on for believing that
Burke was Junius, than that he knew nobody else who had the ability of
Junius. But Johnson discharged his mind of the thought, at the instant
that Burke voluntarily assured him that he neither wrote the letters
of Junius, nor knew who had written them. The subjects and aim of
those famous pieces were not very different from Burke's tract, but
any one who in our time turns from the letters to the tract, will
wonder how the author of the one could ever have been suspected of
writing the other. Junius is never more than a railer, and very
often he is third-rate even as a railer. The author of the _Present
Discontents_ speaks without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Duke
of Grafton; he only refers to persons, when their conduct or their
situation illustrates a principle. Instead of reviling, he probes, he
reflects, he warns; and as the result of this serious method, pursued
by a man in whom close mastery of detail kept exact pace with wide
grasp of generalities, we have not the ephemeral diatribe of a
faction, but one of the monumental pieces of political literature.

The last great pamphlet in the history of English public affairs had
been Swift's tract _On the Conduct of the Allies_ (1711), in which the
writer did a more substantial service for the Tory party of his day
than Burke did for the Whig party of a later date. Swift's pamphlet is
close, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes; but nobody
need read it to-day except the historical student, or a member of the
Peace Society, in search of the most convincing exposure of the most
insane of English wars.[1] There is not a sentence in it which does
not belong exclusively to the matter in hand: not a line of that
general wisdom which is for all time. In the _Present Discontents_ the
method is just the opposite of this. The details are slurred, and they
are not literal. Burke describes with excess of elaboration how the
new system is a system of double cabinets; one put forward with
nominal powers in Parliament, the other concealed behind the throne,
and secretly dictating the policy. The reader feels that this is
worked out far too closely to be real. It is a structure of artificial
rhetoric. But we lightly pass this over, on our way to more solid
matter; to the exposition of the principles of a constitution, the
right methods of statesmanship, and the defence of party.

[Footnote 1: This was not Burke's judgment on the long war agai