[186] The wife of Henry Richard Vassall Fox, 3rd Baron Holland (1773–1840), only son of Stephen, 2nd Lord Holland by Lady Mary Fitzpatrick, daughter of the Earl of Upper Ossory. He was a consistent Liberal in politics, and supported all measures against the slave trade and was in favour of emancipation, and this in spite of being the owner of “extensive plantations in Jamaica.” After his death the following verse in his handwriting was found on his dressing-table:—
“Nephew of Fox, and friend of Grey,
Enough my mead of fame
If those who deign’d to observe me say
I injured neither name.”
In the version quoted by Sydney Smith (Memoir and Letters, vol. ii., p. 457) the last line is “I tarnished neither name”; the punctuation is slightly different from the above, which is taken from the Dict. of Nat. Biog.
[199] My authorities are:—The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by his sister-in-law and his eldest daughter, 2 vols., 1882; The Life of Charles Dickens, by John Forster, 8th Edit., 1872; My Father as I recall him, by Mamie Dickens, Roxburghe Press, N.D. The authoress says that “it is twenty-six years since my father died”; this would make the date of her book 1896.
[200a] His son.
[200b] M. Dickens, p. 26.
[201] Forster, i., p. 4.
[202a] Forster, i., p. 9.
[202b] In writing to Walter Savage Landor (Letters, ii., p. 48), 1856, he asks (in reference to Robinson Crusoe) if it is not a testimony to the homely force of truth that—“One of the most popular books on earth has nothing in it to make anyone laugh or cry. Yet I think, with some confidence, that you never did either over any passage in Robinson Crusoe. In particular, I took Friday’s death as one of the least tender and (in the true sense) least sentimental things ever written. . . .” He goes on:—“It is a book I read very much; and the wonder of its prodigious effect on me and everyone, and the admiration thereof, grows on me the more I observe this curious fact.”
[203] Was it chance or intention that gave his hero the initials D.C., an inversion of C.D.?