He left prison fully resolved not to desist until he had established the principle that the choice of the people was never to be set aside in deference to monarch or minister, and that the representatives of the nation were to be elected at the pollingbooth, and not inside the House of Commons. That principle, which the debates of 1770 had left in the shape of a proposition, he intended, before Lord North had done with him, to place high on the list of constitutional axioms; but what he proposed to effect for the public advantage was to be done at his own time and in his own way. His partisans urged him to assert his rights, even at the expense of a scene in Parliament and a revolution in the country. He, however, according to the saying of a book which he consulted more frequently for quotation than for edification, knew that his strength lay in sitting still. If the British Constitution was to stand, the world had nothing for it but to come round to him at last. "I have not," he wrote to his daughter in May, 1770, "been at either House, to avoid every pretence of a riot, or influencing their debates by a mob." He refused to convert a grave and weighty political ceremony into a personal insult to his sovereign by making one in the procession of aldermen who carried their periodical remonstrance to St. James's. He was not used, he said, to go into any gentleman's house who did not wish to see him. His forbearance was rewarded when Beckford (taking a course not more unprecedented and informal than the proceedings by which the cabinet had provoked him, as the representative of an injured people, to break through the well-founded etiquette of the palace) told his Majesty the wholesome truth in words as plain and free as ever one honest man used to another-words which the citizens of London may still read with profit beneath the statue of their great lord mayor in the Guildhall. It was the spirit of Old England, cried Chatham, which spoke on that never-to-be-forgotten day.

With the moral triumph on his side, Wilkes could afford to wait. At the commencement of each session the sheriffs, better Wilkites than himself, summoned him to appear in Parliament as member for Middlesex; but he remained quietly at

No

home while Luttrell, as was said with wit that had a serious political meaning behind it, continued to vote, like a good representative, in strict conformity with the views of his constituents; that is to say, with the views of the majority of the House of Commons. At the general election of 1774 the intruder abandoned his untenable position; no other government candidate was put in nomination at Brentford; and Sergeant Glynn and his patron were returned unopposed. The ministers came back from the country with a stronger following than ever; but, with Massachusetts in a flame, they did not care to rake up the embers in Middlesex, and, with silent prudence, they allowed Wilkes to take his seat in peace. Thenceforward, as long as he cared to be their member, the freeholders sent him back to each successive Parliament, without the trouble of a contest,' and, for the most part, accompanied by any colleague whom he chose to name. lapse of time, no difference of opinion on the public questions of the day, could detach their loyalty from the man with whom their own liberties and the honor of their county were identified. Years rolled on, and every year did something to bring into deeper discredit the system of government that began with Bute. The policy of which Wilkes was the earliest victim had at length conducted the whole nation from the summit of glory and prosperity, through the depths of humiliation, to the very brink of ruin; and on the third of May, 1782, he rose to tell before a sympathetic audience his own version of his oft-told story, and to move that the resolution of the seventeenth of February, 1769, which declared him incapable of being elected a member of Parliament should be expunged from the journals of the House of Commons. Charles Fox, who then long had been, and was still for a short while to continue, without a rival in that assembly, thought it incumbent on him to pay a tribute to political con

The opposition at the contested election of 1784 was not directed against Wilkes. Even while his party lay prostrate beneath the load of unpopularity which crushed the Coalition Ministry, his seat was never for a moment in danger.

sistency in the shape of a dry and perfunctory counter-argument, very different from the rattling invectives by which, twelve years back, he had thrown the ministerial benches into a ferment, and turned the tables upon speakers who had been parliamentary authorities before he was born or thought of. Fox did not succeed in averting a decision in which he was prepared beforehand to acquiesce. The resolution was annulled by a majority pretty nearly in proportion to that which had originally carried it;' and then, going beyond what Wilkes thought his due, the House, without a single dissentient voice, ordered its clerk to remove from its records all traces whatsoever of its own arbitrary proceedings in the past, "as being subversive of the rights of the whole body of electors of this kingdom."

Historians have been blamed for giving too much of their space to Wilkes, and to the cause which he almost reluctantly represented; but it is difficult to say what other method could be pursued, if it be the aim of history to relate the events which filled the minds of people in days gone by in such a manner as to strike the minds of people in the present. The most random excursion or the most patient and diligent research into the literature of the eighteenth century will alike confirm the truth of a remark made by a contemporary annalist of no mean authority, who pronounced that no public measure since the succession of the Brunswicks had caused "so general an alarm and so universal a discontent" as the foisting of Colonel Luttrell upon an unwilling constituency." As to the legality or wisdom of that step, there has ceased to be any diversity of judgment whatsoever. "I have constantly observed," wrote Burke, when the quarrel was at its hottest, "that the generality of people are at least fifty years behindhand in their politics. Men are wise with but little reflection, and good with little self-denial, in the business of all times

The famous resolution had been carried in 1769 by 235 votes to 89, and was annulled in 1782 by 115 votes to 47.

* This observation occurs on page 68 of the "Annual Register" for 1769. The passage was probably written, and undoubtedly revised, by Burke.

except their own. Few are 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 dare say, to be found a single advocate for the favorites of Richard the Second." It did not take fifty years to fulfil this prophecy, so subtly couched in the form of an historical generalization. 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 Favorable 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.-Effect of his Stage Experience on Fox's Speaking.

Ir the main end of public life is to hold power as a minister, 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 favorably 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 occa