Not only are most people unable to solve the enigma, but
they have no idea of what it is that they are to solve. I have to inform
Schlosser that there are three separate questions about Junius, of which
he has evidently no distinct knowledge, and cannot, therefore, have many
chances to spare for settling them. The three questions are these:--A. Who
_was_ Junius? B. What was it that armed Junius with a power so
unaccountable at this day over the public mind? C. Why, having actually
exercised this power, and gained under his masque far more than he ever
hoped to gain, did this Junius not come forward _in his own person_,
when all the legal danger had long passed away, to claim a distinction
that for _him_ (among the vainest of men) must have been more precious
than his heart's blood? The two questions, B and C, I have examined in
past times, and I will not here repeat my explanations further than to
say, with respect to the last, that the reason for the author not claiming
his own property was this, because he _dared_ not; because it would have
been _infamy_ for him to avow himself as Junius; because it would have
revealed a crime and published a crime in his own earlier life, for which
many a man is transported in our days, and for less than which many a man
has been in past days hanged, broken on the wheel, burned, gibbeted, or
impaled. To say that he watched and listened at his master's key-holes, is
nothing.
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