1 JUNIUS; WITH NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. W. Justins, Printer, Pemberton Row, DEDICATION TO THE ENGLISH NATION. PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. The Author of these Letters, had the prudence or the good fortune to discontinue them, at a time when the name of JUNIUS still retained all its first popularity. He was proudly conscious of their excellence, and believed them to be destined to literary immortality. In the course of their first publication, some of them had been, without. his permission, collected and republished. At the close of the whole, he prepared them to be reprinted in that form in which he seems to have wished them ever after to appear. This Dedication was then prefixed, to express the Author's gratitude for the enthusiastic applause with which his Letters had been honoured, to recall upon them the popular curiosity, to suggest forcibly to the minds of careless readers the principal topics of which the Letters treated, and to explain that his Book was not to be regarded so much in the light of a collection of fugitive personal satires, as in that of a system of the fundamental principles of British Liberty and Political Law, unfolded in a practical application of them, which was well adapted to confirm their truth, and to evince their importance. He bespeaks the continued partiality of the Nation to his work, by representing it as the nurseling of their favour. He boasts, that it cannot but survive the importance of those temporary and personal matters to which it owes a part of its present celebrity. He describes the principles which it inculcates, as worthy to make the People value it as a nтupa siç aici, and transmit it to their posterity with the same care with which they would perpetuate the Constitution which it vindicates and explains. For the boastfulness of these assumptions, he apologizes, by observing, that the concealment of his person and real name, takes away from his vanity whatever might appear particularly weak, or might prove the most offensive. He maintains, that the necessity for hindering the creation of precedents fatal to Liberty, makes it the duty of the People to watch against even the slightest incroachments of the Executive Power, as if these were Revolutions establishing, at once, the Reign of Despotism. Alluding to the great question-concerning the power of the House of Commons to incapacitate any of their members, by a simple vote of expulsion, from being re-elected to serve in the parliament out of which he was expelled; JUNIUS here asserts, that the sovereignty is in the whole nation, not merely in its legislative representatives; urges, that this is, both directly, and by frequent implication, the genuine doctrine of the fundamental laws, and of the forms, of the Constitution; and earnestly warns the People to make such conditions, as should leave this principle no longer in doubt or contest, with those whom they might choose to be their representatives at the next General Election. The Liberty of the Press, and the Right of Juries to return, in all cases, a general verdict, he with equal earnestness describes as of infinite consequence to the support of British Freedom. The discussions in which JUNIUS had engaged, and the judicial trials which his and other similar publications had produced, brought these two great points, in a very particular manner, under the immediate attention of the Public. An alarm which had not yet subsided, a contest not yet finally determined, had been excited in regard to them. JUNIUS was anxious to keep alive the alarm till the wishes of the people should finally prevail, and willing to claim respect for the exertions which he had himself made on account of this object. A General Election was the sole occasion, on which he supposed that the people might command the redress of every grievance. It was soon to return. JUNIUS makes it, therefore, in this Dedication, his leading purpose, to rouse all the patriotism of the people to an eager and resolute expectation of that event. He concludes with one of those flashes of haughty, indignant sentiment, in which one of his best powers as a writer eminently consists. Such is the purport of this preliminary paper; evidently intended to sum up the Author's merits, to state what was his primary design, to make a last impression that should hinder ̄ those from being effaced which he had so successfully made before. This piece does not appear to have been laboured with JUNIUS's happiest skill, nor with the most ardent and strained exertion of the energies : of |