When April came, Lord and Lady Holland returned to England; while Charles, who at all times in his life could obtain as many companions as he wanted by holding up his finger, remained on the Continent with Lord Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Uvedale Price, an Eton acquaintance of his own age. In the following October the old people crossed the Channel again, but got no farther than the South of France, where they made an unbroken stay of six months. They were followed by Lord Carlisle, who at length tore himself away from London, and set forth upon his "necessary banishment;" broken-hearted, of course, but, as is pretty evident from his subsequent correspondence, by no means inconsolable. Lord Holland, who had been wofully bored at Nice,' though he admitted that angels could not enjoy better weather, was sincerely grateful for the trouble which the young men took to amuse "one," he writes, "so universally despised as I am. Lord Carlisle is very good to Charles, and Charles to me, to be so cheerful as they are in this dull place." "Harry," he says elsewhere, speaking of his youngest son, "will lose no learning by being with Charles, instead of being at Eton. I am sure I am a great gainer by the latter's kind and cheerful stay here; and if I were to go on expatiating upon his and Lord

And riding-school no more divert;
Newmarket does, for there you flirt.
But why does he no longer dream
Of yellow Tiber and its shore?

Of his friend Charles's favorite scheme,

On waking, think no more?"

Charles had called on Lord Breadalbane to make inquiries about Nice, and brought Lord Holland back a most uninviting account. "The commandant, le Comte de Nangis, of a good family in Savoy, and his lady are very polite, and were extremely obliging to Lord and Lady Glenorchy. There is an assembly at his house every evening, consisting of from fifteen to twenty-five ladies, and men in proportion, where they play cards very low. There is no other meeting of company in the town, and consequently very little, or rather no, amusement. The lodgings are bad, with bare walls and brick floors, and there is certainly nothing to invite strangers thither but the air. The best house to be let is a newbuilt one in the square, but quite unfurnished."

They have, and

Carlisle's merits, I should never have done. promise, every agreeable and good quality; and will not despise themselves, or be despised by other people, at least these forty years." Forty years from that time Charles Fox was in Westminster Abbey, and Lord Carlisle was patiently submitting to the alternate praises and insults of his fiery young cousin: conduct for which Byron, when his arrogance had been corrected by the experience of a real sorrow, made memorable atonement in his noblest poem.'

Early in 1768 Lord Carlisle set off upon a journey, the stages of which may be traced in his letters to George Selwyn -letters so good as to arouse a regret that the writer did not devote himself to a province of literature in which he might have been mentioned with Walpole, instead of manufacturing poetry which it was flattery to compare with Roscommon's. Accompanied by Lord Kildare, he crossed the Alps in a style very different from that in which Englishmen of his age cross them now; in a chair carried by six men, shuddering at every step, and tortured by apprehensions for the safety of his dog, which, bolder than himself, ventured now and then to look over the edge of a precipice. The scenery of a fine pass inspired him with no ideas except those of horror and melancholy; and he never speaks of "beauties" until he is safe and warm in the Opera-house at Turin. At Genoa he met Charles Fox, who, like a good son, had stayed at Nice till the last moment; and the three friends went by Piacenza, Parma, and Bologna to Florence, and thence to Rome. The history of their proceedings may be read in the fourth book of the "Dunciad." Lads of eighteen and nineteen, who had been their own masters almost since they could remember; bearing names that were a passport to any circle; with unimpaired health, and a credit at their banker's which they were not yet old enough to have exhausted, made their grand tour after much the

1 "Childe Harold," canto iii., stanzas xxix. and xxx.

Three years previously to this, Wilkes pronounces the Apennines to be "not near so high nor so horrid as the Alps. On the Alps you see very few tolerable spots."

same fashion at all periods of the eighteenth century; and it is unnecessary to repeat what Pope has told in a manner that surpasses himself. Travelling with eight servants apiece; noticed by queens; treated as equals by ambassadors; losing their hearts in one palace and their money in another, and yet, on the whole, getting into less mischief in high society than when left to their own devices, they

"sauntered Europe round,

And gathered every vice on Christian ground;
Saw every court; heard every king declare
His royal sense of operas or the fair;

Tried all hors-d'œuvres, all liqueurs defined,

Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined.”1

Fox threw into his follies a vivacity and an originality which were meant for better things. Looking forward to the day when, as arbiter of dress, he was to lead the taste of the town through all stages from coxcombry to slovenliness, he spared no pains to equip himself for the exercise of his lofty functions. He tried upon Italian dandies the effect of the queer little French hat and the red heels with which he designed to astonish his brother-macaronies of St. James's Street; and, before he and his friend left the Continent, the pair of scape

The memoirs of last century swarm with proofs that young Englishmen of family were only too well received in Continental, and most of all in Italian, drawing-rooms. The nobleman who, rather by contrast to the others of his name than for any exceptionally heinous misdoings of his own, goes by the sobriquet of " the bad Lord Lyttelton," dated his moral ruin from his grand tour, when he fought two duels and found the women “all Armidas." It might have been thought that young George Grenville's report of his experiences at Naples in the year 1774 was over-colored, if it had been addressed to any less respectable correspondent than Lord Temple. A nephew may be trusted to say the best for the society in which he lives when writing to an uncle by whose aid he expects to come into Parliament. At Vienna, Grenville complains that very few ladies of rank would allow him the honor of their acquaintance without insisting on his purchasing it at the loo-table-a condition which would not have stood much in the way of Charles Fox or Lord Carlisle, whose confidences to George Selwyn are such as irresistibly to suggest a wish that they were both back at Eton in the hands of a head-master who knew his duty.

graces drove post all the way from Paris to Lyons in order to select patterns for their embroidered waistcoats.

In one respect Fox did not resemble Pope's hero. Unlike the youth who

"Spoiled his own language and acquired no more,"

he came back from the Continent an excellent linguist, and a better English scholar than ever. He was fairly contented with the knowledge which, as the fruit of his industry at Oxford, he had obtained of Greek and Latin; and his standard was not a low one. He bade Virgil and Euripides lie by till such time as he could read them again with something of the pleasure of novelty; and from the day that he landed at Genoa he flung himself into the delights of Italian literature with all the vehemence of his ardent nature. "For God's sake," he wrote to his friend Fitzpatrick, "learn Italian as fast as you can, to read Ariosto. There is more good poetry in Italian than in all other languages I understand put together. Make haste and read all these things, that you may be fit to talk to Christians." Every moment that could be spared from gaming and flirting he spent in devouring Dante and Ariosto, or in drudging his way through Guicciardini and Davila. Ile had a student's instinct for getting at the heart of a language. Like other men who look forward to reading with their knees in the fire or with their elbows in the grass, he knew that he must begin with the dictionary and the exercise-book. While a boy, he had as much French as most diplomatists would think sufficient for a lifetime. Lord Holland has preserved a copy of verses written by Charles at Eton which, in three years out of four, would still win him the prize in French composition at any of our public schools.' But he was dissatisfied

1 When, in after-days, these verses were brought to the notice of Fox, he spoke of them as worthless. "I did not," he said, " at that time know the rules of French versification." The subject, indeed, of the lines was not likely to please many besides his father; for they consist in a eulogy on the "digne citoyen" Lord Bute at the expense of Chatham, who is denounced as "un fourbe orateur,” the idol and tyrant of a land which the poet blushes to call his country.

with his own proficiency. "As to French," he says, "I am far from being so thorough a master of it as I could wish; but I know so much of it that I could perfect myself at any time with very little trouble, especially if I pass three or four months in France." First and last, he passed a great deal more than three or four months in that seductive country, and few besides himself would have spoken slightingly of the trouble which he bestowed on the task of acquiring its language. He adopted the useful custom of writing from France in French to the friends with whom he could take that liberty. Much of what he had to say he put into the shape of verses, over the construction of which he must have expended no small labor; and any error in rhyme or prosody which he suspected himself of having committed in a letter that had been already despatched he took care to point out and amend in the next. His exertions were not thrown away. None ever found fault with his French except Napoleon, the purity of whose own accent was by no means above criticism. When Fox revisited Paris after the Peace of Amiens, the survivors of the eighteenth-century society, who were venturing once more to show themselves in their old haunts, were astonished by the spirit and correctness with which he reproduced the phraseology in which President Henault talked to Madame du Deffand and the Duchesse de la Vallière in the days before the guillotine had been heard of.

There are some who apparently study the histories of distinguished men in order to find illustrations of the theory that fame in after-life does not necessarily depend upon habits of work formed betimes and persistently maintained. Readers of this class will derive even less than their usual consolation and encouragement from the career of Fox. The third Lord Holland, who knew his uncle far better than all other people together who have recorded their impressions of his character, tells us that the most marked and enduring feature in his disposition was his invincible propensity "to labor at excellence." His rule in small things, as in great, was the homely proverb that what is worth doing at all is worth doing well. His verses of society were polished with a care which