There is a new contribution to the Junius controversy in
the shape of a lot of secondary evidence as to Mr. Pitt's belief. The Governor of the Mauritius, the Hon. Arthur Gordon, wrote to Sir John Shaw Lefevre on November 17, 1871, that he has "not once, but very often, heard his father say that Mr. Pitt told him that he knew the name of the author of Junius,' and that the author was not Francis." He mentions one special occasion on which Lord Aberdeen made this state- ment at Drayton on January 13, 1848, in the presence of the Bishop of Orford (now Winchester), and the Bishop of Winchester asserts that he has a g eneral remembrance of it. All this would be evidence so far as it goes, but, even so far, it only shows that Mr. Pitt thought he knew the author, and not that he did ; and then it goes such a very little way. There is no more reason why Mr. Pitt should not have been misled, than why any other man should not have been misled ; and what is more, Mr. Twistleton showed in a most conclusive and triumphant reply, published in the Times of this day week, that in all probability the name of Sir Philip Francis had never been thought of as the author of "Junius" during Mr. Pitt's lifetime, and consequently that it must have been some other man, and not Francis, whose authorship Mr. Pitt denied. Had it even been otherwise, the evidence of testimony is, after all, not as convincing, because not so unconscious, as a body of evidence gathered from the minutest and least imitable peculiarities of handwriting,—such as Mr. Twistleton has put together.
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