We can follow him to Oxford, and wish we had room for his letter to his father explaining with elaborate pains how he came to knock the bottom out of £150, or for another which announces the loss of eighty guineas at cards, and registers the first of a series of vows that it shall never happen again. All this will be found in Volume II., together with some account of the stormy opening of his parliamentary career—at nineteen; but there or thereabouts we regretfully leave him, the best thing by far that Henry Fox ever made.
If it were asked what this man had done in his days to deserve two biographies on the scale of Mr. Riker's and Lord Ilchester's, the answer would be long in coming. Henry Fox was a man of good but moderate abilities, a bad speaker, a fair debater, one of the few, at any rate, who ever stood up to William Pitt the first. He conducted his War Secretaryship with diligence, his Paymastership with what must be called legal honesty. He robbed his country, but no more than any other Paymaster had done. He enriched himself by trading with the huge balances left on his hands, sometimes lending of them to the country which found them at twenty per cent! Every Paymaster except Pitt, who would have none of it, had done as much, and most of them did worse. But one searches Lord Ilchester's pages in vain for anything definitely done by Fox, except, to be sure, the infamous attempt to betray the constitution by making the third estate of the realm a creature of the first. Even that he did not succeed in doing. It was Lord North who reaped for King George what Fox had sown. And that is about all that one can say, and very much what Lord Ilchester himself says of Henry Fox. What should be added to that is that the book is admirable both for lucidity of style and arrangement, for gallantry of attack, and gaiety in action.
RECOLLECTIONS OF LADY GEORGIANA PEEL. Compiled by her Daughter, Ethel Peel. London: Lane. 1920. 16s. net.
Lady Georgiana was born in 1836 and is daughter of Lord John Russell. She should have memorable things to tell, and perhaps she has. But Providence, which has given her length of days and illustrious descent, has not conferred the garnering eye or the gift of tongues. It is a pity, for she has seen so much: Holland House and Pembroke Lodge, Bowood in the days of its greatness, Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston, the Duke and Disraeli, Rogers, Tom Moore and his wife, Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, the whole Victorian galaxy. She has danced with the Prince Consort, and found him rather cross; she has heard Tom Moore sing, and seen him weep at his own music; she has helped entertain Garibaldi, and dined with Macaulay. She was not, however, impressed by that pundit, found his monologue a bore, and agreed with Sydney Smith when he said, "very gravely, towards the end of dinner, 'Macaulay, when I'm dead, you'll be sorry you never heard me talk.'" That is something; and here is another thing equally good. When Lord John was about to take John Bright down to stay at Woburn, "a candid friend" wrote to the Duke of Bedford, "Hope you'll count your spoons." Here, once more, is a glimpse into the manners of that stately place, about 1840:
Many were the happy Christmases we spent at Woburn. I remember, to our huge delight, we were allowed to help throw mutton chops out of the dining-room window for whoever cared to pick them up. I think that custom died out. When I was a child each guest was provided with a piece of paper in which to wrap up an eatable for people waiting outside.
God bless the Squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations!
No doubt that was as good a way of doing it as any. But such flowers grow rarely in Lady Georgiana's garden, which is indeed something of a hortus siccus where names and dates have to stand for more than they will bear. "I remember Mr. Kingslake coming down to Pembroke Lodge sometimes; I don't think he had then begun his History. He was always very agreeable." So much for Eothen. "In connection with William Warburton, I remember Mr. Matthew Arnold, for he was a great friend of my brother-in-law's, and a comrade in the inspection of schools." And so much for him. Of Dickens we get something more. "In the evening, I remember, he was conspicuous, owing to wearing a pink shirt front embroidered with white." Disraeli, too, expatiated in shirts. "Though he talked incessantly, I remember best his shirt front, which was made of white book-muslin over a very bright rose-coloured foundation, which shone through it." The temptation to stick pins into it must have been severe.
With these grains the reader must be satisfied, and with such powers of evolution as he possesses may extract, no doubt, some more. Here is one of Lady Holland, too good to be passed over. She proposed leaving to Lord John Russell, and did in fact leave him, an estate in Kennington—where the Oval now is. Lord John would only accept it for life, urging the claims of the son and daughter of the house. "I hate my son; I don't like my daughter," said the great lady, and settled it.