Toward the close of the year 1769 Junius sent forth his celebrated letter to the King, for the publication of which criminal informations were laid against Woodfall, as well as against Almon and Miller, who immediately reprinted the libel.  “Rex v.  Almon” was the first case brought to trial, and the jury found a general verdict of guilty.  The defense set up in the trial against Woodfall was, that the letter was not libellous.  The part which Lord Mansfield took is well known.  He contended that

“All the jury had to consider was, whether the defendant had published the letter set out in the information, and whether the inuendos, imputing a particular meaning to particular words, as that ‘the K——­’ meant His Majesty King George III., but that they were not to consider whether the publication was ‘false and malicious,’ these being mere formal words, and that whether the letter was libellous or innocent was a pure question of law, upon which the opinion of the court might be taken by a demurrer, or a motion in arrest of judgment.”

The jury retired, and after some hours deliberation returned a verdict of “Guilty of the printing and publishing only.”  The attempt of Lord Mansfield to withdraw the cognizance of the question of libel from the jury to vest it in the court, contrary, as it unquestionably was, both to liberty and law, had high authorities for its justification, and was supported by the unanimous opinion of the judges who sat at his side.  Posterity will acquit the otherwise upright judge of the moral obliquity of which his living enemies, with regard to this proceeding, pronounced him guilty, and for which Junius would have crushed the Chief Justice, had his ability been equal to his will.

It behooves the present generation to approach the lucubrations of the redoubted Junius in a spirit of enlightened discrimination.  We must bear in mind that the poisoned arrows of the unseen combatant were discharged at a period peculiarly favorable for the exercise of his destructive skill; when startling invective was in fashion; when the mercenary acts of the foremost public man excused, if they did not justify, wholesale and unreflecting chastisement; when the public press was in its earliest infancy, and public writers had not yet educated the audience whose good sense now holds the libertinism of even the public censor in check, and provides its own best remedy against the crimes or follies of the pen.  Junius but imitated the example of his betters when he fastened upon a foe, guilty or innocent, and heaped upon his head every opprobrious term a heated imagination could supply.  A statesman’s policy had but to be inconvenient to his adversary in order to prove the Minister “hateful,” “execrable,” “abominable,” “wicked,” a traitor to his country, and a conspirator against the liberties of the people.  Pitt honored Walpole with such vituperation, and when Walpole went out, and Carteret came in without Pitt, the same expressive language