Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/216

 “His mottoes from old plays prove that he, at all events, possesses the dramatic faculty, which is denied me. And yet I am told that his ‘Halidon Hill’ did not justify expectation. I have never met with it, but have seen extracts from it.”

“Do you think,” asked I, “that Sir Walter Scott’s Novels owe any part of their reputation to the concealment of the author’s name?”

“No,” said he; “such works do not gain or lose by it. I am at a loss to know his reason for keeping up the incognito,—but that the reigning family could not have been very well pleased with ‘Waverley.’ There is a degree of charlatanism in some authors keeping up the Unknown. Junius owed much of his fame to that trick; and now that it is known to be the work of Sir Philip Francis, who reads it? A political writer, and one who descends to personalities such as disgrace Junius, should be immaculate as a public, as well as a private character; and Sir Philip Francis was neither. He had his price, and was gagged by being sent to India. He there seduced another man’s wife. It would have been a new case for a Judge to sit in judgment