If he touches a card, if he rattles a box,
Away fly the guineas of this Mr Fox.”
Once, before delivering a speech in defence of the Church, he played for twenty-two hours, and lost five hundred pounds an hour; and then declared that the greatest pleasure in life, after winning, was losing! His bad luck was notorious, but again and again his intimates came to his assistance, and Walpole wondered what he would do when he had sold the estates of all his friends! It was noticed that he did not do himself justice in a debate on the Thirty-Nine Articles (6th February 1772), and Walpole thought it was not to be wondered at.
“He had sat up playing at hazard at Almack’s from Tuesday evening, the 4th, till five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 5th. An hour before, he had recovered twelve thousand pounds that he had lost, and by dinner, which was at five o’clock, he had ended losing eleven thousand pounds. On the Thursday he spoke in the above debate, went to dinner at half-past eleven at night, from there to White’s, where he drank till seven the next morning, thence to Almack’s, where he won six thousand pounds, and between three and four in the afternoon he set out for Newmarket. His brother Stephen lost ten thousand pounds two nights after, and Charles eleven thousand pounds more on the 13th, so that in three nights the two brothers, the eldest not twenty-four, lost thirty-two thousand pounds.”
The wonder is, not that Fox spoke ill, but that he spoke at all.
They were good losers in those days, and stoicism was a very necessary quality to be possessed by the majority, since all played and few won. One night, when Fox had been terribly unfortunate at the faro-table, Topham Beauclerk followed him to his rooms to offer consolation, expecting to find him perhaps stretched on the floor bewailing his losses, perhaps plunged in moody despair. He was surprised to see him reading Herodotus. “What would you have me do?” Fox asked the astonished visitor. “I have lost my last shilling.” “Charles tells me he has not now, nor has had for some time, one guinea,” Lord Carlisle told George Selwyn, “and is happier on that account.”
“But hark! the voice of battle shouts from far,
The Jews and Macaronis are at war;
The Jews prevail, and, thund’ring from the stocks,
They seize, they bind, they circumcise Charles Fox.”