CHARLES JAMES FOX. By WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.

[An eminent orator and statesman, born 1749, died 1806. Fox was noted as being the greatest man of his age in parliamentary debate. He was the son of Sir Henry Fox, afterward Lord Holland, and was elected to Parliament while scarcely yet of age. Fox was identified with the Whig party, and contributed greatly to the success and firm establishment of liberal and reform principles in politics, though his private life was careless and dissolute. Though peerless as a debater, Fox was unsuccessful in commanding public respect and confidence during his short experiment as premier, and was for the most of his career a leader of the opposition. The memory of Fox is endeared to Americans by his sympathy with our revolutionary struggle, his persistent efforts to prevent the war before it began, and to secure an early concession of American independence after the beginning of hostilities.]

Charles James Fox was the third son of the first Lord Holland, the old rival of Pitt. He had entered Parliament irregularly and illegally in November, 1768, when he had not yet completed his twentieth year, and in February, 1770, he had been made a lord of the admiralty in the Government of Lord North. The last political connection of Lord Holland had been with Bute, and his son appears to have accepted the heritage of his Tory principles without inquiry or reluctance. His early life was in the highest degree discreditable, and gave very little promise of greatness. His vehement and passionate temperament threw him speedily into the wildest dissipation, and the almost insane indulgence of his father gratified his every whim. When he was only fourteen Lord Holland had brought him to the gambling-table at Spa, and, at a time when he had hardly reached manhood, he was one of the most desperate gamblers of his day. Lord Holland died in 1774, but before his death he is said to have paid no less than one hundred and forty thousand pounds in extricating his son from gambling debts. The death of his mother and the death of his elder brother in the same year brought him a considerable fortune, including an estate in the Isle of Thanet and the sinecure office of clerk of the pells in Ireland, which was worth two thousand three hundred pounds a year; but in a short time he was obliged to sell or mortgage everything he possessed. He himself nicknamed his antechamber the Jerusalem Chamber from the multitude of Jews who haunted it. Lord Carlisle was at one time security for him to the extent of fifteen or sixteen thousand pounds. During one of the most critical debates in 1781 his house was in the occupation of the sheriffs. He was even debtor for small sums to chairmen and to waiters at Brooks’s; and although in the latter part of his life he was partly relieved by a large subscription raised by his friends, he never appears to have wholly emerged from the money difficulties in which his gambling tastes had involved him. Nor was this his only vice.

With some men the passion for gambling is an irresistible moral monomania, the single morbid taint in a nature otherwise faultless and pure. With Fox it was but one of many forms of an insatiable appetite for vicious excitement, which continued with little abatement during many years of his public career. In 1777, during a long visit to Paris, he lived much in the society of Madame du Deffand, and that very acute judge of character formed an opinion of him which was, on the whole, very unfavorable. He has much talent, she said, much goodness of heart and natural truthfulness, but he is absolutely without principle, he has a contempt for every one who has principle, he lives in a perpetual intoxication of excitement, he never gives a thought to the morrow, he is a man eminently fitted to corrupt youth. In 1779, when he was already one of the foremost politicians in England, he was one night drinking at Almack’s with Lord Derby, Major Stanley, and a few other young men of rank, when they determined at three in the morning to make a tour through the streets, and amused themselves by instigating a mob to break the windows of the chief members of the Government.

His profligacy with women during a great part of his life was notorious, though he appears at last to have confined himself to his connection with Mrs. Armistead, whom he secretly married in September, 1795. He was the soul of a group of brilliant and profligate spendthrifts, who did much to dazzle and corrupt the fashionable youth of the time; and in judging the intense animosity with which George III always regarded him, it must not be forgotten that his example and his friendship had probably a considerable influence in encouraging the Prince of Wales in those vicious habits and in that undutiful course of conduct which produced so much misery in the palace and so much evil in the nation. One of the friends of Charles Fox summed up his whole career in a few significant sentences. “He had three passions—women, play, and politics. Yet he never formed a creditable connection with a woman. He squandered all his means at the gaming-table, and, except for eleven months, he was invariably in opposition.”

That a man of whom all this can be truly said should have taken a high and honorable 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 fiber 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. “He is a man,” said Burke, “made to be loved, of the most artless, candid, open, and benevolent disposition; disinterested in the extreme, of a temper mild and placable to a fault, without one drop of gall in his whole constitution.” “The power of a superior man,” said Gibbon, “was blended in his attractive character with the softness and simplicity of a child. Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.” “He possessed,” said Erskine, “above all men I ever knew, the most gentle, and yet the most ardent spirit.” He retained amid all his vices a capacity for warm and steady friendship, a capacity for struggling passionately and persistently in opposition, for an unpopular cause; a purity of taste and a love of literature which made him, with the exception of Burke, the foremost scholar among the leading members of the House of Commons; an earnestness, disinterestedness, and simplicity of character which was admitted and admired even by his political opponents.

He resembled Bolingbroke in his power of passing at once from scenes of dissipation into the House of Commons, and in retaining in public affairs during the most disorderly periods of his private life all his soundness of judgment and all his force of eloquence and of decision. Gibbon described how he “prepared himself” for one important debate by spending twenty-two previous hours at the hazard table and losing eleven thousand pounds. Walpole extols the extraordinary brilliancy of the speech which he made on another occasion, when he had but just arrived from Newmarket and had been sitting up drinking the whole of the preceding night, and he states that in the early period of his brilliant opposition to the American policy of North he was rarely in bed before five in the morning, or out of it before two in the afternoon. Yet, like Bolingbroke, he never lost the taste and passion for study even at the time when he was most immersed in a life of pleasure.

At Eton and Oxford he had been a very earnest student, and few of his contemporaries can have had a wider knowledge of the imaginative literatures of Greece, Italy, or France. He was passionately fond of poetry, and a singularly delicate and discriminating critic; but he always looked upon literature chiefly from its ornamental and imaginative side. 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 one serious composition added nothing to his reputation. In books, however, he found an unfailing solace in trouble and disappointment. One morning, when one of his friends having heard that Fox on the previous night had been completely ruined at the gaming-table, went to visit and console him, he found him tranquilly reading Herodotus in the original. “What,” he said, “would you have a man do who has lost his last shilling?”

His merits as a politician can only he allowed with great deductions and qualifications. But little stress should indeed be laid on the sudden and violent change in his political principles, which was faintly foreshadowed in 1772 and fully accomplished in 1774, though that change did undoubtedly synchronize with his personal quarrel with Lord North. Changes of principle and policy, which at forty or fifty would indicate great instability of character, are very venial at twenty-four or twenty-five, and from the time when Fox joined the Whig party his career through long years of adversity and of trial was singularly consistent. I can not, however, regard a politician either as a great statesman or a great party leader who left so very little of permanent value behind him, who offended so frequently and so bitterly the national feelings of his countrymen, who on two memorable occasions reduced his party to the lowest stage of depression, and who failed so signally during a long public life in winning the confidence of the nation.

His failure is the more remarkable as one of the features most conspicuous both in his speeches and his letters is the general soundness of his judgment, and his opinions during the greater part of his life were singularly free from every kind of violence, exaggeration, and eccentricity. Much of it was due to his private life, much to his divergence from popular opinion on the American question and on the question of the French Revolution, and much also to an extraordinary deficiency in the art of party management, and to the frequent employment of language which, though eminently adapted to the immediate purposes of debate, was certain from its injudicious energy to be afterward quoted against him. Like more than one great master of words, he was trammeled and injured at every stage of his career by his own speeches. The extreme shock which the disastrous coalition of 1784 gave to the public opinion of England was largely, if not mainly, due to the outrageous violence of the language with which Fox had in the preceding years denounced Lord North, and a similar violence made his breach with the court irrevocable, and greatly aggravated his difference with the nation on the question of the French Revolution.

But if his rank as a statesman and as a party leader is by no means of the highest order, he stood, by the concurrent testimony of all his contemporaries, in the very first line, if not in the very first place, among English parliamentary debaters. He threw the whole energy of his character into his career, and he practiced it continually till he attained a dexterity in debate which to his contemporaries appeared little less than miraculous. “During five whole sessions,” he once said, “I spoke every night but one, and I regret only that I did not speak on that night.” With a delivery that in the beginning of his speeches was somewhat slow and hesitating, with little method, with great repetition, with no grace of gesture, with an utter indifference to the mere oratory of display, thinking of nothing but how to convince and persuade the audience who were immediately before him, never for a moment forgetting the vital issue, never employing an argument which was not completely level with the apprehensions of his audience, he possessed to the very highest degree the debating qualities which an educated political assembly of Englishmen most highly value.

The masculine vigor and strong common sense of his arguments, his unfailing lucidity, his power of grasping in a moment the essential issue of a debate, his skill in hitting blots and throwing the arguments on his own side into the most vivid and various lights, his marvelous memory in catching up the scattered threads of a debate, the rare combination in his speeches of the most glowing vehemence of style with the closest and most transparent reasoning, and the air of intense conviction which he threw into every discussion, had never been surpassed. He was one of the fairest of debaters, and it was said that the arguments of his opponents were very rarely stated with such masterly power as by Fox himself before he proceeded to grapple with, and to overthrow them.

He possessed to the highest degree what Walpole called the power of “declaiming argument,” and that combination of rapidity and soundness of judgment which is the first quality of a debater. “Others,” said Sir George Savile, “may have had more stock, but Fox had more ready money about him than any of his party.” “I believe,” said Lord Carlisle, “there never was a person yet created who had the faculty of reasoning like him.” “Nature,” said Horace Walpole, “had made him the most wonderful reasoner of the age.” “He possessed beyond all moderns,” wrote Mackintosh, “that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence which formed the prince of orators.” “Had he been bred to the bar,” wrote Philip Francis, “he would in my judgment have made himself in a shorter time, and with much less application than any other man, the most powerful litigant that ever appeared there.” “He rose by slow degrees,” said Burke, “to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw.” His finest speeches were wholly unpremeditated, and the complete subordination in them of all rhetorical and philosophical ambition to the immediate purpose of the debate has greatly impaired their permanent value; but, even in the imperfect fragments that remain, the essential qualities of his eloquence may be plainly seen.