solved not to abandon their first line of defence without a struggle. Their decision was fortified by a petition from a group of Dissenting ministers who, fearing Socinianism more than they loved religious liberty, entreated Parliament not to surrender a test imposed expressly for the maintenance of those essential doctrines on which the Reformation was founded. Lady Huntingdon, who thoroughly understood the distinction between toleration and latitudinarianism, remonstrated earnestly with these misguided men; but they went blindly to their fate, which was as terrible as any that oratory has within the resources of its armory to inflict. "Two bodies of men," said Burke, "approach our House, and prostrate themselves at our bar. We ask not honors,' say the one. 'We have no aspiring wishes; no views upon the purple. The mitre has no charms for us, nor aim we at the chief cathedral seats. Content to pass our days in an humble state, we pray, for the sake of him who is Lord of conscience, that we may not be treated as vagrants for acting agreeably to the dictates of internal rectitude.' 'We, on the contrary,' say the Dissenters who petition against Dissenters, 'enjoy every species of indulgence we can wish for; and, as we are content, we pray that others who are not content may meet with no relief. We desire that you will not tolerate these men, because they will not go as far as we; though we desire to be tolerated-we who will not go as far as you. Our prayer to this Honorable House is that they be thrown into prison if ever they come within five miles of a corporate town, because they stop somewhat short of us in point of doctrine.' What," cried the indignant speaker, "shall we say to these reptiles except 'Arrangez-vous, canaille!" If any one would measure the extent of the transformation wrought in the British mind by its recoil from the excesses of the French Revolution, he has but to imagine the storm of fury and disgust that would have been raised in the Parliament of 1793 by a sentence which, a score of years before, was heard inside the same walls with a composure very nearly akin to approbation. Even in 1773, however, it was boldly spoken; but there was something that evening still more boldly done. Charles Fox, who had made

it his vocation to serve his way towards that official eminence which Burke could only hope to carry by storm, planted himself at the door of the lobby as the responsible patron of a proposal every advocate of which was a marked man in the books of one who could close and open at will the road to place and power. How narrowly and attentively the king scanned the lists of those who told and voted for and against the measure which he detested was known a fortnight afterwards, when that measure once more met its annual death in the House of Lords. Alone among his brethren, Green of Lincoln ventured to assert the principle that pious and learned men ought not to be ruined and imprisoned for the crime of preaching to hearers who would reject any ministrations but theirs. "Green! Green!" exclaimed the king, when this instance of episcopal mutiny came to the royal ears; “Green shall never be translated;" and an act which betokened independence in a bishop, who could hardly hope or care to rise higher than the hill on which his cathedral stood, was nothing short of heroism in a junior lord whose ambition was as unbounded as his abilities. But could Charles Fox have foreseen the career that lay before him, he would right willingly have incurred the very extremity of Court disfavor as the price at which he laid the foundation of the strongest and most enduring sentiment that any section of the English community has ever entertained towards any statesman-the grateful veneration with which the whole body of his Nonconformist fellow-citizens adored him living, and mourned him dead.'

1 A gentleman who sat as the first member for Manchester used to tell how the news of Fox's death affected his father, a leading merchant and citizen of that town, who had been forced to hide for his life from a mob, set on by men of his own class to punish him for his opposition to the American war; who became a Nonconformist at the time when the Church had cast in her lot with the persecutors of civil and religious liberty in the early days of the French Revolution; and who lived to treasure a Peterloo medal. The child, for he was but six years old, never forgot the scene: the untasted meal; the unaccustomed tears; the uplifted hands; the exclamation that the cause for which so much had been sacrificed and suffered had received an irreparable blow.

CHAPTER X.

1772-1774.

The Moral Danger of the Position in which Fox now stood.—He attacks Lord North on the Church Nullum Tempus Bill, and resigns the Admiralty. The Motives of his Conduct.-Marriages of the Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester.-Anger of the King.—The Royal Marriage Bill.-The Bill gets through the Lords, is strenuously opposed in the Commons, and with difficulty passes into Law.-Strong Feeling of Fox on the Question.-His Earnest Efforts against the Measure.— His Sentiments with Regard to Women, and his Eager Care of their Rights and Interests in Parliament.-His Private Life.-The Bettingbook at Brooks's.-Personal Tastes and Habits of Charles Fox.-His Extravagance and Indebtedness.-Horace Walpole on Fox.-Influence and Popularity of the Young Man in the House of Commons.-Fox goes to the Treasury.-Lord Clive.-Fox and Johnson.-John Horne Tooke.-Fox leaves the Ministry, never to return.

FOR the present, however, there was no love lost between the Dissenters and their champion of the future. Ten years of George the Third's policy had separated the nation into two deeply marked and intensely hostile factions, which in their composition, and even their titles, revived some of the most ominous associations in our history. "The names of Whig and Tory," said a political writer in the year 1774, "have for some time been laid aside, and that of the Court party and Country party substituted in their room;" and when English politics took the shape that they had worn under the Stuarts, there was no doubt on which side the Nonconformists would be banded. Those were days when it was not permitted to be friend and enemy by halves; and an occasional vote or speech in favor of religious liberty did not make Independents and Presbyterians, who were Wilkites almost to a man, forget that Charles Fox had been foremost in keeping the representative of Middlesex out of the House of Commons, and in preventing the people of England from

learning what went on inside it. Here and there might be discovered an individual member of the middle or lower classes acute enough to detect that the young politician was made of different stuff from the jobbers who shared his bench and cheered his speeches.' But the mass of mankind judge their public men as they find them; and Fox was almost universally regarded as a bird of the same feather with the Bedfords, if, indeed, the dice-box had not rendered that metaphor inapplicable to any of the clan. To the great majority of reasonable Englishmen he seemed as desperate in his fortunes as the worst of his colleagues; as insolent in his defiance of sober political sense and legitimate popular aspirations; and superior to them in nothing except in those mental gifts which he had hitherto employed only to the detriment of the commonwealth. And that which he seemed he was rapidly

2

In a newspaper of the period there is a letter from a Quaker commencing with the words "Friend Charles Fox, thou seemest to be possessed of a very depraved kind of ambition," and urging him to put his talents to better purpose than "persecutions for telling the truth;" a letter conceived in a tone of respectful and hopeful remonstrance which its author would never have wasted upon Wedderburn.

2 The reputation for mischievous ability which Charles Fox had acquired almost in boyhood would be incredible if it did not stand recorded in almost every page of the political literature of the day. There was no enemy of liberty so powerful and so highly placed that the lad's name was not coupled with his in the outbursts of public reprobation, One satirist, writing of the Barons of Runnymede, tells us that

"Indignant from their hallow'd bed

Each lifts a venerable head

And casts a look of fire

At Mansfield, chief among the band
That deal injustice round the land,

At either Fox, and at their sire."

Another testifies, in not ineffective verse, how the young placeman silenced those among his elders who were his betters, and outdid in impudence those who were not.

"Hear, hear him! Peace, each hoary pate!

While ribaldry succeeds debate,

Learn pun and wit from youth high-mettled."

tending to become. George Herbert's proverb, "Keep not ill men company, lest you increase the number," would soon have met with its usual fulfilment had not Providence, kinder to Charles Fox than himself, made use of his own unruly impulses to work for him an escape from a contagion which must erelong have incurably poisoned even such an intellect and such a nature as his.

On the seventeenth of February, 1772, a member of Parliament, whose family estates were confiscated abbey lands, the title-deeds of which had once been nearly sold for old parchment by a discharged servant, asked leave to introduce a bill for the purpose of securing the holders of what had formerly been Church property against dormant claims of more than sixty years' standing. Lord North, at the instance of the bishops, with whose aid in the Upper House his government could not afford to dispense,' warmly opposed the motion, and took its author roundly to task for having omitted to place the House of Commons in possession of the details of his scheme. But roundness and warmth were not words to describe the rollicking audacity with which Charles Fox fell upon the prime-minister, charging him with having arbitrarily invented a most unparliamentary rule of procedure in order to combat a proposal against which he had not been at the pains to bring forward a single parliamentary reason. Following up his speech with his vote, he took with him into. the lobby his brother Stephen, and other members upon whose allegiance Lord North was accustomed to depend; so that the ministry came nearer a serious defeat than they had ever done since the evening on which the eloquence of the same unaccountable young gentleman had preserved them from being beaten on the Nullum Tempus Bill of Sir William

Even Rigby is told to look to his laurels.

1

"Burnish thy shining front anew.

Shall Fox, shall Harley, Luttrell, dare
With thine their foreheads to compare,
Great boatswain of the Bloomsbury crew?"

Lindsey to Jebb, March 3, 1772.