It behooves the present generation to approach the lucubrations of the redoubted Junius in a spirit of enlightened discrimination. We must bear in mind that the poisoned arrows of the unseen combatant were discharged at a period peculiarly favorable for the exercise of his destructive skill; when startling invective was in fashion; when the mercenary acts of the foremost public man excused, if they did not justify, wholesale and unreflecting chastisement; when the public press was in its earliest infancy, and public writers had not yet educated the audience whose good sense now holds the libertinism of even the public censor in check, and provides its own best remedy against the crimes or follies of the pen. Junius but imitated the example of his betters when he fastened upon a foe, guilty or innocent, and heaped upon his head every opprobrious term a heated imagination could supply. A statesman's policy had but to be inconvenient to his adversary in order to prove the Minister "hateful," "execrable," "abominable," "wicked," a traitor to his country, and a conspirator against the liberties of the people. Pitt honored Walpole with such vituperation, and when Walpole went out, and Carteret came in without Pitt, the same expressive language was transferred by the illustrious commoner from Minister to Minister, as though no virtue could possibly be found in any Government without his presence. When Junius affected to regard Lord Mansfield as the incarnation of all that is odious in humanity, his praise of Lord Chatham knew no bounds; yet it is well known that under another disguise Junius dealt far severer blows against the patriot than he ever inflicted upon a man born, as he says, to abet despotism in its hateful attempts to trample upon the people's rights. Nothing can be more inconsistent than the accusations brought by Junius against Lord Mansfield. In one and the same breath he charges him with assuming an arbitrary power of doing right; so that if he does wrong it lies only between him and his conscience; and with condescending to evasive, indirect courses, in the temper of a quibbler. Now the Chief Justice is something more than a lawyer, now considerably less. At one moment he is setting common law at defiance, at another he is twisting the law to the purposes of corruption, and taking refuge behind the forms which he is expressly charged with heroically setting at defiance. Had Lord Mansfield been less timorous, Junius might have been less daring. At the close of one of his letters the reckless assailant writes "Beware how you indulge the first emotions of your resentment. This paper is delivered to the world, and cannot be recalled. The prosecution of an innocent printer cannot alter facts nor refute arguments. Do not furnish me with further materials against yourself." Another venomous diatribe ends with a similar threat. Dare "to represent this charge as a contempt of the authority of the House of Peers, and move their Lordships to