them with an animosity which would have been indecent if directed against the most inveterate of foes. He had cruelly wronged a multitude of humble people who had hitherto been exempted from the severities of party warfare. And all this he had apparently done in the wantonness of deliberate but almost aimless malice; without any benefit to himself which could compensate for a tithe of the unpopularity that pursued him into his retirement, and attended him to his grave. There was no crime of which the public believed him incapable, and not very many which he was not expressly charged with having committed. In the political literature of the next eleven years, Lord Holland supplied an unfailing synonym for tyrant, incendiary, and public robber. Whenever the reader lights upon the title which Fox had waded through so much to earn, it is ten to one that within the next half-dozen lines there will be found an allusion to the gallows; and, what is more significant than the direct vituperation with which he was assailed, he is nowhere mentioned in terms of praise or charity or even of indifference. (Junius, his only friend among the satirists who wrote between the Peace of Paris and the outbreak of the American war, proved his good-will by abstaining from any reference to the hated name. Mason branded Lord Holland in his smoothest, and

A ferocious libel, published originally under Churchill's initials, with much else that affords desultory but not unprofitable reading on an idle afternoon, may be noticed in the "Foundling for Wit"-a collection of extracts, elegant and otherwise, published in annual volumes between the years 1768 and 1773. The ghost of a felon who had lately died at Tyburn for forging Lord Holland's name to a lease appears to the paymaster-general as he lies in his bedroom at Holland House,

"revolving future schemes

His country to betray."

The most vigorous lines read like a horrible travesty of the last verse in "Edwin and Angelina."

"Not all thy art or wealth can e'er

Avert the stern decree;

The same base hand that stretched my neck

Shall do the same for thee."

Churchill in his most pointed, verse.' The men of fashion whom he had helped into comfortable places, and in whose company he had drunk whole cellarfuls of claret, were at the pains to collect, and republish in a permanent shape, all the savage lampoons which might inform posterity how universally their old boon companion was detested. And Gray summed up the popular abhorrence in stanzas of extraordinary power, which describe the fallen statesman, "old, and abandoned by each venal friend," as consumed by an undying rancor against the people of London on account of their fidelity to Pitt. With an energy such as he nowhere else expends upon contemporary themes, the poet depicts Lord Holland in his gloomy retreat on the bleak shore of the North Foreland, which he had made still more hideous with mimic ruins in order to feed his diseased fancy with an image of the desolation to which he would have condemned the disobedient city, if only he had met with colleagues bold enough to carry out his atrocious designs.

1

"Lift against virtue Power's oppressive rod;
Betray thy country, and deny thy God;
And, in one general comprehensive line
To group (which volumes scarcely could define),
Whate'er of sin and dulness can be said,

Join to a Fox's heart a Dashwood's head."

CHURCHILL, Epistle to Hogarth.

Gray, with an affectation unworthy of his powers, gives the title of an "Impromptu" to a performance which, by its condensation of meaning. and lucidity of expression, recalls the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." Such lines as these are not produced offhand:

"Ah! said the sighing peer, had Bute been true,

Nor Murray's, Rigby's, Bedford's friendship vain;
Far better scenes than these had blessed our view,
And realized the beauties which we feign.

"Purged by the sword, and purified by fire,

Then had we seen proud London's hated walls.
Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter's choir,

And foxes stunk and littered in Saint Paul's."

CHAPTER II.

1749-1768.

Lord Holland in his own Family.-Birth of Charles James Fox.--His Childhood.-Wandsworth.-Eton and Paris.-Dr. Barnard.-The Muse Etonenses.-Picture at Holland House.-Lady Sarah Lennox.-Fox at Oxford.-Tour in Italy.-Fox's Industry and Accomplishments.--His Return to England.

LORD HOLLAND was neither so wicked nor so unhappy as the world supposed him. He had never courted esteem, and, while his health was still fairly good and his nerves strong, he cared not a farthing for popularity. He looked upon the public as a milch-cow, which might bellow and toss its horns as much as ever it pleased, now that he had filled his pail and had placed the gate between himself and the animal. But, though he had no self-respect to wound, he could be touched through his affection; for this political buccaneer, whose hand had been against every man and in every corner of the national till, was in private a warm-hearted and faithful friend. Lord Holland cannot be called nice in the choice of some among the objects on whom he bestowed his regard; but, once given, it never was withdrawn. He had attached himself to Rigby with a devotion most unusual in an intimacy made at Newmarket, and cemented over the bottle;' and his feelings were more deeply and more permanently hurt by the unkindness of one coarse and corrupt adventurer than by the contempt and aversion of every honest man in the country who read the newspapers. To the end of his life he could not

"I dined at Holland House," wrote Rigby on one occasion, "where, though I drank claret with the master of it from dinner till two o'clock in the morning, I could not wash away the sorrow he is in at the shocking condition his eldest boy is in-a distemper they call Sanvitoss dance. I believe I spell it damnably."

mention his old associate without a touch of pathos which has its effect even upon those whose reason inclines them to regard his expressions of tenderness as the lamentations of a rogue who has been jockeyed by his accomplice. "I loved him," he says to George Selwyn; "and whether to feel or not to feel on such an occasion be most worthy of a man, I won't dispute; but the fact is that I have been, and still am, whenever I think of it, very unhappy." Six years after the breach he was still writing in the same strain. "There is one question which, I hope, will not be asked—

'Has life no sourness, drawn so near its end?"

Indeed it has; yet I guard against it as much as possible, and am weak enough sometimes to think that if Rigby chiefly, and some others, had pleased, I should have walked down the vale of years more easily. But it is weak in me to think so often as I do of Rigby, and you will be ashamed of me."

Whatever Lord Holland suffered by the coldness and treachery of the outside world was amply made up to him within his domestic circle. As will always be the case with a man of strong intelligence and commanding powers, who has the gift of forgetting himself in others, there was no limit to the attachment which he inspired and the happiness which he spread around him. In all that he said and wrote, his inability to recognize the existence of public duty contrasts singularly with his admirable unconsciousness that he had any claims whatever upon those whom he loved; and, as a sure result, he was not more hated abroad than adored at home. That home presented a beautiful picture of undoubting and undoubted affection; of perfect similarity in tastes and pursuits; of mutual appreciation, which thorough knowledge of the world, and the strong sense inherent in the Fox character, never allowed to degenerate into mutual adulation. There seldom were children who might so easily have been guided into the straight and noble path, if the father had possessed a just conception of the distinction between right and wrong; but the notion of making anybody of whom he was fond uncomfortable, for the sake of so very doubtful an end as the

attainment of self-control, was altogether foreign to his creed and his disposition. However, if the sterner virtues were wanting among his young people, the graces were there in abundance. Never was the natural man more dangerously attractive than in Lord Holland's family; and most of all in the third son, a boy who was the pride and light of the house, with his sweet temper, his rare talents, and his inexhaustible vivacity.'

Charles James Fox was born on the twenty-fourth January, 1749. His father was already tenant of the suburban palace and paradise from which he was to derive his title; but it was a work of no small time and labor to prepare the mansion for its great destinies, and the noise of carpenters and the bustle of upholsterers obliged Lady Caroline to choose a lodging in Conduit Street for the scene of an event which would have added distinction even to Holland House.' Holland House, however, was the seat of Charles's boyhood; and his earliest associations were connected with its lofty avenues, its trim gardens, its broad stretches of deep grass, its fantastic gables, its endless vista of boudoirs, libraries, and drawing-rooms, each more home-like and habitable than the last. All who knew him at this stage of his existence recollected him as at once. the most forward and the most engaging of small creatures.

1 Lord Holland had four sons-Stephen, Henry (who died so young that well-informed writers have called Charles the second son), Charles, and Henry Edward.

* Fox bought Holland House in 1767. Up to that date he paid for the property a rent less than is asked for five out of six among the hundreds of dwellings which now fringe its northern and eastern outskirts, but which have not been permitted to invade the sacred enclosure. "It will be a great pity," wrote Scott," when this ancient house must come down and give way to rows and crescents. One is chiefly affected by the air of deep seclusion which is spread around the domain." This was the limit of what Sir Walter would say in favor of a building which he was perhaps too good a Tory to admire as it deserved. Walpole, writing in 1747, says, "Mr. Fox gave a great ball last week in Holland House, which he has taken for a long term, and where he is making great improvements. It is a brave old house, and belonged to the gallant Earl of Holland, the lover of Charles the First's queen."