If he had not been so fortunate as to find a minister in power whom considerations of filial piety allowed him to support, Fox was quite prepared to head a party of his own, and, if he failed in that, to be a party by himself. It would be useless to try his proceedings during the five years of his first Parliament by the rules of criticism which govern our judg ment in the case of mature statesmen. His defects and his virtues, his appalling scrapes and his transcendent performances, as with all men of exceptional vigor under four-andtwenty, were the inevitable outcome of his temperament. Those who would call Fox conceited because, at an age when he should still have been minding his Aristotle, he thought himself the match for any opponent and the man for any office, might apply the same epithet to Nelson when he announced that, if he lived, he would be at the top of the tree; to Byron when he bearded the Edinburgh Review; or to Shelley when he introduced himself by letter to every philosopher of reputation whom he deemed worthy of being consulted on the prospects of human perfectibility. With health such as falls to the lot of one in ten thousand, spirits which sufficed to keep in good-humor through thirty years of opposition the most unlucky company of politicians that ever existed, and courage that did not know the meaning of fear or the sensation of responsibility, there was nobody whom Charles Fox shrank from facing, and nothing which he did not feel himself equal to accomplish. He, if any one, was a living illustration of Emerson's profound remark, that success is a constitutional trait.' He succeeded because all the world in con

"We must reckon success a constitutional trait. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of his condition, and thirty years old, at his departure from Greenland he will steer west, and his ships will reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric, and put in a stronger and bolder man, and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles farther, and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance in results. With adults, as with children, one class enter cordially into the game, and whirl with the whirling world; the others have cold hands, and remain bystanders. The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited. It must husband its resources to live.

cert could not have kept him in the background; and because, when once in the front, he played his part with a prompt intrepidity and a commanding ease that were but the outward symptoms of the immense reserves of energy on which it was in his power to draw. He went into the House of Commons, as into the hunting-field, glowing with anticipations of enjoyment, and resolved that nothing should stop him, and that, however often he tumbled, he would always be among the first. And first, or among the first, he always was, alike in the tempestuous morning of his life and in the splendid calm of the brief and premature evening which closed his day of unremitting ill-fortune and almost unrequited labor.

But health answers its own ends, and has to spare; runs over and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities."

CHAPTER V.

1768-1769.

Fox's Maiden Speech.-Wilkes.-His Early Life.—The North Briton and the "Essay on Woman."-Persecution of Wilkes.-His Exile.— Churchill.-Return of Wilkes, and his Election for Middlesex.-Disturbances in London.-Fatal Affray between the Troops and the People.-Determination of the Court to crush Wilkes.-Conflict between the House of Commons and the Middlesex Electors.-Enthusiasm in the City on Behalf of Wilkes.-Dingley.-Riot at Brentford.-Weakness of the Civil Arm.-Colonel Luttrell.-His Cause espoused by the Foxes.-Great Debates in Parliament.-Rhetorical Successes of Charles Fox.-The King and Wilkes.-Burke on the Middlesex Election.— Proceedings during the Recess.-Recovery of Lord Chatham. - His Reconciliation with the Grenvilles and the Whigs.

WHEN FOX first spoke, and on what subject, is, and will ever remain, a doubtful matter. His eldest brother, Stephen, had entered Parliament at the same time as himself, and was quite as eager to be conspicuous, until experience taught him that public life is an element in which one of a family may flounder while another swims.' Various paragraphs of five

The verdict of a clever young man before he is of an age to be cynical or jealous may safely be taken about those of his coevals with whom he lives on terms of intimacy; and two sentences from a letter of Lord Carlisle's are perhaps as much notice as the second Lord Holland can claim from a posterity which has so much else to read about. The letter refers to a fire which had destroyed Winterslow House, near Salisbury, where Stephen Fox lived after his marriage. "There is something," wrote Lord Carlisle, "so laughable in Stephen's character and conduct that, though he were broke upon the wheel, or torn between four wild horses, like Damien, the persons who live the most with him would never be grave or serious upon any calamity happening to him. If Lady Mary was much alarmed, or if the birds were really burned to death, I should be very sorry. As this is the first misfortune that ever happened to Stephen which he did not bring upon himself, all compassionate thoughts and intentions may be turned from Charles to him." Charles was just

or six lines, intercalated between the more generously reported speeches of established orators, are by some authorities ascribed to Charles, and by some to Stephen; but the inquiry may be left to those who hold that biography should consist in long-flowing and discursive attempts at the solution of a series of third-rate problems. It is probable that Charles first opened his lips in a short discussion which arose on the question whether Sir Wilfrid Lawson, late High Sheriff of Cumberland, should be examined with regard to an election petition presented by Humphrey Senhouse, resident in that county; and if such is the fact, he did wisely in learning the sound of his own voice on an occasion when nothing was expected from him except plain sense plainly put. Whatever may have been the topic of his maiden address, his air and manner so caught the fancy of an artist who happened to be among the audience that in the dearth of any more suitable material (for, to guarantee the secrecy of debate, paper in every shape or form was rigorously excluded from the gallery of the House of Commons), he tore off part of his shirt, and furtively sketched a likeness of the young declaimer on which, in after-days, those who were fondest of him set not a little store.

No sooner did he feel himself firm in the saddle than, all on fire to win his spurs, he plunged straight into the heart of the most obstinate and protracted affray that has raged within the barriers of St. Stephen's. Parliament was then in one of the acute stages of a controversy trivial in its origin, but most memorable in its consequences; for so strong were the passions which it aroused, and so vital the principles which it called in question, that during its progress our two great political parties were moulded into the shape and consistence which they have ever since retained. At the time when Wilkes was unknown to any but his creditors, men took sides in the House of Commons, and at elections, on grounds that were almost wholly personal; the good attached themselves to a high-minded leader, and the dishonest to an unscrupulous

then at the very bottom of an apparently inextricable pecuniary quagmire.

one; while the names of Whig and Tory had altogether lost their deeper meaning, and had ceased to be valued even as convenient badges. But long before the harassed tribune, after adventures which in duration of time and variety of incident can be paralleled only by the wanderings of Ulysses, was finally admitted to the undisputed honors of the Senate, the old party titles had once more come to signify quite as much as in the days of Somers and Harley. In the dark and evil times that closed the century, the sufferer by arbitrary power knew very well in which ranks he must look for those who were always ready to vindicate the liberty of speech, pen, and person. There is nothing exaggerated in Mr. Gladstone's declaration that the name of Wilkes, whether we choose it or not, must be enrolled among the great champions of English freedom.

That name, which was seldom out of the mouth of our great-grandfathers for three weeks together, had been stained and blotted from the first. The son of a prosperous distiller, who spent money as fast as he made it in the effort to live. above his station,' John Wilkes, before he came of age, was persuaded by his father into a marriage which he describes as a sacrifice to Plutus rather than to Venus. His wife, a rigid Methodist, half again as old as himself, he treated shamefully. Like other famous men who have been bad husbands, he has found apologists, some of whom had recourse to the astounding theory that his domestic disagreements arose from a conscientious difference in religious views the lady being a Dissenter, while the gentleman, though he not unfrequently honored her chapel by his attendance, made a point of never communicating except with the Church of England. His more prudent defenders fell back upon the old cant which has stood greater writers than Wilkes in stead, that the wife

1 Old Mr. Israel Wilkes kept a sumptuous table, and a coach and six in which (to the detriment of the proverb that a Dissenter's second horse takes him to the parish church) he was frequently drawn to meeting, although he began life a Churchman. The explanation of the anomaly is that he had taken to wife the daughter of a rich Nonconformist, who brought him Hoxton Square as part of her dowry.