of the happiest extemporaneous productions he ever met with; though he once comically confessed, that he hated to repeat the wit of a whig urged in support of whiggism. Says Garrick to him one day, Why did not you make me a tory, when we lived so much together[1], you love to make people tories? 'Why (says Johnson, pulling a heap of halfpence from his pocket) did not the king make these guineas?'
Of Mr. Johnson's toryism the world has long been witness, and the political pamphlets written by him in defence of his party, are vigorous and elegant. He often delighted his imagination with the thoughts of having destroyed Junius, an anonymous writer who flourished in the years 1769, and 1770, and who kept himself so ingeniously concealed from every endeavour to detect him, that no probable guess was, I believe, ever formed concerning the author's name, though at that time the subject of general conversation[2]. Mr. Johnson made us all
- ↑ 'True to his King and the Constitution Garrick declined all disputes about Whig and Tory. Mr. Pelham was the minister whom he admired, as may be seen in his Ode on the death of that great man.' Murphy's Garrick, p. 379. For this Ode see Life, i. 269.
- ↑ Johnson attacked Junius in his pamphlet on Falkland's Islands, published in the early spring of 1771. Life, ii. 134; Works, vi. 198. The signature 'Junius' first appeared on Nov. 21, 1768. The first Junius of the collected edition appeared on Jan. 21, 1769%; the last on Jan. 21, 1772. Dict. Nat. Biog., xx. 173.
'Three men,' writes Horace Walpole, 'were especially suspected, Wilkes, Edmund Burke and W. G. Hamilton. Hamilton was most generally suspected.' Memoirs of George III, iii. 401. Johnson said, 'I should have believed Burke to be Junius, because I know no man but Burke who is capable of writing these letters, but Burke spontaneously denied it to me.' Life, iii. 376. Burke, writing on this subject to Charles Townshend on Oct. 17, 1771, says: – 'My friends I have satisfied; my enemies shall never have any direct satisfaction from me.' Burke's Correspondence, i. 268. When Wilkes was charged with being the author 'Utinam scripsissem!' he replied, 'Would to Heaven I could have written them.' Wraxall's Memoirs, ed. 1815, i. 460. Mrs. Piozzi, in a marginal note on Wraxall, says: – 'I well remember when they [Junius's Letters] were most talked of – and N. [W] Seward
with the Heads of Houses, and projecting an insurrection ...; but Stanhope sent thither General Pepper with a squadron of dragoons. Marching all night, Pepper entered Oxford at day-break on the 6th of October, 1715.' Mahon's History of England, ed. 1839, i. 235.
