"Charles Fox, who had been running about the House talking to different persons and scarcely listening to Burke, rose with amazing spirit and memory, answered both Lord North and Burke, ridiculed the arguments of the former and confuted those of the latter with a shrewdness that, from the multiplicity of reasons, as much exceeded his father in embracing all the arguments of his antagonist as he did in his manner and delivery. This was genius, it was almost inspiration."

Genius it certainly was, but genius which was solely intent upon its own amusement and glorification. The bill was read a first time by a majority of one, in spite of Lord North's opposition. On the 19th of May it came on again for discussion; but its champion was not there. He hurried in from Newmarket in time to find his bill thrown out by a large majority without a debate.

Charles Fox remained out of office for the rest of the year, but did not join the Opposition, nor alter in the least his Tory views, except so far as they may have been insensibly altered by the conversation of Burke, with whom he now began that close and untiring friendship which was only shattered by the French Revolution. Lord North could not but feel the danger of leaving so brilliant a comet in the political horizon to follow his own erratic orbit, unregulated and uninfluenced by the sun of the Ministerial system; and in the last days of the year an arrangement was made-of course at the expense of the tax-payer-by which Fox took his place at the Treasury Board. But in office or out of office, his nature remained the same. Ten months of independence had only whetted his appetite. Responsibility sat very lightly on his shoulders, and he was no more likely to lose an opportunity for delighting the House with a piece of brilliant invective out of consideration for his party or his leaders, than he was to check his horse at a fence because he did not know what was on the other side. The more assured

grew his parliamentary position, the more hopeless became the state of his finances, the more determinedly he rebelled against the bridle of office, the more viciously he kicked over the traces.

In

He had been hardly two months at the Treasury Board when he acted as teller for Sir W. Meredith's motion against the imposition of a religious test on matriculation at the Universities, although a strong whip had been issued by the Government on the other side. In June of the same year he suddenly delivered a most violent philippic against Clive, although the House, at the instance of North, had only a month before come to a deliberate judgment on his conduct which amounted to a guarded acquittal, and Clive at that moment was the possessor of ten Government votes. the February of 1774 came his final and unpardonable indiscretion. An attack had appeared in a paper called the Public Advertiser, upon the impartiality of the Speaker, Sir Fletcher Norton, who appealed to the House for an expression of its confidence. On this, the printer, Woodfall, was ordered to appear at the bar. On the 14th of February he attended, named the well-known ex-vicar of Brentford, generally known as Parson Horne, as the author, pleaded that this was his first offence, and asked for lenient treatment. Mollified by his submission, the House was about to commit him to the custody of the sergeant-at-arms, when Charles Fox jumped up and moved that he be committed to Newgate. Lord North, anxious to avoid another Wilkes case, nettled at the assumption of leadership by Fox, and not knowing of any precedent for committal to the sergeant-at-arms, moved to commit to the Gate House instead of Newgate, as that was out of the jurisdiction of the City. At this moment Dowdeswell produced the very precedent for

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committal to the sergeant-at-arms which Lord North had desired, who then entreated Fox to release him from his pledge of supporting a committal to prison, since it was given under a misapprehension. Fox, self-willed and obstinate, refused, and forced his leader to the ignominious course of himself voting for a motion of which he disapproved, while he begged all his supporters to vote against him.

Conduct such as this from a subordinate official to the first Minister of the Crown was an insult which no party discipline, however lax, could endure. Yet for some days Lord North took no step, waiting perhaps for some expression of regret on the part of Fox. He little knew the man with whom he had to deal. So far from expressing regret, or caring at all what the King, or his colleagues, or indeed the world in general, might think of him, Fox was contemptuously accusing Lord North of pusillanimity at the clubs. In the following week he returned to the charge and openly attacked him in the House for what he considered his culpable lenity towards the printers. This was too much even for the patience of Lord North, and on the 24th of February his dismissal was notified to Fox in the following laconic terms: "His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name."

In four years and a quarter of parliamentary life Fox had been twice in and twice out of office. When he so wantonly left the Administration in 1774, he little thought that he had already seen more of official life than he was ever to see again, but so it was. Never again did he hold office for more than eight months at a time, and the total number of months which he spent in the service of the Crown, during the thirty-two years which remained

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to him of life, when put together are only a little more than half of those which he spent in the Ministry of Lord North.

It has been sometimes said that Fox's behaviour to Lord North and his dismissal from office which followed, were due, not to petulance of temper or to vanity and selfassertion, but to a sense of moral superiority which would not permit him any longer to condone the evil with which he found himself involved; that it was a true moral instinct, which, working faithfully if blindly, led him to dissociate himself from a hireling crew of sycophants, and cast in his lot with Chatham and with Burke rather than with Sandwich or with Wedderburn. The facts will hardly warrant such a view. Fox quarrelled with Lord North, not because he was too much of a Tory, but because he was not Tory enough. He led against the Minister what in the parliamentary language of modern France would be called the extreme right. It was to the hireling crew, the placemen and the pensioners, that he appealed, to force his timid trimmer of a leader to support the dignity of the Crown and the privilege of Parliament against those who dared to print criticisms on their conduct. An honest indignation against parliamentary corruption, if felt, was certainly singularly well concealed by one who consistently opposed the only Act which was efficacious in promoting an impartial trial of election petitions.

The fact is that it is impossible to dissociate the public life of Fox from his private life at this period of his career. The one was a mirror of the other. Both were dominated by the same love of notoriety, were actuated by the same impulsive temperament, were clouded by the same reckless and cynical contempt for principle. It is true that at a later period of his career he acquired strong

convictions. The great questions brought to the front by the American War deepened and steadied his whole character. Intervals of office taught him something of responsibility. But conviction was with him a plant of slow growth, to act upon impulse instead of on principle was for him even to the end of his days the most congenial course, to mistake sentiment for principle the most unfailing snare. The King appreciated him at the time of his secession far more justly, if more severely, than a House which is ever indulgent to those who amuse it.

"I am greatly incensed," he wrote to Lord North after the division on Woodfall's case, "at the presumption of Charles Fox in obliging you to vote with him that night; indeed that young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honour and honesty, that he must become as contemptible as he is odious."

Walpole, with more delicacy but no less severity, put the same truth in a letter to Sir Horace Mann :

"The famous Charles Fox was this morning turned out of his place of Lord of the Treasury for great flippancies in the House towards North. His parts will now have a full opportunity of showing whether they can balance his character or whether patriotism can whitewash it."

His first essay in political life, tried by any standard except that of mere oratorical success, must be pronounced a failure. Coming into Parliament gifted with transcendent talents and enjoying unique opportunities, he had in five years become unpopular with the people, hated by the King, and distrusted by the House which petted and applauded him. And his failure was distinctly a moral failure, a failure of character and of character alone. In that age of meanness and moral degeneration there were plenty of statesmen who attained to honourable posts in the State whose private life would not bear examination. The Duke of Grafton could become Prime Minister, the high priests of the mysteries of Medmenham