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_? CHAPTER XXXI. THE LITERARY FORGERS IN THE ANTIQUARIAN AGE. The Eighteenth Century. James Macpherson. Ossian. Thomas Chatterton. His Poems. The Verdict. Suicide. The Cause. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.