to his health was unremitted, as if he feared that hereditary gout would traverse his career as it had often broken in upon his father's. No juvenile avocations diverted him from his studies nor left reproaches from the grave on his character. Fox seemed to leave pleasure with regret, and to bestow only spare moments on the government of a nation; Pitt, to make industry and virtue the ladders of his ambition. Fox's greatness was innate, and if he had ambition it was the only passion which he took no means to gratify. He disguised no vice; he used no art; he despised application; he sought no popularity. A warm friend, and almost incapable of being provoked by one; void of all inveteracy, and only an enemy when spirit called on him to resent, or the foe was so great that he was too bold not to punish, as he showed the next year by insisting on the dismission of the lord chancellor and the lord advocate. Pitt cultivated friends to form a party, and had already attached many considerable young men to himself.

"It is singular and perhaps totally a novel combination of circumstances that Charles Fox and William Pitt, the second sons of Henry Lord Holland and William Lord Chatham, who themselves were second sons, should become rivals and the first men in the House of Commons, as their fathers had been little more than twenty years before.

"Pitt had not the commanding brilliancy of his father, nor his imposing air and person; but his language was more pure and correct, and his method and reasoning better. Fox had not the ungraceful hesitation of his father, yet scarce equalled him in subtlety and acuteness. Yet no man ever exceeded him in the closeness of argument, which flowed from him in a torrent of vehemence, as declamation sometimes does from those who most want argument. He alone was a match for the nervous sense of Thurlow, and could dismount the wit and pleasantry of Lord North. Without that conciliatory jocoseness, and with

out the exuberant imagery of Burke, Fox's allusions were beautiful and happy; and he often possessed that superior kind of wit which, without being sought, results from the clearness of ideas and knowledge of the world, and which combines by intuition, not by fancy. It was one of Fox's merits that though he idolized the imagination of Burke, the quickness and fire of Hare, the genteel irony and badinage of Fitzpatrick, and the gaiety of Sheridan, he never aimed at wit himself, which was not his peculiar talent. Good sense and reasoning were his native language, and he neither sought what he had not nor studied to make the most of what he had. Nature had given him genius, and to her he left it to furnish him with occasions of displaying it. If he affected anything it was vice: all his abilities and good qualities were born with him. Intrepid, he did not fear even reproach. Art he was either incapable of or despised. I do not believe that he had one bad, black, or base object; it was a pity that he was as inattentive in having a good one. acted as the moment impelled him; but as his conception was just, and his soul void of malice or treachery, he meditated no ill, yet might have advantaged himself and his country more had he acted with any foresight or any plan."

He

The Shelburne administration, like its predecessor, was fated to be short-lived. As we have already related, Fox entered into a coalition with Lord North, and hotly attacked the government upon the policy then being pursued towards America. He was, as we have seen, bitterly assailed by Pitt for having united himself with a minister whom for the last ten years he had been in the habit of inveighing against, and whose measures he had stigmatized as worthy of their pliant and unscrupulous author. It was an unnatural union, and could only, said Pitt, then serving under Shelburne, produce the most monstrous results. Fox crossed swords with his foe, and defended himself as best he could, but the defence was weak and