COLONEL BARRÉ'S ORATORY.

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every friend to England, will follow me. These walls are unholy, they are baleful, they are deadly, while a prostitute majority holds the bolt of parliamentary omnipotence, and hurls its vengeance only on the virtuous. To yourselves therefore I consign you. Enjoy your own Pandemonium

"When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,

The post of honour is a private station." "*

The impassioned and courageous speaker immediately left the house. This extract from a lengthened harangue in the same style, will mark the man, the patriot, the orator, and will suffice to show that he possessed both moral courage and sterling talents. It cannot be doubted that one who, in the heat of debate and argument, delivered the speech just cited, would be able by the aid of leisure and study, and animated by a subject interesting to his feelings to produce a composition, which in elegance and energy of style would not be inferior to the letters of Junius.

But the mere command of spontaneous eloquence, however much resembling the written style of Junius, would be but inconclusive proof in such a question as the present; and the reader will therefore expect, and is entitled to, much stronger facts and arguments. Amongst those to be adduced in the course of the present Essay particular reference will be made to a Pamphlet published anonymously in the year 1760, in which the motives and conduct of Lord George Townshend are attacked in language precisely similar to that in which Junius, at a later time, assailed the same officer: and in assigning the authorship of that very interesting production to Colonel Barré such reasons will be given as it is hoped cannot fail that its author and Junius were one and the same person. From the profusion of military phrases and similes used by Junius, it has long been admitted that a soldier must have been concerned in writing those Letters; and certainly no person who was not either on the head-quarter staff of the Quebec army, or otherwise well acquainted with its proceedings, could have referred, as Junius

to prove

* Gentleman's Magazine, March, 1771. London Magazine, July, 1771.

C

did, to Lord Townshend's despatch from Quebec announcing the surrender of that important citadel. Barré, it will be shown, held a distinguished staff appointment in the army at that time and place.

Junius strenuously espoused the cause of Sir Jeffery Amherst, whom the ministry of the day had injured; and his letters on the subject prove that their writer was in the confidence of that ill-used General. Colonel Barré was befriended by Amherst and lived on terms of the closest intimacy with him. Again, the Colonel's military career was impeded whilst Lord Barrington was Secretary at War, and it will be remembered that Junius severely satirized that gentleman.

Colonel Barré's conduct in Parliament with reference to Wilkes would naturally excite the hostility of George the Third; and the Duke of Bedford, who was then in office, was the cause of his being suddenly deprived of military appointments worth upwards of £4000 a year. It is almost unnecessary to refer, in this place, to the severe but cautious letter of Junius to the King, or to his more personal one censuring the Duke of Bedford.

On the chief political questions discussed by Junius his opinions were in unison with those which Barré advocated at the same time in Parliament; and, without alluding at present to many circumstantial arguments which the Letters furnish in support of the theory now advanced, it must suffice to add that there were ample reasons for the concealment of the authorship in the case referred to; for Barré having become a pensioner upon the public, after the publication of the Letters, could not consistently with the high political principles inculcated by Junius avow himself the writer of those extraordinary productions.

Each of these, and various other circumstances, in proof of the identity of Junius and Colonel Barré, and of the assistance which the latter received from Lord Shelburne and from Dunning in the preparation of the Letters, will be adverted to in the following narrative, which it is hoped will at all events furnish useful materials for future biographical and historical literature.

COLONEL BARRE'S ANCESTORS AND NAME.

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Of the personal and even the public history of Isaac BARRÉ, very short and imperfect notices have hitherto been made public. Yet he was a remarkable and influential man in the military, political, and literary annals of his time. Not only in his professional career, with the army in North America, but in his parliamentary and literary character, he manifested talents of a high and commanding nature. By a letter written in 1762, and cited in the Chatham Correspondence, it appears that his father was a foreign refugee, settled by the Bishop of Clogher in a shop in Dublin, because his wife had nursed one of the Bishop's children. The father's name was Peter, and the family appellation implies a French extraction, and the baptismal appendages both of the father and the son indicate their Hugonotic origin. The revocation of the edict of Nantz probably drove them from their native country.*

A friendly correspondent observes in remarking on the accompanying Portraits of Lord Shelburne, Dunning, and Barré, that "the physiognomy of the last was, like his character, fiery and pugnacious, with a peculiar cast of malignity." The subject of the present inquiry lived and died a bachelor, but his personal connections, though almost entirely political, included some of his relations, particularly the Phipps's. Through the cordiality of his friendship with the Montgomerys, a distinguished Irish family, and their intermarriage with the Beresfords, "Barré" became a baptismal appellation in the latter family, and it was also introduced in that of Roberts, of Ealing, Middlesex.t

* The notorious Du Barres were a different race, being denizens of France from Ireland. They were descendants of the Norman Conquerors of Ireland, of the same name, who, I am informed, are represented in the present day by the Barrymore family, and the Barrys of Ballyclough, near Cork.

†There is something extraordinary, interesting, and pathetic, in the history of a member of this family. Edward Roberts, Esq., of Ealing, was deputy-clerk of the Pells, when Colonel Barré held the clerkship, and the latter was godfather to a son of the former, in March, 1789, to whom he gave his name, Barré Charles Roberts. Very early in life this youth manifested a genius of unusual compass and character, for

By reference to the civic records of Dublin it is clear that Peter, the father of Isaac Barré, gradually rose from the humble station already mentioned to one of wealth and opulence. He was a member of the "Dublin Society of Arts and Husbandry” (an important Institution, supported by the principal residents of that city), from its formation in 1750;-in 1758 he was an alderman, which office he probably filled until his death about 1776. In 1766 we find that, besides a warehouse in Fleet Street, Dublin, he had a country-house, at Cullen's Wood.

Isaac Barré was born in the latter end of the year 1726. In 1740 his father sent him to Trinity College, Dublin, as is proved by the following entry in the college Register, extracted by James Prior, Esq., who printed it in his Memoirs of Oliver Goldsmith.

"1740, NOVEMBRIS 190-ISAAC. BARRÉ PENS.-FILIUS PETRI MERCATOR -ANNUM AGENS 14-NATUS DUBLINII-EDUCATUS SUB Dno. LOYD-TUTOR Dr. PELISSIER."

Intending him for the law, his father afterwards sent him to London, where he entered his name in one of the Inns of Court.

It is probable that the young Barré disliked the profession which his father had selected; for we find that on the 12th of February, 1746, he obtained a commission as Ensign in the 32nd Foot, which at that time was in Flanders. His regiment returned to England in 1747, and again went to the continent early in 1748, where it re

when a boy he read various and numerous literary works, and wrote essays and criticisms of surprising acuteness and discrimination. At the age of nineteen he furnished an article for the first number of the Quarterly Review, which induced its learned and caustic editor, William Gifford, to write thus to his father, after the death of Barré Roberts, at the age of twenty-one: "The world has lost talent rarely seen, accompanied with acquirements which, in one so young, were altogether extraordinary. There was an elegance, a playfulness of satire, a chastened degree of humour in what he wrote, that made it truly delightful; the effect of all these was heightened by his sound but unobtrusive literature."-From a volume, containing "Letters and Memoirs of Barré Charles Roberts," 4to., 1804, privately printed.

COLONEL BARRÉ'S CAREER IN THE ARMY.

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From

mained till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in the same year. 1749 to 1753 the 32nd was at Gibraltar, and in the three following years the scene of its operations was Scotland. On the 1st of October, 1755, Barré became Lieutenant in the same regiment.

These successive movements of Barré's regiment, from 1746 to 1756, afford the only information I have found respecting his personal history during those ten years; comprising, as they do, the important period from the twentieth to the thirtieth year of his age. Nor has any thing transpired to indicate his learning or literary attainments, at that era. His residence in Scotland for three years may have induced that prejudice against the Scotch character, which is palpably marked in the Letters of Junius; Johnson was equally inimical to the Scotch, after a cursory view of them and their homes. Barré, as an Irishman, of ardent and enthusiastic temperament, who had mixed in various society, and lived an active life, must have felt a great contrast between himself and the cold and calculating conduct of Scotchmen.

After the year 1756, the personal career of our officer becomes more clearly defined, and many incidents will be found to identify him with the anonymous Junius.

About that time the first Mr. Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, conceived the plan of expelling the French from their American and Colonial possessions. In 1757 two expeditions were employed to effect this project; one against Louisbourg, the French strong coast-hold in America; the other against the coast of France at Rochefort, the latter being intended to prevent the Gallic troops, locked up there, from receiving reinforcements. Both these expeditions failed. The fleet under Admiral Holbourne was ineffectual at Louisbourg; and at Rochefort the proceedings were merely a series of idle demonstrations, for which the commanderin-chief, General Mordaunt, was tried by a court-martial. Barré was in the latter expedition, and it is necessary to explain his position on that occasion. The immortal Wolfe was Colonel of the 20th regiment, which formed part of Mordaunt's army. At one of the