Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/527

FOX an unpopularity which justifies the conclusion that ho was the most thoroughly hated statesman of his day. Henry Fox s affection for his son Charles James verged on idolatry. The boy was both precocious and engaging. Whatever he chose to learn, he acquired with ease, and he displayed more than a boy s good sense in correcting his faults. Once he overheard his mother, with whom he was no favourite, remark to his father, " Charles is dreadfully passionate; what shall we do with him?" and the reply, " Oh, never mind ; he is a very sensible little fellow, and he will learn to cure himself." Thereupon he resolved to repress his angry passions, and he succeeded in rendering himself a pattern for gentle bearing and command of temper. He went to Eton when he was nine, having spent the preceding year, at his own request, in the school kept at Wandsworth by Pampelonne, a French refugee. The boy s health was delicate, and this caused his father much anxiety. He was not diligent in learning, nor was his tendency towards indolence at school counteracted by the discipline to which he was subjected. The Rev. Dr Francis, his tutor, sent to his father accounts more flattering than just of his son s progress and attention, and better fitted to gratify parental fondness than set forth the truth. He often went home in order to accompany his parents to some notable spectacle, chief among them being the coronation of George III., where he met with a slight accident, which, being reported in the newspapers, caused his father to write, " The article [in the newspapers] of Charles s mishap has brought several messages. The boy is a great deal better beloved than his father is." When fourteen he left school for four months, which he spent with his parents at Spa and Paris. His father taught him to game at Spa, giving him several gold pieces wherewith to try his luck, as the saying is, every evening. Hence he early became addicted to the vice which was for some years his besetting sin, and for which he could urge no other excuse, when taunted with it later by Lord Hillsborough in the House of Commons, than that it was a vice " countenanced by the fashion of the times, a vice to which some of the greatest characters had given way in the early part of their lives, and a vice which carried with it its own punishment, and entailed a curse upon those who were addicted to it." He returned to Eton thinking himself a thorough young man of the world ; bat his dandi fied airs only excited the ridicule of his comrades, and Dr Barnard, the head master, by flogging him for misconduct, made him feel keenly that he was still a mere schoolboy. More instructive and advantageous than trips to the Con tinent and visits to Continental gaming houses were the visits which he made to the Houses of Parliament, in com pany with his father, to hear important debates. He was in the gallery of the House of Commons when Lord North moved " that the paper entitled the North Briton is a false, scandalous, and seditious libel." His father impressed upon him that John Wilkes was a bad man, and that the earl of Bute was a sagacious minister; these opinions were embodied by him in some French verses, which injudicious admirers have reproduced to show his want of mastery over the French language, and the absurdity of his boyish political sentiments. Leaving Eton in 1764, Fox went to Oxford, where he entered Hertford College. In a letter to his friend Mr Macartney, he professed a great liking for Oxford and fondness for mathematics, adding, in another letter, that he believed mathematics were useful, and was sure they were entertaining, this being enough, in his opinion, to recommend them. The same letter contained his judgment on a newly published poem, which is far less paradoxical and more creditable to his discernment than the foregoing statement concerning mathematics. The poem was the Traveller, which the youthful critic pronounced, with perfect truth, " to have a good deal of merit." A trip to Paris and a stay there of two months interrupted Fox s university career. Dr Newcome, the head of his college, readily sanctioned this holiday, making the complimentary remark that such appli cation as his required " some intermission, and you are the only person with whom I have ever had connexion to whom I could say this. . . . You need not interrupt your amuse ments by severe studies ; for it is wholly unnecessary to make a step onward without you, and therefore we shall stop until we have the pleasure of your company." This visit to the capital of France was no more serviceable to him, in a moral sense, than his previous one. His father en couraged him to indulge himself without stint in pleasures to which young men are only too prone, and, what is still more blameworthy, jested at the scruples of a son who had no strong liking for vicious courses. On his return to Oxford he worked hard at his studies, spending the greater part of a vacation in systematic reading along with his friend Dickson, who was afterwards bishop of Down. Their leisure was devoted to perusing the works of the early English dramatists, all of which they read. Taking his degree in 1766, he left Oxford and spent the succeeding two years in Continental travel, traversing France and Italy, either in company with his parents, or else with his friends Lord Carlisle, Lord Fitzwilliam, and Mr Uvedale Price. Along with Mr Price he visited Voltaire at Ferney, where he was heartily welcomed by the great Frenchman for his father s sake, and was advised to read Voltaire s published works in order that he might emancipate himself from religious prejudices and increase his stock of ideas. He became a proficient in speaking the French tongue, and he practised himself in writing it by penning poetical epistles in French to his friend Fitzpatrick. He also mastered Italian, which he admired beyond measure, saying that there was " more good poetry in Italian than in all other languages that I understand put together." He was then passionately fond of amateur acting and of wearing fine clothes. In after days his friends could scarcely credit the assurance of the friends of his youth when the latter stated that Fox, who had become a sloven in dress, was once a " macaroni," having made a journey from Paris to Lyons in order to buy waistcoats, and was in the habit of walking about with a little French hat on his head and red-heeled shoes on his feet. As difficult was it for some among them to realize that Fox, the leader of the Whigs, and even further advanced in Liberal opinions than the majority of his party, had been such a Tory at the outset of his parliamentary career as to write to George Selwyn in the following terms : " I am reading Clarendon, but scarcely get on faster than you did with your Charles V. I think the style bad, and that he has a great deal of the old woman in his way of thinking, but hate the opposite party so much that it gives one a kind of partiality for him." Hating the opposite party so thoroughly, it is not surpris ing that he should have been inimical to the first adminis tration of the marquis of Rockingham, an administration that repealed the Stamp Act which George Grenville had designed to raise a revenue in the American Colonies, an administration which was far too liberal in tendency and independent in character to suit the narrow and personal views of George III., and that he should have written to Sir George Macartney, " every body laughs at its mem bers, holds them cheap, but, according to the fashionable phrase, doing justice to their good intentions." In 1768, when still under age, Fox was returned for Midhurst, then a pocket borough. His father having made the arrangements necessary for his election had thereby pro vided a supporter of the ministry of the day which the earl of Chatham had formed, and in which the duke of Grafton was first lord of the treasury. Fox s maiden speech in the