him, and tell him that, if he had always acted with the same spirit, I should not have differed with him yesterday." The Prime Minister needed another week's pressure from the Palace, and a fresh outbreak of insubordination on the part of Fox, to spur him towards a course of action which was alien both to his good nature and his indolence. At last he nerved himself to write a letter which was said to run thus :-"Sir; His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name.” A similar story is told about a very recent successor of Lord North, and perhaps was invented for one of his predecessors; but, whatever the form of the communication may have been, its substance soon became the property of the public. Twentyfour hours after he had been dismissed from office, Fox was again haranguing the House of Commons with an easy magniloquence which provoked a Tory baronet into exclaiming that he talked as if the fate of Cæsar and of Rome depended on his conduct. "The Honourable gentleman," remarked the speaker, "is tender in years, but tough in politics, and, if I do not mistake, has already been twice in, and twice out of, place." And, when the sitting was over, and the full-dress sarcasms of debate gave place to the fraternal raillery of the lobby, George Selwyn took the earliest opportunity of setting afloat his view of an incident which, for a month to come, was sure to be in everybody's mouth. "Charles," he said; "for the future. I will eat salt fish on the day you was turned out. You shall be my Charles the Martyr now; for I am tired of your greatgrandfather, the old one. His head can never be sewed on again; but, as yours can be, I will stick to you."

And so Fox was once more out, and out for good; and the first portion of his story had ended in a climax which fitly and harmoniously crowned the preceding narrative. Still of an age before which no English statesman can hope to accomplish

great things, he had at any rate given earnest of remarkable qualities. He had shown himself to possess, in an unusual degree, that recuperative power which is all but indispensable in a career where no one, who fights to win, can keep himself out of the reach of a knock-down blow. An observant veteran watches with almost pathetic interest the bearing of a young politician who has been flung off the ladder of promotion, or who has brought down upon his head a sudden avalanche of unpopularity; and never did any one pick himself up quicker than Charles Fox, and go to work again with more sublime indifference to jeers and bruises. And, while his elasticity of temperament boded well for his own happiness, those who looked to him as a future servant of his country noticed, in all that he said and did, the unmistakeable tokens of an ingrained disinterestedness, which it required only a good cause to turn into heroism. He was not a political adventurer, but a knighterrant roaming about in search of a tilt, or, still better, of a mêleé; and not much caring whether his foes were robbers or true men, if only there were enough of them. He was one who, in a venal age, looked to something besides the main chance; who, when he had set his mind or his fancy on an enterprise, never counted the odds that he faced, or the hundreds a year that he forfeited. But, with all these generous gifts, his education and hiscircumstances almost proved too much for him ; and it was the instinct of moral self-preservation which drove him to detach himself from his early surroundings, and find safety in uncompromising hostility to that evil system which had come so near to spoiling him.

"Are wills so weak? Then let not mine wait long.
Hast thou so rare a poison? Let me be

Keener to slay thee, lest thou poison me.”

Such is the temper in which, fortunately for mankind, rare and noble natures have often revolted against that world whose

blighting influence they had begun to feel; and such was the mood of Charles Fox, when, sick of a prison house whose secrets had so early been familiar to him, he dissolved his partnership with Sandwich and Wedderburn, and united himself to Burke, and Chatham, and Savile in their crusade against the tyranny which was trampling out English liberty in the colonies, and the corruption which was undermining it at home.

INDEX.

[In the following Index the abbreviations ƒ and ff mean following pages,"
and n, or nn, that the reference is to the footnotes as well as to the pages
indicated.]