LIVES OF EMINENT

AND

ILLUSTRIOUS ENGLISHMEN.

Charles James Fox.

BORN A. D. 1749-DIED A. D. 1806.

CHARLES JAMES Fox, third son of the Right Honourable Henry Fox, created Baron Holland of Foxley in 1763, and of Lady Georgina Caroline Fox, daughter of Charles, second duke of Richmond, was born in 1749.

From his birth he was the darling of his father, and experienced an amount of indulgence which most parents would pronounce in the highest degree culpable. His education was, however, conducted with the greatest care, and chiefly at Eton, where he highly distinguished himself. At the age of fourteen his father permitted him to accompany him to Spa, at that time a place of highly fashionable resort. This visit, and the imprudent indulgence of his father in allowing him, at this tender age, to mingle in all the gaieties and dissipation of the place, laid a permanent foundation for that love of gaming, and other habits, which obscured and embittered so much of a life which might have been spent in infinitely higher pursuits. The vivacities of the young Etonian were the theme of conversation long after he had left that seminary, and were indeed spoken of with more candour than is generally bestowed upon school-boy levities by sometimes suffering neighbourhoods, because, however eccentric, he never appears to have had the smallest particle of malice in his composition; but, on the contrary, when he had 'gone too far,' was always ready to own, and, if possible, to repair his error, with a veracity and generosity which at once denoted principle and good nature.

From Eton, young Fox went to Hertford college, Oxford, where also he distinguished himself at once by his talents and dissipation; and seemed as if born to show the instability of affluence, and the mischievous consequences of the most brilliant talents, when unguided by prudence and sobriety. An allowance almost unlimited was not equal to the claims that arose upon it from his early taste for every species of extravagance and dissipation. At a period when quires of bills from Stephen and Charles Fox were presented to their father, a punster in one of the newspapers, (Lloyd's Evening Post,) stated that the Right Honourable Henry Fox was about to sue the county of Middlesex, and that there was no doubt of his success, because he could easily prove that

he had been robbed betwixt sun and sun! With a genius able to compass what to many would have been the study of a month, in a few hours, and a spirit and constitution that distanced all his companions, he spent his college life in one fascinating round betwixt the calm of learning and the storms of licentious indulgence. It is easy to conceive that, when emancipated from college, his habits and propensities expanded with the expansion of his sphere of action and gratification. Though the same ardent desire of scientific acquisition operated, and many an instance in his public life showed how ready he was to avail himself of every opportunity to store his mind with elegant, accurate, and useful knowledge of every description, still, perhaps, it is to be lamented that the extreme brilliancy of his faculties, and the energy of his genius, enabled him to discriminate characters, to develope circumstances, and to appreciate things almost instantaneously and intuitively, as this mental facility only afforded him more time for dissipation. We have more pleasure in observing that while at college young Fox was extremely partial to the Greek writers, of whom Longinus and Homer were his favourites. His familiar acquaintance with the works of the latter is displayed in the following anecdote: "A clergyman, eminent for his knowledge of Greek, was endeavouring to prove that a verse in the Iliad was spurious, because it contained measures not used by Homer. Fox instantly recited twenty other verses of the same measure, to show that the deviation from the usual feet was no evidence of interpolation. He was, indeed, capable of conversing with a Longinus on the beauty, sublimity, and pathos of Homer; with an Aristotle on his delineations of man; and with a pedagogue on his dactyls, spondees, and anapaests."-After a short residence at Oxford, he made a tour on the continent, during which he is said to have contracted vast debts in every capital which he visited; at Naples alone his liabilities amounted to £16,000. Alarmed at his boundless prodigality, Lord Holland at length summoned him home, and he returned one of the most egregious coxcombs in Europe. "It will be scarcely supposed," says a writer in the Monthly Magazine' for October, 1806, "by those who have seen Mr Fox, or examined his dress at any time during the last twenty years, that he had been once celebrated as a beau garcon; but the fact is, that at this period he was one of the most fashionable young men about town, and there are multitudes now living who still recollect his chapeau bras, his red-heeled shoes, and his blue hair-powder."

He en

At the general election in 1768, Charles Fox, notwithstanding his nonage, was returned for Midhurst in the county of Sussex. tered parliament a decided ministerialist, and soon became one of the most strenuous defenders of an unpopular administration. He made his maiden-speech on the 15th April, 1769, on the presentment of Wilkes's petition from the king's bench; and he subsequently defended the legality of general warrants, and loudly declaimed against the proceedings of the Friends of the People. We shall here introduce a sketch of the young member from the Public Characters' originally inserted in the Advertiser paper, and afterwards collectively published in 1777. It has the advantage of being a fresh and contemporary sketch, however imperfectly executed in many respects: "Having had the curiosity to inspect this young gentleman's parish-register, we find he was born in the month of March, 1749; and, consequently, that he

united in his own person talents and circumstances unparalleled in the annals of parliament, or the strange vicissitudes of state-intrigue: for he was appointed a lord of the admiralty,-resigned in disgust, was a second time appointed,-was afterwards removed to the treasury board, -whence he was dismissed some few weeks before he completed the twenty-fifth year of his age,-namely, on the 17th or 18th of February, 1774. Two other circumstances strongly mark his political career; before he was twenty-four years old, he was by much the most able support the minister had in the course of a whole session, and within a year after, one of his most powerful and dangerous antagonists.

"The political history of this extraordinary young orator furnishes very few things worthy of notice. His conduct, as long as he remained in office, was that of the most violent and unreserved courtier. He not only discharged his duty as a mere placeman, called upon by his situation to defend the measures of administration, to cover their blunders, to urge their propriety, to predict the salutary consequences that must flow from them, and the whole science of augmenting and diminishing at pleasure, but he caught the decisive tone of a violent partisan, in a kind of state of war and open hostility against every man who dared to differ from him, or question the ministerial infallibility of his leader and financial creator.1

"His parliamentary operations, in this line, were chiefly directed against Mr Burke, and a few other leaders in opposition. This part of his task he performed with remarkable punctuality and alacrity, and with no small degree of success. Some detached part of Mr Burke's speech, not perhaps at all essential to the main subject of debate, was misquoted or misrepresented; the fallacy or absurdity of its pretended contents was pointed out and animadverted upon; and the whole thrown into a ridiculous light; a laugh was created in every ministerial corner of the house; the treasury bench was set in a roar, and Charles smacked the clerk's table with his hand, and moulded his feathered hat into ten thousand different forms. Burke's fine speeches were thus cut up; Charles was applauded; and every tool of administration, from his lordship down to Robinson, Eden, and Brummel 'at the door,' or in the gallery, loudly proclaimed victory. This office is now occupied by his particular friend and worthy associate. There were two other gentlemen on whom he bestowed a great deal of attention in the same way. They at length perceived their folly, and the justice of his ridicule so much, that one of them changed places with him, and the other* accepted of a white wand, as a public testimony of his conversion.

"In the midst of victory, flushed with success, and running at the rate of fourteen knots an hour, with every sail set, and in the warmest expectation of at least procuring at a short day the chancellorship of the exchequer, his friend and patron having frequently assured him, in confidence, that he wished to divide the fame, profits, and labour of conducting public affairs with him, our hero, like a certain wellknown ambitious young man of Ovidian memory, was thrown from the box, as he says, by the baseness and treachery of the first coachman.

'He was appointed a commissioner of the treasury, through the interest of Lord North, in the room of Charles Jenkinson.

Mr Thurlow, attorney-general.

Sir William Meredith.

3 Mr Cornewall.