'Tis that beauty alone but imperfectly charms, For though lightness may dazzle, 'tis kindness that warms. As on suns in the winter with pleasure we gaze, But feel not their warmth, though their splendour we praise, But love, and love only, our hearts can inflame? VIII. The admirers of Fox in his own age, and that which immediately succeeded, were much too Quixotic in their defence of his irregularities. They pretended that the rankness of the weeds only proved the excellence of the soil. They would appear to have forgotten that when we write, our paramount duty is that which we owe to the public; and that, consequently, whether treating of friend or foe, we are constrained to be impartial, to censure failings and excesses, to condemn vices, and to bestow our praise on great and good qualities wherever they exist. In Mr Fox's case, it must be acknowledged that he performed immense services for the cause of freedom; but at the same time, it is not to be dissembled, that had his private life at this period been less blameable, those services would have been much greater. It is no doubt true that a man has a right to frame his own theory of happiness, in which he is to consider himself as well as the public; but no scheme of philosophy, however large or lenient, will enable us, even in selfdefence, to make an apology for gaming or habitual intemperance. We should be lost in a multitude of minute details, did we attempt to follow Mr Fox through every stage of his parliamentary career. No great question was brought before the House of Commons in which he did not take a part. The House and the public were dissatisfied till they knew his opinions; while his friends in the legislature never calculated on success unless when they could reckon on the aid of his splendid abilities. In advocating the principles he upheld, and in defending his own opinions, he rather resembled the orators of antiquity, than the speakers of an age in which the relics of feudal manners were still suffered to exhibit themselves. Plain truth can never be commonly spoken, or the interest of an empire be faithfully served, in a senate among whose members the practice of duelling prevails. Among the members of such an assembly the feeling should be, that they are responsible only to the public, so that no private considerations whatever may interfere with the revelation of their inmost thoughts. This was Fox's conviction, and in strict conformity with it he acted. The ministers of the day being in extreme want of supporters, held out very strong inducements to all who would desert the liberal party, and give the aid of their talents or their votes to the government. Among the converts of this class, in 1780, was a Mr Adam, who, having acted with the Opposition up to the close of one session of parliament, was found at the commencement of the next on the Treasury benches, his reason having probably in studied insult. While seated on the Treasury bench, a letter was handed to him, conceived in the most offensive language; and to render the insult more pointed, it was brought him by a common door-keeper. This curious document was as follows: 'His Majesty has thought proper to order a new commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not perceive your name.-NORTH. TO THE HON. C. J. Fox.' Thus delivered from his political trammels, Fox was now at liberty to join the liberal party, to which, by his genius and temper, he properly belonged. But from taking this step he was still restrained by considerations of filial piety. He knew that his going publicly over to the Opposition would have greatly afflicted his father, and he therefore postponed the declaration of the change which had taken place in his mind, till Lord Holland's death had rendered all reserve on this point unnecessary. He now, therefore, took his stand among the antagonists of ministers; and for more than thirty years, with very brief intervals of official life, shed the glory of his eloquence over the Opposition benches. While in office, he had never lent his support to some of the most obnoxious acts of the minister, had never countenanced the proceedings against America, but had condemned every attempt to tax the colonies without their own acquiescence. Burke welcomed with open arms the seceding orator, who was destined at a future day to eclipse him in the senate, to take the lead of the liberal party out of his hands, to acquire unparalleled popularity throughout the country, and, by exciting in the elder statesman's breast the feelings of disappointment, resentment, and envy, to drive him to support the cause of legitimacy and authority, which the whole character of his mind ought to have led him to espouse from the first. Still, Burke performed distinguished services for liberal principles during the great contest with America. Again and again did he fill ministers with dismay, denouncing their projects, unmasking their principles, and revealing in glowing language to the public the crimes and delinquencies by which a state, priding itself on the patronage of freedom at home, sought to enslave that portion of its citizens who had taken up their abode in one of its distant dependencies. VII. It is impossible, in this brief view of Mr Fox's career, to criticise his several speeches, to point out their merits or defects, or to mark all the various stages by which he ascended to the highest position in parliament as an orator and a statesman. The misfortunes of his times enabled him to display all his wonderful abilities in the defence of freedom and humanity. Burke, with boundless ingenuity, and the inexhaustible resources of knowledge and imagination, advocated the cause of America. Fox stood by his side, inferior in age and experience, inferior in general acquisitions, inferior in the practice of oratory, but superior in warmth, in tenderness, in unaffected humanity, in generosity, and in genius. The one astonished the House; the other melted it into the love of what was right. The one appealed to the reason, or, with rhetorical flourishes, to the passions; the other went directly to the heart, and, by awakening all the noblest feelings of our nature, succeeded in rousing those who were not bound by the chains of official dependence, into an open condemnation of the wrongs which England was then inflicting on her transatlantic children. It would be satisfactory to be able to represent Fox as equally great and estimable in the relations of private life; but this, unfortunately, is not to be done. His passion for gaming, and his love of pleasure, kept him for ever in difficulties, notwithstanding the ample fortune he had inherited from his father. He was constantly beset by Jews and money-lenders, and there was a little back-parlour in his house in South Street on which he bestowed the name of the Jerusalem Chamber, because it was there he habitually contended with the Israelites. His perpetual state of pecuniary embarrassment must have reconciled him to the inheriting of a sinecure from his father, which, however, he soon disposed of for considerably less than its value. By way of illustrating the shifts to which his pecuniary difficulties led him to have recourse, we may borrow a story from Horace Walpole, which though incorrect in some particulars, is admitted by Lord Holland to be true upon the whole :-In the summer of this year, a woman who had been transported, and who, a few years before, had advertised herself as a sensible woman, who gave advice on all emergencies for half-a-guinea, was carried before Justice Fielding by a Quaker, whom she had defrauded of money under pretence of getting him a place by her interest with ministers, to whom she pretended to be related. She called herself the Hon. Mrs Grieve, and gave herself for cousin to Lord North, the Duke of Grafton, and Mrs Fitzroy. She had bribed Lord North's porter to let her into his house, and as her dupes waited for her in the street, they concluded that she had access to the minister. Before Fielding, she behaved with insolence; abused the Quaker, and told him she had disappointed him of the place because he was an immoral man. Her art and address had been so great, that she had avoided being culpable of any fraud for which she could be committed to prison, and was dismissed, the Quaker only having power to sue her at common-law for the recovery of his money, and for which suit she was not weak enough to wait when at liberty. But the Quaker's part of the story would not have spread Mrs Grieve's renown, if a far more improbable dupe had not been caught in her snare. In a word, the famous Charles Fox had been the bubble of this woman, who undoubtedly had uncommon talents, and a knowledge of the world. She had persuaded Fox, desperate with his debts, that she could procure him, as a wife, a Miss Phipps, with a fortune of L.80,000, who was just arrived from the West Indies. There was such a person coming over, but not with half the fortune, nor known to Mrs Grieve. With this bait she amused Charles for many months, appointed meetings, and once persuaded him that as Miss Phipps liked a fair man, and as he was remarkably black, he must powder his eyebrows. Of that intended interview he was disappointed by the imaginary lady's falling ill, of what was afterwards pretended to be the small-pox. After he had waited some time, Mrs Grieve affected to go and see if Miss Phipps was a little better, and able to receive her swain; but on opening the door, a servant-man, who had been posted to wait upon the stairs, as coming down with the remains of a basin of broth, told Mrs Grieve that Miss Phipps was not well enough to receive the visit. Had a novice been the prey of these artifices, it would not have been extraordinary; but Charles Fox had been in the world from his childhood, and been treated as a man long before the season. He ought to have known there could not have been an Hon. Mrs Grieve, nor such a being as she pretended to be. Indeed, in one stroke, she had singular finesse: instead of asking him for money, which would have detected her plot at once, she was so artful as to lend him L.300, or thereabouts, and she paid herself by his chariot standing frequently at her door, which served to impose on her more vulgar dupes. His experience, from this time forward, lay chiefly among the members of the liberal party, and among others, he became acquainted with Sheridan, though at what period is not exactly known. Lord John Townshend gives the following account of their first meeting, and of the impression they made on each other :-'I made the first dinner-party at which they met, having told Fox, that all the notions he might have conceived of Sheridan's talents and genius from the comedy of The Rivals, &c., would fall infinitely short of the admiration of his astonishing powers which I was sure he would entertain at the first interview. The first interview between them-there were very few present, only Tickell and myself, and one or two more- -I shall never forget. Fox told me after breaking up from dinner, that he had always thought Hare, after my uncle Charles Townshend, the wittiest man he ever met with, but that Sheridan surpassed them both infinitely; and Sheridan told me next day that he was quite lost in admiration of Fox, and that it was a puzzle to him to say what he admired most-his commanding superiority of talents and universal knowledge, or his playful fancy, artless manners, and benevolence of heart, which shewed itself in every word he uttered!' There exists, unfortunately, no means of discovering in what manner Fox at this period conducted his studies. We are told, ingenuity, and the inexhaustible resources of knowledge and imagination, advocated the cause of America: Fox stood by his side, inferior in age and experience, inferior in general acquisitions, inferior in the practice of oratory, but superior in warmth, in tenderness, in unaffected humanity, in generosity, and in genius. The one astonished the House; the other melted it into the love of what was right. The one appealed to the reason, or, with rhetorical flourishes, to the passions; the other went directly to the heart, and, by awakening all the noblest feelings of our nature, succeeded in rousing those who were not bound by the chains of official dependence, into an open condemnation of the wrongs which England was then inflicting on her transatlantic children. It would be satisfactory to be able to represent Fox as equally great and estimable in the relations of private life; but this, unfortunately, is not to be done. His passion for gaming, and his love of pleasure, kept him for ever in difficulties, notwithstanding the ample fortune he had inherited from his father. He was constantly beset by Jews and money-lenders, and there was a little back-parlour in his house in South Street on which he bestowed the name of the Jerusalem Chamber, because it was there he habitually contended with the Israelites. His perpetual state of pecuniary embarrassment must have reconciled him to the inheriting of a sinecure from his father, which, however, he soon disposed of for considerably less than its value. By way of illustrating the shifts to which his pecuniary difficulties led him to have recourse, we may borrow a story from Horace Walpole, which though incorrect in some particulars, is admitted by Lord Holland to be true upon the whole :-In the summer of this year, a woman who had been transported, and who, a few years before, had advertised herself as a sensible woman, who gave advice on all emergencies for half-a-guinea, was carried before Justice Fielding by a Quaker, whom she had defrauded of money under pretence of getting him a place by her interest with ministers, to whom she pretended to be related. She called herself the Hon. Mrs Grieve, and gave herself for cousin to Lord North, the Duke of Grafton, and Mrs Fitzroy. She had bribed Lord North's porter to let her into his house, and as her dupes waited for her in the street, they concluded that she had access to the minister. Before Fielding, she behaved with insolence; abused the Quaker, and told him she had disappointed him of the place because he was an immoral man. Her art and address had been so great, that she had avoided being culpable of any fraud for which she could be committed to prison, and was dismissed, the Quaker only having power to sue her at common-law for the recovery of his money, and for which suit she was not weak enough to wait when at liberty. But the Quaker's part of the story would not have spread Mrs Grieve's renown, if a far more improbable dupe had not been caught in her In a word, the famous Charles Fox had been the bubble of this woman, who undoubtedly had uncommon talents, and a snare. |