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    regretted ? we hesitate to answer yes : great writers write for posterity , but frequent writers are those who do good in their generation ; and no great writer , whom we remember , was a frequent writer , fexcept Voltaire . Junius Redivivus writes far more powerfully than could be expected , from one who has written in two years as much as would amount to many volumes , and every

    word of it with thought . Writing of a very high order is thrown away when it is buried in periodicals , which are mostly read but once , and that hastily : yet the only access now to the general public , is through periodicals . An article in a newspaper or a magazine , is to the public mind no more than a drop of water on a stone ; and like that , it produces its effect by repetition . a stone ; and like that , it produces its effect by repetition .

    ^ The peculiar * mission' of this age , ( if we may be allowed to borrow from the new French school of philosophers a term which they have abused , ) is to popularize among the many , the more immediately practical results of the thought and experience of the few . This is marked out as the fittest employment for the present epoch , partly because now for the first time it can be done ,

    partly because anything of a still higher description cannot ; unless writers are willing to forego immediate usefulness , and take their chance , that what is neglected by their own age will reach posterity . In this , then , which is the great intellectual business of our time , Junius Redivivus is better qualified to render eminent service , than a more eminent writer . ^ It is true , that all he has written , perhaps all he will ever have the inclination or the

    patience to write , will be ephemeral : but if each production only lasts its day or year , each new day or year produces a successor : and though his works shall perish , it will not be until they have planted in many minds , truths which shall survive them , and awakened in many hearts a spirit which will not die . % The staple of all popular writing in the present crumbling condition of the social fabric , must be politics : and politics predominate in the writings of Junius Redivivus . But he writes not as

    one to whom politics are all in all : he knows the limits of what laws and institutions can do : he never expresses himself , as if any form of polity could give to mankind even the outward requisites of happiness , much less render them actually happy , in spite of themselves , or as if a people individually ignorant and selfish , could as a community by any legerdemain of checks and balances conjure up n government better than the men by whom

    it is carried on . Politics with our author are important , but not all-important . The great concern with him is , the improvement of the human beings themselves : of which the improvement of their institutions will be a certain effect , may be in some degree a cause , and is so far even a necessary condition , that until it is accomplished , none of the other causes of improvement carl have fair p lay . The individual man must after all work out his own destiny , not have it worked out for him by a king , or a House of

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    266 Wr&ings of Junius Redivivus *

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1833, page 265, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2612/page/50/