learning to speak the words of others enabled him to concentrate his undivided attention upon the arduous task of improvising his own. If only he could find the thing which required to be said, he was sure to say it in the way that would produce the greatest possible effect. His variety of manner, we are told, was quite as remarkable as the richness of his matter. The modulations of his voice responded exactly to the nature of his subject and the emotions of his mind. When he was piling up his arguments, so correct in their sequence, and, as we read them now with cool and impartial judg ments, for the most part so irresistible in their weight, every one of his massive sentences "came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long." If his cadences at times waxed shrill and even inharmonious, and his enunciation became almost preternaturally rapid, it was only when his hearers were so fascinated by his burning logic, and so entranced by the contagion of his vehemence, that he could hardly speak fast enough or loud enough to satisfy them. His deep tones, which occurred rarely, and then but for a moment, were reserved for occasions that necessitated a solemn appeal to the compassion or the justice of the assembly which he was addressing, and never failed to go straight to the heart of every one present. Feeling profoundly, thinking accurately and strongly, trained thoroughly in all the external graces of oratory, "Fox during the American war, Fox in his best days," was declared by Grattan to have been the best speaker that he ever heard; and Grattan, over and above his experiences in the Irish Parliament, had formed his taste on Chatham, and had lived through the great days of Burke, Pitt, and Sheridan, to hear Brougham on the "Orders in Council," and Canning on the "Emancipation of the Catholics."

CHAPTER VIII.

1770-1771.

The Law of Libel.-Great Speech by Charles Fox, and Burke's Reply.— Final Solution of the Question.-Contest of Parliament with the Reporters. Scene in the Lords.-Indignation of the Commons.-Artful Conduct of Charles Fox.-Lord George Germaine's Duel.-The Onslows.-Their Warfare with the Press.-The King begins to take an Interest in the Controversy.-A Night of Divisions.—John Wheble.-Interference of Wilkes.-Miller Arrested, and Discharged by the Guildhall Bench.-Proceedings in the House of Commons against the Lord Mayor and Alderman Oliver.-Rebellion of the King's Friends against Lord North.-Fiery Speech of Charles Fox.-Feeling against him in the Country.-March of the City upon Westminster.-Violent Conduct of the Majority in the House.-Wedderburn's Defection from the Opposition. Popular Excitement outside Parliament.-Fox and North Maltreated. The Lord Mayor and the Alderman Committed to the Tower. Their Imprisonment and Release.-Testimonial to Wilkes.Establishment of the Freedom of Reporting Debates in Parliament.

SUCH, in the heyday of youth, was Charles Fox, and such was his chosen friend. Their joint stock of sagacity and folly, of power and frailty, of sterling merits and grievous faults, was amply sufficient to have made a score of reputations and wrecked a hundred careers. When Lord Holland was at King's Gate or on the Continent, the pair took up their quarters together over Mackie's Italian warehouse in Piccadilly. Some frequenters of Brooks's were soft-hearted enough to pity the landlord of two such seductive and unprofitable lodgers, and predicted that his ruin would date from the day on which he let them his rooms. "On the contrary," said Selwyn, “so far from ruining him, they will make Mackie's fortune; for he will have the finest pickles in his house of any man in London ;" and the phrase, unceremonious as it was, conveys a truer notion of Fox when just out of his teens than a solemn.

and elaborate analysis of his character and his policy. He was not all that he should have been between 1770 and 1774; but those who read his life are the last who have a right to complain of him. Politics are so grave a trade that a politician of mature years can hardly be an amusing personage unless he sinks into the absurd and the unbecoming; and there is therefore all the more reason to be thankful for those few great men who have played a foremost part at an age when high spirits and audacious actions are among the most hopeful symptoms of future excellence. During the earliest, and much the longest, portion of his first Parliament, Fox, as the spoiled child of the worst House of Commons that ever met, seemed bent upon ascertaining how much unsound argument and pert dogmatism would be tolerated from a ready and an agreeable speaker, and how often it was permissible to go in and out of place without any adequate reason for leaving office, or justification for resuming it. He did not mend his ways until even the fagot voters of Midhurst were tired of electing and reelecting him, and until he had exhausted his sauciness and his sophistry in declaiming against all the principles with which his name was thereafter to be identified, and most of the measures which he himself or the statesmen bred in his school were some day to place upon the Statute-book.

The activity and pertinacity which the ministry displayed in punishing, or attempting to punish, the printers and venders of the "Letter to the King" had gravely alarmed every one who desired that the freedom of the British press should be anything but an empty name. It was idle to hope that a nation would ever enjoy a political literature that was at the same time outspoken and respectable, while its booksellers, as Wilkes most truly said, "lived always in a state of jeopardy, like soldiers fighting for their country." Sustained and effective criticism was impossible when a writer who smartly assailed the measures of the government was sure, sooner or later, to be prosecuted at the expense of the State, on a charge. of having traduced the personal character of the king or the minister. The Opposition lost no time in calling attention to so pressing a danger. On the day fortnight after Parlia

ment met for the winter session of 1770, a debate was raised by Captain Constantine Phipps, the member for Lincoln, an industrious and sententious youth who, as Lord Mulgrave, was erelong to embark on a course of tergiversation which earned him an English peerage, a long succession of richly paid offices, and a couplet by Fitzpatrick worth all the painfully composed and minutely revised speeches that he ever made on either side of any controversy.' Captain Phipps, always eager to prove how large a stock of law might be laid in by a sailor, attacked the question on its most technical quarter, and moved for leave to introduce a bill limiting the right of the attorney-general to file informations for libel. But, by the time half a dozen members had spoken, it became evident that the House was upon a wrong scent, and that the officers of the Crown might be safely intrusted with the power of filing what informations they chose, so long as it was clearly established that a jury was to decide the issue. But Lord Mansfield's doctrine, that it was for the judge to determine whether a paper was libellous, while the jury were only concerned with the fact of publication, had placed at the mercy of himself and his brethren every printer and author in the kingdom. It was true that, in the recent trials, London juries had refused to let out of their own keeping the fortunes and liberty of their fellow-citizens. But that bold course had been adopted under the influence of an excited public feeling which to a large extent was temporary and local; and the tradesmen of a provincial assize town, in quiet times, could not be expected, in direct contradiction to what would be told them from the bench, to insist on usurping a function which the greatest judge of modern days had repeatedly and emphatically pronounced not to belong to them. Accordingly, after the lapse of another fortnight,

1 "Acute observers, who with skilful ken
Descry the characters of public men,

Exchange with pleasure Elliot, Lew'sham, North,
For Mulgrave's tried integrity and worth.

And all must own that worth completely tried

By turns experienced on every side."

Sergeant Glynn, tutored by Shelburne, who in his turn had been inspired by Chatham, went straight to the root of the matter by moving for a committee which should inquire into the administration of justice in cases relating to the press, and clear up the doubts that had been cast upon the authority of juries.

The discussion, in quality and in duration, responded to the importance of the subject. De Grey, the attorney-general, speaking with temper and ingenuity, opposed the motion on behalf of the government; and he was supported by Thurlow, who, while he showed his sense of the gravity of the question by an unusual decency of language, made amends to himself by indulging in even more than a usual audacity of assertion. After adjuring his brother - members to protect virtue from the assaults of calumny-an appeal which, if rather trite, had at any rate the merit of being unselfish-he proceeded to enforce the proposition that in State libels it was idle to hope for fairness from jurymen, "who might justly be considered as parties concerned against the Crown." To have proclaimed the humiliating confession that the subjects of the Crown, as then worn, must be counted among its enemies, would at happier periods of our history have been the death-blow to a rising lawyer. But Thurlow was as well acquainted as any man living with the source which in those days fed the fountain of honor; and a declaration which, if made under a sovereign proud of being a constitutional monarch, would have sent him to pine on the back benches until his sin was purged and forgotten, exalted him into being George the Third's attorney-general within seven weeks after it had been uttered. The ministerial lawyers met with competent antagonists in the members of their own profession. Glynn, Dunning, and Wedderburn, as Lord Chatham thankfully acknowledged, "stood with much dignity and great abilities for the transcendent object now at stake." The day, said the old statesman, was a good and a great one for the public.

But the House, while it consented to be edified by the lawyers, looked, as its custom is, for amusement to the laymen,