orator more happily or more frequently wielded than wit, the wit which exposes to ridicule the absurdity or inconsistency of an adverse argument. It has been said of him, we believe by Mr. Frere, that he was the wittiest speaker of his times; and they were the times of Sheridan and of Windham. This was Mr. Canning's opinion, and it was also Mr. Pitt's. There was nothing more awful in Mr. Pitt's sarcasm, nothing so vexatious in Mr. Canning's light and galling raillery, as the battering and piercing wit with which Mr. Fox so often interrupted, but always supported, the heavy artillery of his argumentative declamation.

"Nonne fuit satius, tristes Amaryllidis iras,

Atque superba pati fastidia? Nonne, Menalcan."

In debate he had that ready discernment of an adversary's weakness, and the advantage to be taken of it, which is, in the war of words, what the coup d'œil of a practised general is in the field. He was ever best in reply his opening speeches were almost always unsuccessful; the one in 1805, upon the Catholic Question was a great exception; and the previous meditation. upon it, after having heard Lord Grenville's able opening of the same question in the House of Lords, gave him much anxiety: he felt exceedingly nervous, to use the common expression. It was a noble performance, instinct with sound principle; full of broad and striking views of policy abounding in magnanimous appeals to justice; and bold assertions of right; in one passage touching and pathetic,-the description of a Catholic soldier's feelings on reviewing some field where he had shared the dangers of the fight, yet repined to think that he could never taste the glories of command. His greatest speeches were those in 1792, on the Russian armament, on parliamentary reform in 1797, and on the renewal of the war in 1803. The last he himself preferred to all the others; and it had the disadvantage, if it be not however, in another sense, the advantage,†

*See Quarterly Review for October, 1810.

To a great speaker, it is always an advantage to follow a powerful adversary. The audience is prepared for attention, nay, even feels a craving for some answer.

of coming after the finest speech, excepting that on the slave trade, ever delivered by his great antagonist. But there are passages in the earlier speeches,-particularly the fierce attack upon Lord Auckland in the Russian speech,—and the impressive and vehement summary of our failings and our misgovernment in the Reform speech, which it would be hard to match even in the speech of 1803. But for the inferiority of the subject, the speech upon the Westminster Scrutiny in 1784 might perhaps be justly placed at the head of them all. The surpassing interest of the question to the speaker himself; the thorough knowledge of all its details possessed by his audience, which made it sufficient to allude to matters and not to state them ;"* the undeniably strong grounds of attack which he had against his adversary; all conspire to make this great oration as animated and energetic throughout, as it is perfectly felicitous both in the choice of topics and the handling of them. A fortunate cry of Order," which he early raised in the very exordium, by affirming that "far from expecting any indulgence, he could scarcely hope for bare justice from the House," gave him occasion for dwelling on this topic, and pressing it home with additional illustration; till the redoubled blows and repeated bursts of extemporaneous declamation almost overpowered the audience, while they wholly bore down all further interruption. A similar effect is said to have been produced by Mr. (now Lord) Plunket, in the Irish House of Commons, upon some one calling out to take down his words. "Stop," said this consummate orator, “and you shall have something more to take down ;" and then followed in a torrent, the most vehement and indignant description of the wrongs which his country had sustained, and had still to endure.

"

In most of the external qualities of oratory, Mr. Fox was certainly deficient, being of an unwieldy person, without any grace of action, with a voice of little com

*This is one main cause of the conciseness and rapidity of the Greek orations; they were all on a few simple topics thoroughly known to the whole audience. Much of their difficulty comes also from this source.

pass, and which, when pressed in the vehemence of his speech, became shrill almost to a cry or squeak; yet all this was absolutely forgotten in the moment when the torrent began to pour. Some of the under tones of his voice were peculiarly sweet; and there was even in the shrill and piercing sounds which he uttered when at the more exalted pitch, a power that thrilled the heart of the hearer. His pronunciation of our language was singularly beautiful, and his use of it pure and chaste to severity. As he rejected, from the correctness of his taste, all vicious ornaments, and was most sparing, indeed, in the use of figures at all; so, in his choice of words, he justly shunned foreign idiom, or words borrowed, whether from the ancient or modern languages; and affected the pure Saxon tongue, the resources of which are unknown to so many who use it, both in writing and in speaking.

If from the orator we turn to the man, we shall find much more to blame and to lament, whether his private character be regarded or his public; but for the defects of the former, there are excuses to be offered, almost sufficient to remove the censure, and leave the feeling of regret entire and alone. The foolish indulgence of a father, from which he inherited his talents certainly, but little principle, put him, while yet a boy, in the possession of pecuniary resources which cannot safely be trusted to more advanced stages of youth; and the dissipated habits of the times drew him, before the age of manhood, into the whirlpool of fashionable excess. In the comparatively correct age in which our lot is cast, it would be almost as unjust to apply our more severe standard to him and his associates, as it would have been for the Ludlows and Hutchinsons of the seventeenth century, in writing a history of the Roman empire, to denounce the immoralities of Julius Cæsar. Nor let it be forgotten that the noble heart and sweet disposition of this great man passed unscathed through an ordeal which, in almost every other instance, is found to deaden all the kindly and generous affections. A life of gambling, and intrigue, and faction, left the nature of Charles Fox as

little tainted with selfishness or falsehood, and his heart as little hardened, as if he had lived and died in a farmhouse; or rather as if he had not outlived his childish years.

The historian of a character so attractive, the softer features of which present a rare contrast to the accustomed harshness of political men, is tempted to extend the same indulgence, and ascribe the errors of the statesman to the accidents of his position, or the less lofty tone of principle which distinguished the earlier period of his public life, while his principles of conduct were forming and ripening. The great party, too, which he so long led with mathless personal influence, would gladly catch at such a means of defence; but as the very same measure of justice or of mercy must be meted out to the public conduct of Mr. Pitt, his great rival, there would be little gain to party pride by that sacrifice of principle, which could alone lead to such unworthy concessions. It is of most dangerous example, of most corrupting tendency, ever to let the faults of statesmen pass uncensured; or to treat the errors or the crimes which involve the interests of millions with the same indulgence towards human frailty which we may, in the exercise of charity, show towards the more venial transgressions that only hurt an individual; most commonly only the wrong-doer himself. Of Mr. Fox it must be said, that whilst his political principles were formed upon the true model of the Whig School, and led him, when combined with his position as opposing the government's warlike and oppressive policy, to defend the liberty of America, and support the cause of peace both in that and the French war, yet he constantly modified these principles, according to his own situation and circumstances as a party chief; making the ambition of the man and the interest of his followers the governing rule of his conduct. The charge is a grave one; but unhappily the facts fully bear it out. Because Lord Shelburne had gained the King's ear, by an intrigue possibly, but then Lord Shelburne never had pretended to be a follower of Mr. Fox,

the latter formed a coalition with Lord North, whose person and whose policy he had spent his whole life in decrying; whose misgovernment of America had been the cause of nearly destroying the empire; and whose whole principles were the very reverse of his own. The ground taken by this coalition on which to subvert the government of Lord Shelburne and Mr. Pitt, was their having made a peace favourable to England beyond what could have been expected, after the state to which Lord North's maladministration had reduced her; their having among other things, given the new American States too large concessions; and their having made inadequate provision for the security and indemnity of the American loyalists. On such grounds they, Mr. Fox and Lord North, succeeded in overturning the ministry, and took their places; which they held for a few months, when the King dismissed them, amidst the all but universal joy of the country; men of all ranks, and parties, and sects, joining in one feeling of disgust at the factious propensities in which the unnatural alliance was begotten; and apprehending from it, as Mr. Wilberfore remarked, "a progeny stamped with the features of both parents, the violence of one party, and the corruption of the other." This grand error raised the Tories and Mr. Pitt to the power which, during their long and undisturbed reign, they enjoyed, notwithstanding all the unparalleled difficulties of the times, and in spite of so many failures in all the military enterprises of themselves and of their foreign allies. The original quarrel with Mr. Pitt was an error proceeding from the same evil source. His early but mature talents had been amply displayed; he had already gained an influence in Parliament and the country, partly from hereditary, partly from personal qualities, second only to that of Mr. Fox; his private character was wholly untarnished; his principles were the same with those of the Whigs; he had nobly fought with them the battle which destroyed the North administration. Yet no first-rate place could be found to offer him; although Mr. Fox had once and again declared a boundless admiration of his genius, and an unlimited confidence in