Philip, an English versifier and dramatic writer, but more distinguished for his translations of classical authors than for his original compositions. His father was dean of Lismore, and rector of St Mary's, Dublin, whence he is said to have been elected at the Revolution on account of his principles. The son received his theological education at Dublin; but, after taking orders, he came over to England, and settled at Esher in Surrey, where he opened a school. He obtained the degree of LL.D., and was afterwards presented to the rectory of Barrow, in Suffolk, and made chaplain of Chelsea hospital. He wrote two tragedies, Eugenia, 1752, and Constantia, 1754, neither of which, however, met with a favourable reception at the time of its appearance, and both have now fallen into oblivion. But his translation of Horace with notes was completely successful, and has been often reprinted. In 1757 he published a translation of the orations of Demosthenes and Eschines, in two vols. 4to. Dr Francis was also a political writer of some note, and was said to have been employed by government. He died at Bath in 1773.

Francis, Sir Philip, a distinguished politician, and the supposed author of the Letters of Junius, was the only son of the preceding Dr Francis. He was born at Dublin in 1740; received the chief part of his education at St Paul's School, London; and when only sixteen years of age was placed as a clerk in the Secretary of State's office by Mr Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, in whose family Dr Francis had been tutor. When Mr Pitt (Lord Chatham) succeeded as Secretary of State, he continued young Francis in the office, and seems to have noticed his precocious talents for public business. More than a quarter of a century afterwards, Francis gracefully acknowledged this in the House of Commons. "I hope," he said, "it will not appear improper in me to say that in the early part of my life I had the good fortune to hold a place, very inconsiderable in itself, but immediately under the late Earl of Chatham. He descended from his station to take notice of mine, and he honoured me with repeated marks of his favour and protection. How warmly, in return, I was attached to his person, and how I have been grateful to his memory, those who know me know. I admired him as a great, illustrious, faultless human being, whose character, like all the noblest works of human composition, should be determined by its excellencies, not by its defects. . . . But he is dead, and has left nothing in this world that resembles him." The last allusion is, of course, an insidious, Junius-like blow at Chatham's son, the second William Pitt. Before he had come of age, Philip Francis was secretary to General Bligh in the expedition against Francis, Cherbourg, and also secretary to the Earl of Kinnoul on a special embassy to Lisbon. In 1768 he was appointed to a principal clerkship in the War Office, with a salary of about £400 per annum. He held his post during the period in which the Letters of Junius appeared in the Public Advertiser until the year 1772, when a Mr Chamier was appointed over him as Deputy Secretary at War. In consequence of this slight, Francis resigned his clerkship, indignant at Lord Barrington, the head of the War Office, and full of bitterness and contempt towards the new deputy. It will be recollected how keenly Junius attacks Lord Barrington, and how he descends from the usual elevation of his style to pour out low and scurrilous invectives against Chamier. Of all the subordinate points of the evidence connecting Francis with Junius, this affair of Chamier appears to us one of the most convincing. Junius claimed to be a man of rank, above a common bribe; but the spirit of the subordinate official—the disappointed War-Office clerk—breathes through all his references to this subject, and destroys his fictitious dignity. Having left the War Office, Francis went abroad, and travelled for about a year in France and Italy. There was at the same time a cessation in the correspondence of Junius with his publisher Woodfall, but he addressed him again in January 1773, and Francis had then returned from his continental tour. In June of the same year Francis received from Lord North what must be considered a splendid appointment. He was, on the recommendation of Lord Barrington, made one of the Supreme Council of Calcutta, constituted by Act of Parliament, with a salary of £10,000 per annum each, for the purpose of co-operating in the government of India. The chief of this new board was Warren Hastings, styled Governor-General, and the councillors were Mr Barwell (an able servant of the Company in India), General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Philip Francis. The advancement of Francis from a clerkship in the War Office, and especially through the instrumentality of Lord Barrington, who formerly thwarted his rise in the public service, to a post of such high trust and emolument, has led to a belief that the ministry had somehow become aware of the authorship of Junius' Letters, and by this important foreign appointment effectually removed and silenced Francis. His talents, however, justified the confidence placed in him, and Lord Barrington may have been anxious to repair his former injustice. It is certain that no further letters from the pen of Junius appeared after Francis had sailed for India. His seat at the council-board of Calcutta was not favourable to his peace or happiness. From the moment of their arrival Warren Hastings disliked his new coadjutors. He received them with less than the customary etiquette, and was jealous of the power they came to divide with him. Francis, on the other hand, was proud, unbending, and irascible; and the quarrel rose to such a pitch, that while the councillor pretty plainly accused his chief of deliberate fraud, extortion, and cruelty, the latter stated in a minute delivered to the council-board that "he judged of the public conduct of Mr Francis by his experience of his private, which he had found to be void of truth and honour." A duel was the consequence, and Francis received a dangerous wound, the ball striking him below the shoulder, and passing out at the lower part of the body. He recovered; but finding that Hastings was triumphant in his Indian policy, and supported by public favour, as well as by a majority of the board, he returned to England in the year 1781. A man of strong passions and implacable in his resentments (which he identified with public duty and patriotism), Francis now devoted himself to the impeachment of Hastings, giving his powerful assistance to Burke, Fox, and the other Whig leaders. He was proposed as one of the managers of the public im- Francis, peachment (having been returned to parliament for the borough of Yarmouth), but his appointment was negatived on what were sufficient grounds—his duel with Hastings, and the avowed enmity that had so long subsisted between them. The result is well known. The trial of Hastings fixed the attention of Europe, and has been drawn in imperishable colours by Mr Macaulay in the most popular and magnificent of his historical pictures. Francis was the mainspring of the whole. He supplied the information which Burke and Sheridan expanded into eloquent orations and burning invective; and these services, as well as his general support of Whig measures, rendered him conspicuous among the public men of his day. He was a forcible and impressive parliamentary speaker, but wanted fluency, and this was probably the cause why he so often resorted to the press, with letters and pamphlets on political questions. On the accession of the Whig party to power in 1806 Mr Francis was invested with the Order of the Bath. He died in December 1818.

A full statement of the claims of Sir Philip Francis to be considered the author of Junius' Letters would require greater space than the nature of a work like the present would permit. They rest upon circumstantial evidence—on the correspondence of dates and incidents in the life of Sir Philip with the dates and incidents in the publication of the letters—in the agreement of style, sentiment, and literary ability—and in the similarity of handwriting, peculiarities of spelling and punctuation, and other minute resemblances. Of all the candidates for the Junius' laurel, Francis alone seems to have possessed the requisite intellectual power and tastes. None of his acknowledged productions are so highly finished, but they are racy and vigorous in style, and abound in vivid illustration, and in interesting reminiscences of his early great contemporaries, and past events. He inherited all the friendships and antipathies of Junius, indulged in strong personal animosities, and despised the cold infusions of prudence and moderation in the discussion of public questions. We have seen Francis' practical acquaintance with the War-Office, and his resentment at the appointment of Mr Chamberlain both so conspicuous in Junius. He owed his first introduction to the public service to the family of Lord Holland, and Junius uniformly spares Lord Holland, even when heavy charges of malversation of the public money impended over him. He frequently heard Lord Chatham speak, took notes of his speeches, and gave them to the printer; and Junius gives extracts from speeches of Lord Chatham closely resembling those of Francis. During the publication of the letters, Francis was exactly in the situation to know all the interior movements of the different departments; and he is known to have been in close intimacy with Calcraft, the army agent, a political jobber, who furnished information to Chatham and the Grenvilles. Dr Francis, the father of Sir Philip, may have unconsciously contributed details, for he was prominent in the higher political circles, was patronized by the Holland family, and was the favourite chaplain of Lord Chesterfield. When the first of the undoubted letters by Junius (signed "Atticus") appeared, Philip Francis was in his twenty-sixth year, an early age certainly for so active a plotter and intriguer; but he had then been ten years in public employment, had known Chatham and other statesmen, and was all his life restless and ambitious of personal and literary distinction. He was twenty-nine before the signature of Junius was adopted. Late in life—we believe when a septuagenarian—Sir Philip Francis entered into a second marriage; and this lady, his widow, has adduced almost direct testimony to support his right to the name of Junius. In a communication published by Lord Campbell in his Lives of the Chancellors, Lady Francis states that she never entertained a doubt that Sir Philip was the author of the letters, though he never avowed himself more than by saying he knew what her opinion was, and never contradicting it. "His first gift after our marriage," adds Lady Francis, "was an edition of Junius, which he bid be taken to my room, and not let be seen, or speak on the subject; and his posthumous present, which his son found in his bureau, was Junius Identified, sealed up and directed to me." This work, Junius Identified, was written in 1816, to prove that Sir Philip Francis was Junius; and the evidence it contains has been pronounced satisfactory by the ablest of our legal sages—Mackintosh, Brougham, Macaulay, Lord Mahon, and Lord Campbell. According to Lady Francis, Lord Chatham gave assistance after the éclat of Junius' controversy with Sir William Draper, but probably without knowing that Francis was the writer. In Calcraft, however, there was a ready and safe medium of communication. Since the publication of the Grenville Papers it seems pretty clear that Junius received hints from Lord Temple and his brother, George Grenville's whose patronage he had in a private letter solicited, stating that he would avow himself when Grenville became prime minister. (See Grenville.) In the case of Sir William Draper, a difficulty has lately been removed by Mr Macaulay. To the military knight Junius put a direct and searching question—"When you receive your half-pay do you, or do you not, take a solemn oath, or sign a declaration, upon your honour, to the following effect—That you do not actually hold any place of profit, civil or military?" Sir William answered decidedly in the negative: he took no such oath, nor made any such declaration; and this not only gave Junius the advantage over his assailant, but seemed to prove that Junius was not so well acquainted with the forms of the War-Office as Phillip Francis must of necessity have been. But how stands the fact? In the English War-Office such a declaration was necessary, but Draper drew his half-pay from the Irish establishment, and the declaration was not required from him. Francis relied on his official knowledge, and did not consider that there might be a difference between the practice at Westminster and the practice at Dublin. On the whole we may conclude that a clearer case of circumstantial evidence has rarely been submitted than that which identifies Sir Philip Francis with Junius. That he made no open avowal himself is easily accounted for. We believe he could not have done it without implicating others. The letters, by their malevolence and injustice, were as injurious to his moral reputation as they were honourable to his literary talents. He had received great benefits from some of the persons he had libelled, and he mixed in society with the immediate descendants of some of the families which he had wantonly and malignantly aspersed. The letters contain few great constitutional principles or maxims, like the writings of Burke, and they defend some political measures and opinions (such as the American Stamp Act, and the retention of the rotten boroughs in our parliamentary representation) which the mature judgment of Francis must have condemned. In his own family Sir Philip seems to have all but dropped the veil. He evidently had a lurking desire for posthumous fame when he made the partial disclosures to his wife. The letters had cost him great labour. They were polished to the utmost brilliancy, and inflicted deep and venomous wounds, with matchless dexterity and skill. His shafts had been aimed at the highest quarters, and invaded the most sacred and private recesses of life—a degree of daring which must be considered as audacity rather than courage, for the mask of invisibility was strictly and marvellously preserved. There were also noble sentiments and bursts of fine feeling scattered through the letters, which seemed to betoken a great and generous nature warped by passion, arrogance, and secret motives of faction. These, however, bear but a small proportion to the rash assumptions, the bold inventive and scandal which, aided by all the graceful style—unrivalled sarcasm, terse expression, and happy imagery—raised Junius into almost unparalleled popularity, and bid fair to continue him, now that the mystery and immediate interest are dispelled, as a great and unique English classic.

(8c. 6—8.)