of Sir G. Macartney, to whom he was writing, and who was
known to maintain that it was useless. His own account of his
school and college training, given in a letter to the same correspondent
(6th August 1767), is: “I employed almost my
whole time at Oxford in the mathematical and classical knowledge,
but more particularly in the latter, so that I understand
Latin and Greek tolerably well. I am totally ignorant in every
part of useful knowledge. I am more convinced every day how
little advantage there is in being what at school and the university
is called a good scholar: one receives a good deal of
amusement from it, but that is all. At present I read nothing
but Italian, which I am immoderately fond of, particularly of
the poetry.... As for French, I am far from being so thorough
a master of it as I could wish, but I know so much of it that I
could perfect myself in it at any time with very little trouble,
especially if I pass three or four months in France.” The passage
is characteristic. It shows at once his love of good literature
and his thoroughness. Fox’s youth was disorderly, but it was
never indolent. He was incapable of half doing anything which
he did at all. He did perfect himself in French, and he showed
no less determination to master mere sports. At a later period
when he had grown fat he accounted for his skill in taking “cut
balls” at tennis by saying that he was a very “painstaking
man.” He was all his life a great and steady walker.
The disorders of his early years were notorious, and were a common subject of gossip. In the spring of 1767 he left Oxford and joined his father on the continent during a tour in France and Italy. In 1768 Lord Holland bought the pocket borough of Midhurst for him, and he entered on his parliamentary career, and on London society, in 1769. Within the next few years Lord Holland reaped to the full the reward for all that was good, and whatever was evil, in the training he had given his son. The affection of Charles Fox for his father was unbounded, but the passion for gambling which had been instilled in him as a boy proved the ruin of the family fortune. He kept racehorses, and bet on them largely. On the racecourse he was successful, and it is another proof of his native thoroughness that he gained a reputation as a handicapper. It is said that he won more than he lost on the course. At the gambling table he was unfortunate, and there can be little question that he was fleeced both in London and in Paris by unscrupulous players of his own social rank, who took advantage of his generosity and whose worthlessness he knew. In the ardour of his passion Fox took his losses and their consequences with an attractive gaiety. He called the room in which he did business with the Jew moneylenders his “Jerusalem chamber.” When his elder brother had a son, and his prospects were injured, he said that the boy was a second Messiah, who had appeared for the destruction of the Jews. “He had his jest, and they had his estate.” In 1774 Lord Holland had to find £140,000 to pay the gambling debts of his sons. For years Charles lived in pecuniary embarrassment, and during his later years, when he had given up gambling, he was supported by the contributions of wealthy friends, who in 1793 formed a fund of £70,000 for his benefit.
His public career did not supply him with a check on habits of dissipation in the shape of the responsibilities of office. He began, as was to be expected in his father’s son, by supporting the court; and in 1770, when only twenty-one, he was appointed a junior lord of the admiralty with Lord North. During the violent conflict over the Middlesex election (see Wilkes, John) he took the unpopular side, and vehemently asserted the right of the House of Commons to exclude Wilkes. In 1772 during the proceedings against Crosby and Oliver—a part of the “Wilkes and liberty” agitation—he and Lord North were attacked by a mob and rolled in the mud. But Fox’s character was incompatible with ministerial service under King George III. The king, himself a man of orderly life, detested him as a gambler and a rake. And Fox was too independent to please a master who expected obedience. In February 1772 he threw up his place to be free to oppose the Royal Marriage Act, on which the king’s heart was set. He returned to office as junior lord of the treasury in December. But he was insubordinate; his sympathy with the American colonies, which were now beginning to resist the claims of the mother country to tax them, made him intolerable to the king and he was dismissed in February 1774. The death of his father on the 1st of July of that year removed an influence which tended to keep him subordinate to the court, and his friendship for Burke drew him into close alliance with the Rockingham Whigs. From the first his ability had won him admiration in the House of Commons. He had prepared to distinguish himself as an orator by the elaborate cultivation of his voice, which was naturally harsh and shrill. His argumentative force was recognized at once, but the full scope of his powers was first shown on the 2nd of February 1775, when he spoke on the disputes with the colonies. The speech is unfortunately lost, but Gibbon, who heard it, told his friend Holroyd (afterwards Earl of Sheffield) that Fox, “taking the vast compass of the question before us, discovered powers for regular debate which neither his friends hoped nor his enemies dreaded.”
His great political career dates from that day. It is unique among the careers of British statesmen of the first rank, for it was passed almost wholly in opposition. Except for a few months in 1782 and 1783, and again for a few months before his death in 1806, he was out of office. If he was absolutely sincere in the statement he made to his friend Fitzpatrick, in a letter of the 3rd of February 1778, his life was all he could have wished. “I am,” he wrote, “certainly ambitious by nature, but I really have, or think I have, totally subdued that passion. I have still as much vanity as ever, which is a happier passion by far, because great reputation I think I may acquire and keep, great situation I never can acquire, nor if acquired keep, without making sacrifices that I never will make.” His words show that he judged himself and read the future accurately. Yet it was certainly a cause of bitter disappointment to him that he had to stand by while the country was in his opinion not only misgoverned, but led to ruin. His reputation as an orator and a political critic, which was great from the first and grew as he lived, most assuredly did not console him for his impotence as a statesman. Of the causes which rendered his brilliant capacity useless for the purpose of obtaining practical success the most important, perhaps the only one of real importance, was his personal character. Lord John Russell (afterwards Earl Russell), his friendly biographer, has to confess that Fox might have joined in the confession of Mirabeau: “The public cause suffers for the immoralities of my youth.” His reputation as a rake and gambler was so well established at the very beginning of his career that when he was dismissed from office in 1774 there was a general belief among the vulgar that he had been detected in actual theft. His perfect openness, the notoriety of his bankruptcies and of the seizure of his books and furniture in execution, kept him before the world as a model of dissipation. In 1776, when he was leading the resistance to Lord North’s colonial policy, he “neither abandoned gaming nor his rakish life. He was seldom in bed before five in the morning nor out of it before two at noon.” At the most important crisis of his life in 1783, he almost made an ostentation of disorder and of indifference not only to appearances, but even to decency. Horace Walpole has drawn a picture of him at that time which Lord Holland, Fox’s beloved and admiring nephew, speaking from his early recollections of his uncle, confesses has “some justification.” Coming from such an authority the certificate may be held to confirm the substantial accuracy of Walpole. “Fox lodged in St James’s Street, and as soon as he rose, which was very late, had a levée of his followers and of the gaming club at Brooks’s—all his disciples. His bristly black person, and shagged breast quite open and rarely purified by any ablutions, was wrapped in a foul linen nightgown and his bushy hair dishevelled. In these cynic weeds and with Epicurean good humour did he dictate his politics, and in this school did the heir of the empire attend his lessons and imbibe them.” That this cynic manner, and Epicurean speech, were only the outside of a manly and generous nature was well known to the personal friends of Fox, and is now universally allowed. But by the bulk of his contemporaries,
