the partisans of departed tyranny. I believe there was no professed admirer of Henry the Eighth among the instruments of the last King James; nor in the court of Henry the Eighth was there, I daresay, to be found a single advocate for the favourites of Richard the Second." It did not take fifty years to fulfil this prophecy, so subtly couched in the form of an historical generalisation. Long before that term had elapsed, politicians who were opposing reforms which Richmond and Rockingham would have promoted, and walking through lobbies in which Burke and Savile would never have been found, were one and all forward in protesting that, if they had been born a generation earlier, they would have spoken and voted with. the Whigs at every point of the dispute about the Middlesex election.

CHAPTER VII.

The favourable conditions for taking rank as an orator under which Fox entered Parliament-His early career-He becomes a Junior Lord of the Admiralty His father's pride and pleasure-Lord Holland's unpopularity -The balances of the Pay Office-Lord Holland's indulgence towards his children-King's Gate-Charles Fox and his studies-His passion for poetry -Naples-Paris-Intimate relations between the good society of France and England-Shopping in Paris-Intellectual commerce between the two countries-Feelings of Fox towards France-Madame du Deffand-Fitzpatrick-Mrs. Crewe-Private theatricals-Effects of his stage experience on Fox's speaking.

If the main end of public life is to hold power as a mirister, Charles Fox was of all statesmen the most unfortunate; but, as though in compensation for the ill-luck that awaited him, the circumstances of his early career could not have been more favourably arranged for the purpose of educating him into an orator. The peculiar temptations of the House of Commons are seldom understood outside its walls; and of all those temptations the most irresistible is that which invites a speaker, who is still on his promotion, to acquire the fatal habit of flattering his audience. Lofty sentiments arrayed in burning words,stern truths embellished, but not concealed, by the ornaments of language, and all else that constitutes high and genuine eloquence, are not expected, and if forthcoming are seldom readily accepted, from those who are not already in possession of what in homely phrase is known as the ear of the House and an aspirant very soon discovers that the shortest and surest method of gaining the ear of the House is to say what pleases the most numerous section of its members. And so it often

happens that a politician, who begins by speaking in manly and faithful obedience to his own beliefs and aspirations, gradually learns the art of reserving himself for occasions when those beliefs happen to coincide with the views, or, it may be, the prejudices, of the assembly which he addresses; forgetting, until it is too late, that he purchases each successive ovation at the expense of the unflinching sincerity which is the soul of true oratory.

But with Charles Fox, most happily for himself and his countrymen, the process was exactly reversed. Before his character was formed; before the party with which he was to act was deliberately and finally chosen ;-before, it may almost be said, he was old enough to have opinions at all;-he found himself in complete accord with all that was most violent in the passions which swayed the majority of his parliamentary colleagues, but which were shared by few of the ablest, and none of the most earnest, statesmen of the day. With nobody better than Rigby and Sir Fletcher Norton to oppose to Burke and Wedderburn, the ministerialists wanted a spokesman, while Fox was looking about for a topic; and thus it came to pass that, with unexampled rapidity, he shot straight to the front, and acquired the confidence which emboldened him freely to speak his mind, and the authority which secured him a hearing. And then, when his position was established,-when he had begun to think for himself, with the certainty that the world would listen eagerly and respectfully to the result of his reflections, there was presented to him as fertile and elevated a theme as ever called forth the powers of an orator; and during eight years of a ceaseless and arduous struggle against the folly of those who first insisted on provoking, and then persisted in fighting, America, he nobly justified the reputation that he had cheaply won by his panegyrics on Luttrell and his denunciations of Wilkes.

But those eight years were preceded by four others, during which the public doings of Charles Fox were of a nature to afford more amusement than profit to the student of parliamentary history. His political, as well as his moral, wild oats were still to sow; and he set himself to the business of scattering them broadcast with a profusion that has rarely been equalled in the case of the latter species, and never in that of the former. With the levity of a schoolboy, the self-reliance of an ex-Prime Minister, and a debating faculty which might be put to better uses, but could not possibly become sharper or swifterthan it was already, no portent at once so formidable and so unaccountable had hitherto been witnessed in St. Stephen's. The noble lord who steered the ship of the state, and whose scientific calculations were grievously disturbed by the vagaries of such a meteor, was indefatigable, as long as he had any hope of success, in inducing it to take and keep a place among the fixed constellations. It was evident that something would have to be found for a young gentleman who, according to his own account in later days, was on his legs at least once every evening, and who, by the confession of others, never sate down without having left his mark upon the discussion. At length, on the nineteenth of February 1770,-when many hours had been spent in thrashing out a question of unusual intricacy connected with the Middlesex election,-Wedderburn, by a singularly ingenious and welltimed argument, had convinced even his opponents that there was no precedent for the course recommended by the Govern ment, in a matter where precedent was everything; and honourable members were just settling down to the disagreeable conviction that they would have to vote against their common sense, or see their party defeated, when Charles Fox started up, and produced a case in point so apt and recent as entirely to cut the ground from under Wedderburn. The House "roared with applause;" the King, delighted by a majority which ex

ceeded his most sanguine expectations, begged the Prime Minister to give him the particulars of a debate which had been crowned by so brilliant a victory; and, on the very day after His Majesty had heard Lord North's report of what had passed, a new writ was moved for the borough of Midhurst in consequence of Mr. Charles Fox having been appointed a Junior Lord of the Admiralty.1

It is easy to imagine the feelings with which Lord Holland watched the son of his hopes, while not yet of age, fighting his way towards the enchanted portals of office, and then reaching out his hand to receive a prize which came only just too late to be a birthday present. The father's letters abound in expressions of satisfaction so hearty and affectionate as to awaken in the reader an evanescent sympathy even for the doleful dissertations on the guile and ingratitude of mankind with which those letters are plentifully interlarded. "The newspapers, I am told, have forgot me :" so the old gentleman writes to Selwyn from Nice, in February 1770. "You, I see, remember me. The excessive fine weather we have here, and Charles's fame, have certainly for some days past made my spirits better than they had been since I saw you; and yet the man I envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead, and he died suddenly. If that dog Beckford should be dead, I must not envy him ;" and the writer then proceeds to put forward, as the ground on which he forbore to envy Beckford, certain gloomy probabilities which, when his own death occurred, it is to be feared that many were uncharitable enough to give as their reason for not envying Lord Holland. "I told you," he says again, "that Charles's fame

1 Fox's patent as Lord of the Admiralty was made out on the 28th of February 1770. Walpole makes Fox confute Wedderburn on the 25th of January; but a careful comparison of his narrative with reports of the debates of the 25th January and the 19th February proves almost to certainty that he confused the dates. By this time Walpole was no longer in Parliament, and got his House of Commons information at second hand.