Blue coat. Buff waistcoat. Powder.
BORN 1749, DIED 1806.
By Jackson after Reynolds.
CHARLES JAMES FOX, third son of the first Lord Holland, was born in 1749.
Lord Holland was the most able and unprincipled of the able and unprincipled statesmen of the school of Walpole. In private life he seems to have had something of the generous and sweet-tempered disposition of his son Charles, towards whom he exhibited a boundless, but not very judicious, affection. He spoilt him as a child. He gave him so much money at Eton, as by example to inaugurate a new state of things at that school, and he was constantly taking him away from his studies at Oxford to indulge him prematurely in the dissipations of fashionable life. He brought him into Parliament before he was of age, and encouraged him from the first to take part in every important debate.
Such were the early circumstances of Charles Fox. His abilities at once showed themselves to be of the very highest order, and exactly fitted for the field in which they were to be displayed.
A power of close and rapid reasoning, combined with a strength and passion which would have made even mere declamation effective, a slight hesitation indeed in his cooler moments, but when he was excited a flow of language almost too rapid and too copious, and altogether inexhaustible, a miraculous quickness in perceiving at a glance the weak points in the speech of an opponent, and a matchless dexterity in taking advantage of them: these were the characteristics of his extraordinary eloquence. In no age and no country could he have found an audience more capable of appreciating his particular gifts than the House of Commons of that period. On the other hand, no audience could have been more ready to forgive the total absence of preparation, the occasional repetition, the want of arrangement and the want of finish, which were his faults, and which would have seemed very serious faults in the Athenian Assembly or the Roman Senate.
His private life at the outset, and long afterwards, was stained by dissipation of every kind. He entered Parliament with no fixed principles. He was to the last unduly carried away by the spirit of faction. But there was a goodness as well as a manliness in his nature, and a justness in his judgment, which were apparent from the very first, and which more and more asserted themselves till they threw his faults entirely into the shade. He grew steadily in character and estimation, till, at the time of his death, he was regarded by a large circle with an idolatrous attachment, which no other statesman has ever inspired. More than twenty years after there were people who could not mention his name without tears in their eyes.
Fox at once took a prominent part in public life. He vehemently defended the unconstitutional action of the Government against Wilkes, accepted office, was turned out soon afterwards for speaking against the Ministry, struck right and left for some time in an irregular manner, and finally, at the age of six-and-twenty, settled down into steady and vigorous Opposition to the war with our American colonists, which then broke out.