Third son of the first Lord Holland, was born in London, 24th January 1749, and educated at Eton and Hertford College, Oxford, spending his vacations in the gayest circles of the French capital. Even as a schoolboy he led an irregular life, but was distinguished for ability; at nineteen his father had him brought into parliament as member for Midhurst. Soon after he attained his majority he came forward as a supporter of Lord North, and was made a lord of Admiralty. In 1772 he resigned, but next year was named a commissioner of the Treasury. Dismissed from that post in 1775 after another quarrel with Lord North, he passed over to the ranks of the opposition, and during the American war was the most formidable opponent of the coercive measures of government. After the downfall of North (1782), Fox was one of the secretaries of State till the death of the Marquis of Rockingham. In 1783 the North and Fox coalition was formed, and Fox resumed his former office; but the rejection of his India Bill by the House of Lords led to the resignation of his government. Now Pitt came into power, and the long contest between him and Fox began. The sudden illness of the king in 1788 and the need for a regency recalled Fox from a visit to Gibbon at Lausanne and to Italy. The regency, the trial of Warren Hastings, and the French Revolution gave ample scope to the talents and energies of Fox, who employed his influence to modify, if not to counteract, the policy of his great rival. He was a strenuous opponent of the war with France, and an advocate of non-intervention. After Pitt’s death in January 1806, Fox, recalled to office, set on foot negotiations for a peace with France. He was on the point of introducing a bill for the abolition of the slave-trade, when he died at Chiswick, 13th September 1806. He was buried, near Pitt, in Westminster Abbey. Fox was a hard liver, addicted to gambling and drinking; his bearing towards his opponents was generous. Burke called him “the greatest debater the world ever saw.”

Personal

  I believe there never was a person yet created who had the faculty of reasoning like him. His judgments are never wrong; his decision is formed quicker than any man’s I ever conversed with; and he never seems to mistake but in his own affairs.

  Fox is a most extraordinary man; here is a man … who has divided the Kingdom with Cæsar; so that it was a doubt whether the nation should be ruled by the sceptre of George the Third, or the tongue of Fox.

  I beg you would assure him that my expressions of esteem for him are not mere professions. I really think him a great man, and I should not think so, if I did not believe he was at bottom, and would prove himself, a good one.

  Mr. Fox is in a very bad state of health. His rapid journeys to England, on the news of the king’s illness, have brought on him a violent complaint in the bowels, which will, it is imagined, prove mortal. However, if it should, it will vindicate his character from the general report that he has no bowels, as has been most strenuously asserted by his creditors.

  I have eat, and drank, and conversed, and sat up all night with Fox in England; but it never has happened, perhaps it never can happen again, that I should enjoy him, as I did that day, alone, from ten in the morning till ten at night. We had little politics; though he gave me in a few words such a character of Pitt as one great man should give of another his rival; much of books, from my own, on which he flattered me very pleasantly, to Homer and the Arabian Nights; much about the country, my garden, (which he understands far better than I do); and, upon the whole, I think he envies me, and would do so were he minister.

	He, too, is fall’n, who Britain’s loss supplied,
	With him our fast-reviving hopes have died;
	Not one great people only raise his urn,
	All Europe’s far-extending regions mourn.
	“These feelings wide, let sense and truth unclue,
	To give the palm where Justice points it’s due:”
	Yet let not canker’d Calumny assail,
	Or round our statesmen wind her gloomy veil.
	Fox! o’er whose corse a mourning world must weep,
	Whose dear remains in honor’d marble sleep;
	For whom, at last, e’en hostile nations groan,
	While friends and foes alike his talents own;
	Fox shall in Britain’s future annals shine,
	Nor e’en to Pitt the patriot’s palm resign;
	Which Envy, wearing Candor’s sacred mask,
	For Pitt, and Pitt alone, has dared to ask.

  Mr. Fox, though not an adept in the use of political wiles, was very unlikely to be the dupe of them. He was conversant in the ways of man, as well as in the contents of books. He was acquainted with the peculiar language of states, their peculiar forms, and the grounds and effects of their peculiar usages. From his earliest youth he had investigated the science of politics on the greater and smaller scale; he had studied it in the records of history, both popular and rare,—in the conferences of ambassadors,—in the archives of royal cabinets,—in the minuter detail of memoirs—and in collected or straggling anecdotes of the wrangles, intrigues, and cabals, which, springing up in the secret recesses of courts, shed their baneful influence on the determination of sovereigns, the fortune of favourites and the tranquility of kingdoms.

	Genius and taste, and talent gone,
	For ever tombed beneath the stone,
	Where—taming thought to human pride—
	The mighty chiefs sleep side by side.
	Drop upon Fox’s grave the tear,
	’Twill trickle to his rival’s bier.
	O’er Pitt’s the mournful requiem sound,
	And Fox’s shall the notes rebound.
	The solemn echo seems to cry,—
	“Here let their discord with them die.
	Speak not for those a separate doom
	Whom fate made brothers in the tomb;
	But search the land of living men,
	Where wilt thou find their like again?”

  I have never seen Mr. Fox more perfectly happy than when we were quite alone. He was so utterly divested of a wish to shine, or of any appetite for flattery, that he in no manner required, what is called, company, to enliven or animate him. A lover of nature, and consequently an enemy to art, he held, I think, above every quality, sincerity, and unaffectedness; and, being also of a character singularly domestic and amiable, he found in his little circle all he wished and wanted. To his other attainments he had added very considerable knowledge in Botany; and without making it a primary object, enjoyed every pursuit connected with agriculture, in a high degree.

  In London mixed society Fox conversed little; but at his own house in the country, with his intimate friends, he would talk on forever, with all the openness and simplicity of a child: he has continued talking to me for half-an-hour after he had taken up his bed-room candle.—I have seen it somewhere stated that Fox liked to talk about great people: nothing can be more untrue; he hardly ever alluded to them.

  Nature bestowed on Mr. Fox the qualities which are certain to command distinction in popular assemblies. He possessed in the highest degree the temperament of the orator, which, equal to the poet’s in the intensity of feeling, is diametrically opposed to the poet’s in the direction to which its instincts impel it…. Mr. Fox might have spent the night in a gaming-house, hurried off to Newmarket at daybreak, returned just in time to open a debate in the House of Commons—but who shall say that during those hours he had found no intervals in which his reason was arranging a course of argument, and his memory suggesting the appropriate witticism or the felicitous allusion?… Those, indeed, notably err, who, judging only by the desultory social habits and dissipated tastes of Mr. Fox, conclude that his faculties attained their strength without the necessary toil of resolute exertion.

  There is one man, Charles Fox, happy from his cradle, who learned everything without study, whom his father trained in prodigality and recklessness, whom, from the age of twenty-one, the public voice proclaimed as the first in eloquence and the leader of a great party, liberal, humane, sociable, faithful to these generous expectations, whose very enemies pardoned his faults, whom his friends adored, whom labour never wearied, whom rivals never embittered, whom power did not spoil; a lover of converse, of literature, of pleasure, who has left the impress of his rich genius in the persuasive abundance, in the fine character, the clearness and continuous ease of his speeches.

  It was an end which would better have become a serious Christian. But it is not for us to pass sentence on a man so benevolent in his dispositions and designs. We may rather be surprised at his possessing so much virtue, not having the gift of faith. We may hope that his good deeds, his gratitude to all who had ever served him, his constant uneasiness till he had repaid their kindness, his uniform longing for peace, and his general philanthropy, have been taken into account by the Merciful Judge who makes allowances for all. “Perhaps no human being,” said Gibbon, “was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, of falsehood.”

  Our first great statesman of the modern school…. He was not a political adventurer, but a knight-errant roaming about in search of a tilt, or, still better, of a mélê; and not much caring whether his foes were robbers or true men, if only there were enough of them. He was one who, in a venal age, looked to something besides the main chance; who, when he had set his mind or his fancy on an enterprise, never counted the odds that he faced, or the hundreds a year that he forfeited. But with all these generous gifts, his education and his circumstances almost proved too much for him; and it was the instinct of moral self-preservation which drove him to detach himself from his early surroundings, and find safety in uncompromising hostility to that evil system which had come so near to spoiling him.

	“Are wills so weak? Then let not mine wait long.
	Hast thou so rare a poison? Let me be
	Keener to slay thee, lest thou poison me.”

Such is the temper in which, fortunately for mankind, rare and noble natures have often revolted against that world whose blighting influence they had begun to feel; and such was the mood of Charles Fox when, sick of a prison-house whose secrets had so early been familiar to him, he dissolved his partnership with Sandwich and Wedderburn, and united himself to Burke and Chatham and Savile in their crusade against the tyranny which was trampling out English liberty in the colonies, and the corruption which was undermining it at home.

  While there is so much to admire and love in the character of Fox … there is no man of his own or perhaps of any age who presented in himself more to be accepted and at the same time more to be avoided as an example. His habits of life would have ruined him before he had matured if he had not contracted them innocently, and if they had not been afterward controlled to some extent by intellectual endowments of the very highest order. Happily the number of parents who train children as Fox was trained is very limited, and unhappily the number born with such marvelous endowments is still more limited. He is therefore to be contemplated rather as a phenomenon than model, reminding one of the Pyramid of Cheops, so imposing in its dimensions, so unique in all its proportions, but fitly built in a wilderness, and not a model upon which a school of architecture can ever be founded.

  The early days of Fox were his worst days. Indeed, in the opening years of his life it is not so easy to discover the great liberal of the future. Yet like all the rest of Fox’s career his early life was typical. He inherited the doctrines of his father, who was, perhaps, as bad an example as could be found of all the political vices of the eighteenth century in England. Offices and blunders were the creed of the first Lord Holland; and his son, making himself master of these and backed by bought majorities, astonished the House of Commons by his brilliant, youthful rhetoric, attacking what was right with the same success which he won in later years when he denounced what was wrong. It was the way of the world into which Charles Fox was born, and he took up all the ways of that world with equal extravagance and success.

  That a man of whom all this can be truly said should have taken a high and honourable place in English history, and should have won for himself the perennial love and loyalty of some of the best Englishmen of his time, is not a little surprising, for a life such as I have described would with most men have destroyed every fibre of intellectual energy and of moral worth. But in truth there are some characters which nature has so happily compounded that even vice is unable wholly to degrade them, and there is a charm of manner and of temper which sometimes accompanies the excesses of a strong animal nature that wins more popularity in the world than the purest and the most self-denying virtue. Of this truth Fox was an eminent example. With a herculean frame, with iron nerves, with that happy vividness and buoyancy of temperament that can ever throw itself passionately into the pursuits and the impressions of the hour, and can then cast them aside without an effort, he combined one of the sweetest of human tempers, one of the warmest of human hearts. Nothing in his career is more remarkable than the spell which he cast over men who in character and principles were as unlike as possible to himself.

  In the duel between Fox (who was a very stout man) and Adam, so soon as the ground had been measured, Fitzgerald (second of the former) said, “You must stand sideways, Mr. Fox, as much as you can.” “Why so?” asked the statesman; “I am as thick one way as the other.”

  “Carlo Khan.” “A Hercules.” “The Last of the Romans.” “The Man of the People.” “Niger.” “The Young Cub.”

  As a young man Fox was strongly built; his frame was large, and he had a handsome face, bright eyes, high colour, and black hair. He soon became very stout, and his enemies considered that in manhood his swarthy countenance had a “saturnine” aspect, but his smile was always pleasant. From childhood he was courted for his gaiety, originality, and genius. He was perfectly good-natured, eager, warm-hearted, and unselfish. With great natural abilities, a singular quickness of apprehension, and a retentive memory, he combined the habit of doing all things with his might. He was, as he said, a “very painstaking man,” and even when secretary of state wrote copies for a writing-master to improve his handwriting. He delighted in literature and art, his critical faculty was acute, and his taste cultivated. Poetry was to him “the best thing after all,” and he declared that he loved “all the poets.”

  Indeed we can only account for his great successes as an orator, his amazing repute, and his exceptional popularity, when we sum up a half score of contributory causes, which lie outside of the cold print of the Parliamentary record; among these, we count—his Holland wealth and training, his environments of rank and luxury, his picturesque bearing, his bonhomie, his scorn of the rank he held, his accessibility to all, his outspoken, democratic sympathies, that warmed him into outbursts of generous passion, his fearlessness, his bearding of the king, his earnestness whenever afoot, his very shortcomings too, and the crowding disabilities that grew out of his trust—his simplicities—his lack of forethought, his want of moneyed prudence, his free-handedness, his little, unfailing, every-day kindnesses—these all backed his speeches and put a tender under-tone, and a glow, and a drawing power in them, which we look for vainly in the rhetoric or the argumentation.

  It was surely in an evil hour for himself that Burke became connected with Charles Fox. Charles Fox had fine impulses, though love of his own country was not one of them. It is not less certain that he was a most powerful debater, if in the reports of his speeches little of the fire is left. His social charms were also evidently great, and won him ardent friends. But his character had been formed at the gambling table, and Napoleon was right in saying that he would never, if he could help it, employ a gambler. The recklessness of the gambling table was brought by Fox into the arena of public life…. Fox, indolent, and ostentatiously ignorant of economy and finance, while he aspired to the government of a great commercial country, would, of course, welcome the industry and knowledge of Burke; while Burke would be drawn to Fox by Fox’s lovable qualities, perhaps by his high connections, perhaps by the very dissimilarity of their character and gifts. Fox’s violence in his opposition to North, which went almost to the length of treason, had the effect, as a good observer remarked, of confirming the obstinacy of the Government and prolonging the American war. Burke, as Fox’s associate, must in some measure share the blame.

Speeches

  Vehement in his elocution, ardent in his language, prompt in his invention of arguments, adroit in its use, comprehensive in his view of the given subject, and equal to his political rival in the power of agitating the passions; but offending continually by the tautology of his diction and the repetition of his arguments. He feels this himself so much, as to think it necessary to vindicate it in private. And he so feels also his own inferiority in the selection of appropriate terms, that he says, “although he himself is never in want of words, Mr. Pitt is never without the best words possible.”

  Paramount as he is in ability and in political eloquence beyond any man.

  Fox is the most illustrious model of a Parliamentary Leader, on the side of liberty, that this country has produced. This character is the appropriate glory of England, and Fox is the proper example of this character…. Fox, as an orator, appeared to come immediately from the forming hand of nature. He spoke well, because he felt strongly and earnestly. His oratory was impetuous as the current of the river Rhone; nothing could arrest its course. His voice would insensibly rise to too high a key; he would run himself out of breath. Everything showed how little artifice there was in his eloquence. Though on all great occasions he was throughout energetic, yet it was by sudden flashes and emanations that he electrified the heart, and shot through the blood of his hearer. I have seen his countenance lighted up with more than mortal ardour and goodness; I have been present when his voice has become suffocated with the sudden bursting forth of a torrent of tears.

  For ourselves, we think we never heard any man who dismissed us from the argument on a debated topic with such a feeling of satisfied and final conviction, or such a competence to tell why we were convinced. There was, in the view in which subjects were placed by him, something like the daylight, that simple clearness which makes things conspicuous and does not make them glare, which adds no colour or form, but purely makes visible in perfection the real colour and form of all things round; a kind of light less amusing than that of magnificent lusters or a thousand coloured lamps, and less fascinating and romantic than that of the moon, but which is immeasurably preferred when we are bent on sober business, and not at leisure, or not in the disposition to wander delighted among beautiful shadows and delusions. It is needless to say that Fox possessed in a high degree wit and fancy; but superlative intellect was the grand distinction of his eloquence; the pure force of sense, of plain, downright sense was so great, that it would have given a character of sublimity to his eloquence, even if it had never once been aided by a happy image or a brilliant explosion. The grandeur of plain sense would not have been deemed an absurd phrase, by any man who had heard one of Fox’s best speeches.

  Pitt I never heard: Fox but once, and then he struck me as a debater, which to me seems as different from an orator as an improvisatore, or a versifier, from a poet.

  This extraordinary person, then, in rising generally to speak, had evidently no more premeditated the particular language he should employ, nor frequently the illustrations and images by which he should discuss and enforce his subject, than he had contemplated the hour he was to die; and his exalted merit as a debater in Parliament did not, therefore, consist in the length, variety, or roundness of his periods; but in the truth and vigour of his conceptions; in the depth and extent of his information; in the retentive powers of his memory, which enabled him to keep in constant view, not only all he had formerly read and reflected on, but everything said at the moment, and even at other times, by the various persons whose arguments he was to answer; in the faculty of spreading out his matter so clearly to the grasp of his own mind, as to render it impossible he should ever fail in the utmost clearness and distinctness to others; in the exuberant fertility of his invention, which spontaneously brought forth his ideas at the moment, in every possible shape by which the understanding might sit in the most accurate judgment upon them; whilst, instead of seeking afterwards to enforce them by cold, premeditated illustrations, or by episodes, which, however beautiful, only distract attention, he was accustomed to repass his subject, not methodically, but in the most unforeseen and fascinating review, enlightening every part of it, and binding even his adversaries in a kind of spell for the moment of involuntary assent…. He possessed, above all men I ever knew, the most gentle and yet the most ardent spirit—a rare and happy combination! He had nourished in his mind all the manly and generous sentiments, which are the true supports of the social world; he was trembling alive to every kind of private wrong or suffering; and from the habitual and fervent contemplation of the just principles of government, he had the most bitter and unextinguishable contempt for the low arts of political intrigue, and an indignant abhorrence of every species of tyranny, oppression, and injustice.

  Fox was heedless of method; having the complete command of good words, he never sought for better; if those which occurred expressed his meaning clearly and forcibly, he paid little attention to their arrangement or harmony. This detracts from the merit of his speeches when they are read; but, when they were delivered, it perhaps added to their effect, as it tended greatly to make the hearers believe that he was above art, and spoke from conviction…. The moment of his grandeur was, when he had stated the argument of his adversary, with much greater strength than his adversary had done, and with greater than his hearers thought possible, he seized it with the strength of a giant, and tore and trampled it to destruction.

  We of 1858, that can only read him, hearing Fox described as forcible, are disposed to recollect Shakspere’s Mr. Feeble amongst Falstaff’s recruits, who also is described as forcible—viz. as the “most forcible Feeble.” And, perhaps, a better description could not be devised for Fox himself: so feeble was he in matter, so forcible in manner; so powerful for instant effect, so impotent for posterity. In the Pythian fury of his gestures, in his screaming voice (for Fox’s voice was shrill as a woman’s), in his directness of purpose, Fox would now remind you of some demon steam-engine on a railroad, some Fire-king or Salmoneus, that had counterfeited Jove’s thunderbolts,—hissing, bubbling, snorting, fuming. Demonias gas, you think, gas from Acheron, must feed that dreadful system of convulsions.

  While Fox, in the simplicity and the vehemence of his reasoning, might bear comparison with Demosthenes, his speeches as a whole show more distinctly perhaps than those of any other speaker the difference between Greek and British oratory. A speech of Demosthenes resembles a beautiful Greek temple; it is composed of reasoning, of elegant diction, of appeals to the patriotism and public spirit of his hearers, all of the same pure material. We admire the purity, and harmony, the unity and grace of the structure. A speech of Fox resembles rather a cathedral of Gothic architecture. The strength of the buttresses, the grandeur of the arches, the painted glass, the fretted aisle, these multiplied and fanciful ornaments, fill the mind with admiration and delight…. Pitt used to say that, when he thought that he had himself done better than usual, he found Fox, in reply, surpass his ordinary vigour, and exceed the best of his former efforts. Wilberforce is reported to have declared himself always convinced for the moment by Pitt or by Fox, and inclined to give the palm to that one of these two orators who had last spoken.

  Though a statesman of the first order, yet it was oratory which gave to Fox an indisputable preëminence among his contemporaries. He was born with the oratorical temperament; from youth upwards, his ambition was to become a great speaker. He was endowed with an understanding of exceeding quickness, with an imagination of great brilliancy, with feeling of great mobility and tenderness; he had read much in the ancient and modern languages; a retentive memory enabled him to utilize his vast stores of information and illustrations, while his logical disposition led him to marshal in faultless symmetry and imposing array all the arguments he adduced to prove a case or enforce a proposition. His constant appeal was to the intellect, and his aim was to convince by reasoning. He was as practical as Demosthenes. He had none of Cicero’s besetting anxiety to demonstrate, when pleading a cause or advocating a policy, that he was an unrivalled master of fine language. No contemporary orator was his parallel. Chatham was a greater adept in dramatic effects. Burke was far more ornate and profound. William Pitt poured forth sentences infinitely superior in finish and melody. Lord North was more uniformly witty; Charles Townshend and Sheridan were more uniformly brilliant. None, however, among the elder or younger generation of speakers succeeded in making an audience feel, as Fox did, that they were listening to arguments which could not be refuted, and to common sense it was hardly possible to gainsay.

  Fox was a great speaker, and, in the words of Burke, the greatest debater the world ever saw. Not place or power, but reputation as an orator, was the object of his ambition, as he declares in one of his earliest letters to an intimate friend and relation. He inspired affection rather than admiration. In his worst days an observer said of his party, “There are only forty of them, but every one of them is ready to be hanged for Fox.” In his earliest days, Lord Mansfield being asked who that young man was whom he saw in Westminster Hall, answered, “That is the son of old Harry Fox, with twice his parts and half his sagacity.”… The errors of Fox—his coalition with Lord North, and his India Bill—were grave; but the warmth of his feelings and his passionate love of liberty should obtain for his memory indemnity for these or even greater faults. His affectionate temper, combined with his love of liberty, won him the attachment of devoted friends. His memory ought to be consecrated in the heart of every lover of freedom throughout the globe.

  Fox delivered his speeches without previous preparation, and their power lay not in rhetorical adornments, but in the vigour of the speaker’s thoughts, the extent of his knowledge, the quickness with which he grasped the significance of each point in debate, the clearness of his conceptions, and the remarkable plainness with which he laid them before his audience. Even in his longest speeches he never strayed from the matter in hand; he never rose above the level of his hearers’ understanding, was never obscure, and never bored the house. Every position that he took up he defended with a large number of shrewd arguments, plainly stated and well ordered. The training in elocution that he had received at Eton and his practice as an amateur actor gave him confidence and ease, while the accuracy and readiness of his memory supplied him with a store of quotations, and rendered him never at loss for a word. At the same time he does not appear to have been particularly fluent until he became warmed with his subject; then he spoke with a stormy eloquence which carried his hearers with him. His voice was naturally poor, and though he generally modulated it skilfully, he was apt when excited to speak with shrillness. His action was ungraceful. His attempts at pathos generally failed; he was prone to invective, and is said to have been the wittiest speaker of his time. Although some of his speeches introducing subjects to the house are magnificent, he especially excelled in reply; for great as he was as an orator, he was certainly greater in debate.

  Pre-eminently does he stand out as the first English statesman of ministerial rank who appreciated the power of the Platform, and who systematically used it. Whether or not it was that he liked it for the qualities which rendered him so much more fascinating to some men than the House of Commons, its freedom, its enthusiasm, its applause, certain it is that he was constantly addressing public meetings, so constantly, indeed, as to earn for himself the name of “The man of the people.”

  It may be said once for all that Fox was the most transcendant of all debaters, the most genial of all associates, the most beloved of all friends. He was moreover, after Burke, the most lettered politician in a generation that affected literature…. It has been said that his private life was conspicuously disordered. And yet even when it was blamable it was lovable, and it mellowed into an exquisite evening. Whether we see him plunged in Theocritus after a bout at faro which has left him penniless; or cheerfully watching the bailiffs remove his last stick of furniture; or drinking with the jockey of Norfolk; or choosing wild waistcoats at Paris; or building with his own hands his little greenhouse at St. Anne’s; or sauntering down its cool glades with a book and a friend; or prone without either under a tree in the long summer afternoons; or watching the contests of Newmarket with the rapt frenzy of a boy; or chatting before the races with Windham on the horses of the ancients and the precise meaning of argutum caput; or corresponding with Gilbert Wakefield about innumerable other niceties of classical reading; or, when crippled and aged, playing trapball with the children and with more than a child’s keenness; or speechless of generous tears in the House of Commons when quivering under the harsh severance of Burke; or placid on his deathbed reassuring his wife and nephew;—he still exercises over us something of the unbounded fascination which he wielded over his contemporaries.

History

  The goodness of his heart, and the grandeur of his mind—the just medium of his opinions between the crown and democracy, and his warm love of true and rational liberty, are, however, indelibly recorded in a work, which perhaps came out too soon after his death to be justly appreciated; and as it promoted the views of none of the parties of the day, it is rather to be considered a classic, whose wholesome tendency and purity of principle, will benefit posterity, than amend the present generation.

  The superiority of Mr. Fox to Sir James as an orator is hardly more clear than the superiority of Sir James to Mr. Fox as an historian. Mr. Fox with a pen in his hand, and Sir James on his legs in the House of Commons, were, we think, each out of his proper element. They were men, it is true, of far too much judgment and ability to fail scandalously in any undertaking to which they brought the whole power of their minds. The “History of James II.” will always keep its place in our libraries as a valuable book; and Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in winning and maintaining a high place among the parliamentary speakers of his time. Yet we could never read a page of Mr. Fox’s writing, we could never listen for a quarter of an hour to the speaking of Sir James, without feeling that there was a constant effort, a tug up hill. Nature, or habit which had become nature, asserted its rights. Mr. Fox wrote debates. Sir James Mackintosh spoke essays…. While Mr. Fox winnowed and sifted his phraseology with a care, which seems hardly consistent with the simplicity and elevation of his mind, and of which the effect really was to debase and enfeeble his style, he was little on his guard against those more serious improprieties of manner into which a great orator, who undertakes to write history is in danger of falling. There is about the whole book a vehement, contentious, replying manner. Almost every argument is put in the form of an interrogation, an ejaculation, or a sarcasm. The writer seems to be addressing himself to some imaginary audience; to be tearing in pieces a defence of the Stuarts which has just been pronounced by an imaginary Tory.

  It was also during the early progress of printing the first volume of these (Typographical) Antiquities, at Mr. Savage’s, in Bedfordbury, Covent Garden, that I used to see the sheets of Mr. Fox’s “Historical Work” hanging up in every direction through the dwelling-house and adjacent yard. It will be supposed that five thousand copies of a quarto volume, with five hundred more upon a larger paper, and yet another two hundred and fifty of an elephantine size, were not likely to be carried through the press where the premises were small, without seeming to suffocate every passage and corridor of the building…. It was doubtless the boldest experiment ever made with a large paper speculation: but it succeeded. In due course, what at first came forth as a rapid and overboiling torrent, at a high price subsided into a quiet channel, and became obtainable on very moderate terms. Yet, considering the extraordinary number of copies printed, I do not consider this book of the commonest possible occurrence. As the work of an Author whose name can never perish, it must necessarily form “part and parcel” of every well-ordered library. Why is it not dressed in “rank and file” with the octavo HUMES, ROBERTSONS, and GIBBONS?

  Has been greatly undervalued; but it will be properly estimated in future times.

  His History as he has left it, is simply a disquisition on English politics, from the time of Henry VII. to the death of Charles II., together with a narrative of the reign of James II. until the death of Monmouth. Here he paused, probably from the constant interruption of business, indolence, or pleasure. He evidently wanted sufficient steadiness to produce any laborious work, and the whole result of his inquiries is this imperfect fragment. The History has good sense, a clear manner, and an evident sincerity and honesty of execution; but it is wholly wanting in imagination, interest, and grace. Fox’s style is that of a debater, plain, pointed, and inharmonious. His language does not flow easily, and wants the delicate graces of the fine writer. His narrative is sometimes interesting, on account of its clearness, but something more than simplicity is needed, to keep up for a long period the attention of the reader. And Fox must be remembered rather as one who desired to become an historian, than as having given any proofs of historical power.

  Incomparably the most important book relating to the art of government which appeared during his lifetime was the “Wealth of Nations,” but Fox once owned that he had never read it, and the history which was his own serious composition added nothing to his reputation.

General

  We are no admirers of Mr. Fox’s poetry. His Vers de Société appears to us flat and insipid. To write verses was the only thing which Mr. Fox ever attempted to do, without doing it well. In that single instance he seems to have mistaken his talent.

  Some specimens of his own verses have been circulated in private, and printed in collections. They were occasional, and on trifling subjects, but sufficient to prove the exquisite correctness of his ear and judgment, the delicacy of his feelings, and his great familiarity with the best models of composition.

  Charles Fox’s “Fragment of History” falls far short of the expectations which that distinguished statesman’s genius had raised regarding it. Probably the failure arose from the difference between the processes of speaking and of writing: yet Burke equally excelled in both!—Pitt has given no specimens, by which we may be led to believe that he could have been pre-eminent as an author. The matter of all his speeches is now dead: the spirit evaporated with the tones of his voice. We can cite no general wisdom,—nothing applicable beyond the occasion. Without this there may be talent; without a power of generalisation there cannot be genius.

  Fox, so pre-eminent as a debater, appears with small distinction in his authorship.