the boy employed like himself! Habits
ensued which became alarming to the old
gamester himself, and which impeded the
rise, injured the reputation, and finally
nullified that supremacy on the part of the
son, which was borne away from him by the
inferior but more decorous nature of Pitt.

Fox was a great lesson as to what is good
and what is bad in fatherly indulgence. All
that was good in him it made better; all that
was bad it made worse. And it would have
made it worse still, had not the good luckily
preponderated, and thus made the best at
last even of the bad. Charles was to have
his way as a child; so he smashed watches.
He was to have his way as a youth; so he
gambled and was dissolute. He was to have
his way as a man; so he must be in Parliament,
and get power, and vote as his father
did, on the Tory side, because his father had
indulged him, and he must indulge his
father. But his father died, and then the love
of sincerity which had been taught him as a
bravery and a predominance, was encouraged
to break forth by the galling of his political
trammels; and though he could not refuse
his passions their indulgence, till friends
rescued him from insolvency, and thus piqued
his gratitude into amendment, that very
circumstance tended to show that he added
strength and largeness of heart to his father's
softness; for the spoilt child and reckless
gamester, finally settled down as the
representative of a nobler age that was coming,
and was the charm in private of all who
admired simplicity of manners and the perfection
of good sense. Apart from this love of
truth, we do not take him, in any respect, to
have been profound, or to have seen beyond
the next generation. What was greatest
in Charles Fox was his freedom from
nonsense, pettiness, and pretension. He could by no
means admit that greater was smaller, or the
rights of the American and French nations
inferior to those of their princes. He envied no
man his good qualities; felt under no necessity
of considering his dignity with young or old;
thought humanity at large superior to any
particular forms of it; and in becoming its
representative in circles which would have conceded
such a privilege to none but a man of birth,
enabled them to feel how charming it was.

The spoilt child prevailed so long in the
life of Fox, and to all appearance so
irremediably, that accounts of him at different
periods seem hardly recording the same man.

To give instances, in as few words as possible.
We have seen the smashing of the watch.

When a youth he was a great admirer of
peerages and ribbons; and on his return
from his first visit to the continent he appeared
in red-heeled shoes, and a feather in his hat
—the greatest fopperies of the day.

His father paid a hundred and forty thousand
pounds for his gaming debts.

He took to the other extreme in dress, and
became as slovenly as he had been foppish.

On coming into office he showed that he
could be as industrious as he had been idle.

Whenever he was in office he never touched
a card; and when his political friends, out of
a sense of what was due to his public
services, finally paid his debts, and made him
easy for life, he left off play entirely.

He dressed decently and simply, and settled
down for the remainder of his life into the
domestic husband, the reader of books, and
the lover of country retirement, from which
he could not bear to be absent for a day.

In Holland House Fox passed his boyhood
and part of his youth. He is not much
associated with it otherwise, except as a
name. He and a friend, one day, without a
penny in their pockets, walked thither from
Oxford, a distance of fifty-six miles; for the
purpose, we suppose, of getting a supply.
They resolved to do it without stopping on
the road; but the day was hot; an alehouse
became irresistible; and on arriving at their
journey's end, Charles thus addressed his
father, who was drinking his coffee: "You
must send half a guinea or a guinea, without
loss of time, to the alehouse-keeper at
Nettlebed, to redeem the gold watch you gave
me some years ago, and which I have left
in pawn there for a pot of porter."

A little before he died, at fifty-eight years of
age, of a dropsy, he drove several times with
his wife to Holland House, and looked about
the grounds with a melancholy tenderness.

But, notwithstanding the celebrity of
Charles Fox, and that of Addison himself,
the man who has drawn the greatest attention
to Holland House, if not in his own person,
yet certainly by the effect of his personal
qualities and attainments upon other people,
was Fox's nephew, the late Lord Holland,
Henry Richard, third of the title. He
succeeded to the title before he was a year old;
rescued the old mansion from ruin, as before
noticed; and with allowance for visits to the
continent and occasional residence in town,
may be said to have passed his whole life in
it, between enjoyments of his books and
hospitalities to wits and worthies of all parties.

Lord Holland was a man of elegant literature,
of liberal politics, and great benevolence.
Travelling like other young noblemen on the
continent, but extending his acquaintance
with it beyond most of them, and going into
Spain, his inclinations became directed to the
writers of that country, and his feelings
deeply interested in their political struggles.
The consequence was a work in two volumes,
containing the Lives of Lope de Vega and
Guillen de Castro, a translation of three
Spanish comedies, and the most hospitable and
generous services to the patriots who suffered
exile in the cause of their country's freedom.
The comedies we have never seen. The lives,
though not profound (for he was educated in
a school of criticism anterior to that of
Coleridge and the Germans), are excellent
as far as they go written with classical