scribed by Grammont, in terms which read oddly as applied to any of the name of Fox, as among "the richest and most regular men in England." The old gentleman did not fail to profit by his dear-bought experience; and Evelyn gives an amusing sketch of the grave and dexterous courtesy with which he foiled an attempt, on the part of Lady Sunderland, to saddle him with a second high-born and expensive son-inlaw. His sons were all childless; and, at the age of seventysix, after his retirement from the Treasury, "unwilling that so plentiful an estate should go out of the name, and being of a vegete and hale constitution," he took to wife the daughter of a Grantham clergyman, who brought him twins within the twelvemonth. Two more children were born before Sir Stephen's death, which took place at his Chiswick villa in the year 1716. He had attended Charles the First on the scaffold, and he lived to discuss the execution of Lord Derwentwater. One of his daughters by the first marriage is said to have died while a baby. Lady Sarah Napier, the sister of his daughter-in-law, survived until the year 1826; and there is no reason to question the tradition that Charles Fox had two aunts who died a hundred and seventy years from each other.

Lady Fox outlived her husband only three years. Sir Godfrey Kneller, in the picture at Holland House, endows her with small and pretty features, and hair and complexion as dark as her grandson's. A fortnight before her death she called her children together, and made them a quaint little address which shows that she had already discerned the tendencies of the family character. "Don't be a fop, don't be a rake," she said to her eldest son. "Mind on your name-Stephen Fox; that, I hope, will keep you from being wicked. You, Harry, having a less fortune, won't be subject to so many temptations; but withstand those you have when you grow up. Then you'll learn to swear, to rake about, to game, and at last be ruined by those you unhappily think your friends. Love your brother, Stephen; I charge you all love one anoth

You have enemies enough; make not one another so." In after-years Henry Fox, the most fiercely hated public man

of his own, or perhaps of any other, generation, may have called to mind these affectionate forebodings, which can still be read in his own boyish handwriting.

Stephen became, in course of time, Earl of Ilchester, and the founder of a house which has steadily grown in prosperity and general esteem. Henry Fox had a stormy and dissolute youth, and did not turn to serious affairs until he had wasted some of his best years and the greater part of his patrimony. He was thirty when he entered Parliament, and thirty-two before he got office, an age at which his son was the first man in the House of Commons. Any chance of Henry Fox being a Jacobite was effectually extinguished by his early distaste for certain doleful ceremonies with which the 30th of January was honored in the paternal household. His principles, if they could be dignified by such a title, were Whig, and he owed his first place to Walpole, whose favor he repaid by a fidelity which that statesman seldom experienced, and never expected.' To the end of his life, Fox made Sir Robert's quarrels his own. He could not forgive Lord Hardwicke for deserting their common chief, as the great chancellor in after-years had ample reason to know. "Mr. Fox," wrote Bubb Dodington, "had something very frank and open about him. If he had any dislike to me, it must be from my hating Sir Robert Walpole; for Fox really loved that man." He would have nothing to do with the administration which had profited by his leader's fall; and it was not until Pelham became prime-minister, on the recommendation, and almost under the auspices, of Walpole, that Fox consented to return to public employment as a Commissioner of the Treasury.

The first exploit by which he attracted the attention of the world was not performed in his capacity of an administrator. Horace Walpole has left us the description of a ball given in the days when his father was still in power; and it must be

1

1 A colleague of Sir Robert Walpole said to him in the House of Commons, while Winnington was speaking, "That young dog promised that he would always stand by us." "I advise my young men never to use 'always,'" was the quiet reply.

confessed that there are some features in the picture which modern London might copy with advantage. "There were one hundred and ninety-seven persons at Sir Thomas's, and yet nobody felt a crowd. He had taken off all his doors, and so separated the old and the young that neither were inconvenienced with the other. The ball began at eight. Except Lady Ancram, no married woman danced. The beauties were the Duke of Richmond's two daughters, and their mother, still handsomer than they. The duke sat by his wife all night, kissing her hand." It is strange to reflect that this pair of lovely girls, and a third sister whose turn to be the reigning toast was still in the future, were destined to be the mothers of Charles Fox, Sir Charles Napier, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Forcibly, indeed, does such a thought bring it home to the mind that the period of which this book will treat was the transition between the old order of things and the new.

A more curious illustration of the sentiments and manners of the past could not easily be found than the story of Henry Fox's marriage. Fox lost his heart to Lady Caroline Lennox, and won hers in return. He made a formal application for her hand, but the duke and duchess would not hear of it; and Lady Caroline's relatives were already looking around for a more eligible suitor, when, early in the month of May, 1744, the town was convulsed by the intelligence that the lovers had settled the matter by a secret wedding, which, in those days, was a much less arduous operation than at present. The sensation was instant and tremendous. At the opera the news ran along the front boxes "exactly like fire in a train of gunpowder." It was said at the time that more noise could hardly have been made if the Princess Caroline had gone off with her dancing-master. All the blood royal was up in arms to avenge what was esteemed an outrage upon the memory of his sacred Majesty Charles the Second, who, if he had been alive to see it, would have been infinitely diverted by the catastrophe, and would doubtless have taken his great-granddaughter's part. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who had lent his house for the marriage, found that his complicity was

like to have cost him his red ribbon. The father and mother of the young lady put off their social engagements, and hurried away to hide their vexation at their country-seat. There is something irresistibly comical in the letters of condolence which came pouring in upon them at Goodwood. Lord Ilchester wrote to exculpate himself and his wife from any previous knowledge of his brother's designs. Lord Lincoln had heard, with the greatest uneasiness, that he and his sister had been "falsely and villanously" charged with being concerned in so unhappy and imprudent a business. The Duke of Newcastle buzzed round the court, mumbling and bewailing to every peer he met about "this most unfortunate affair," till he was unlucky enough to fall into the hands of Lord Carteret. "I thought," said Carteret, "that our fleet was beaten, or that Mons had been betrayed to the French. At last it came out that Harry Fox was married, which I knew before. This man, who is secretary of state, cannot be consoled because two people, to neither of whom he is any relation, were married without their parents' consent!" The prime-minister, who both liked and feared Fox, would have been very glad to have left the matter alone, and the more so because Miss Pelham stoutly refused to abandon her friend Lady Caroline, and, in the vigorous language which young women then allowed themselves to use, declared to any one who denied Mr. Fox's claim to be called a gentleman that if Lord Ilchester had been free to present himself, the duke and duchess would both have jumped at the match. She was now, she

1 Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, is the only person of whom we hear too little in the voluminous memoirs of his time. His flashes of jovial common-sense never fail to infuse some human interest into the dreary political period which coincided with the ascendency of the Pelhams. Unfortunately he loved his ease better than his country, and was only too ready to lounge away his life in the background, “resigned,” says Mr. Carlyle, "in a big contemptuous way to have had his really considerable career closed upon him by the smallest of mankind,” and known in history chiefly for "occasional spurts of strong rugged speech which come from him, and a good deal of wine taken into him." Two bottles of burgundy were his daily allowance.

said, in other people's power, but before long would be her own mistress and able to please herself; which meant that she was on the eve of being married to Lord Lincoln, who, no doubt, soon found occasion to repent that he had been in such a hurry to take the wrong side in so interesting a controversy. In order to keep on terms with the Duke of Richmond, Pelham thought it necessary to speak with grave disapproval of his audacious subordinate, and, during at least a twelvemonth, continued to address him as "Dear Sir" instead of "Dear Harry." But the anger of a minister against a formidable member of Parliament is not an enduring or implacable emotion, and Fox soon discovered that his political future had gained a great deal more than it had lost by his having aspired to a duke's daughter. The parents remained obdurate from 1744 to 1748; but even they melted at last, and, in a letter which is extant, announced to their erring daughter that the conflict between reason and nature was over, and that tenderness had carried the day. The birth of a son, whom the duke candidly admits to be an "innocent child," contributed not a little to this change of feeling; and, when Fox had for years been secretary at war, a privy-councillor, and the readiest speaker in the House of Commons, he was solemnly forgiven for having married above his station.

Charles Fox's mother, if pictures may be trusted (and in her day they spoke true), must, at each successive stage of life, have possessed in a high degree the charms appropriate to her years. Hogarth makes her the prettiest and most prominent figure in a delicious group of small actors and actresses just out of the nursery, who are playing the "Conquest of Mexico" by the fireside for the amusement of the Duke of Cumberland; and her latest portrait, taken when her hair was gray, is marked by a tranquil, serious expression, which is singularly winning. Fox and Lady Caroline were, from first to last, an enviable couple. They lived together most happily for more than thirty years, and the wife survived the husband not quite so many days. Neither of them ever knew content except in the possession, or the immediate expectation, of the other's company; and their correspondence