MEMOIRS

OF

CHARLES JAMES FOX.

CHAPTER I.

IN recurring to the happy days when St. Anne's Hill possessed its BENEVOLENT and ILLUSTRIOUS MASTER, a gloom pervades my mind, which neither time, nor change of scene, has been able wholly to dissipate.

Let me, however, suppress my feelings, and commence with the period of the year 1802, when Mr. Fox left his beloved spot, to visit the new, brilliant, and extraordinary scenes then opening in France. If it will not be deemed superfluous, (and can any thing be superfluous relating to that great man?) I shall introduce to my reader an outline of the domestic life of Mr. Fox, in that

dignified retirement in which he had found true happiness, and in which those admirable talents, so capable of guiding and saving a nation, were devoted to the rational purpose of acquiring knowledge, and enlarging a mind, already so powerful and capa

cious.

The Vulgar, whose prejudices it is difficult to efface, and who are more prone to depreciate than to make allowance for great characters, have long imagined, and even still continue to think, that Mr. Fox was a mere dissipated man of pleasure. This idea had been industriously cherished and propagated by a party, whose interested views were promoted, by keeping, from the councils of the nation, a man so eminently their superior. The unprincipled desires of selfish ambition had kept him out of stations for which nature had most eminently qualified him. Destined, as he appeared, of becoming the founder of a political school in England-capable of raising her in the opinion of other nations, it was his ill fate to be opposed by a minister incapable of appreciating his merit, and unwilling to recommend it to the approbation

of his sovereign; though himself unfit to be premier, and indeed inadequate to fill any considerable department of the state.

The calumny thus attached to Mr. Fox, and the selfish monopoly of power which excluded him from the cabinet, have been productive of those enormous evils to the Eng lish nation which now threaten her very existence. Mr. Pitt, under the controul of an extensive and liberal genius, like that of Mr. Fox, might have been a useful minister of finance; but, in attempting to regulate the concerns of the world, his vigour was creative of destruction, and his imperious spirit, so unworthy a true statesman, was prejudicial to liberty abroad, and dangerous to it at home. The financial dictator of Downingstreet was unfit to cope with the consummate military and diplomatic characters that had newly risen upon the Continent ; and, it is probable that even his father, Lord Chatham, a man great through the weakness of France, would have been foiled in such a contest; certainly not with so much disgrace, but, perhaps, with equal injury

to the country. The most mischievously fatal error which a statesman can be guilty of, is to use coercive severity in direct opposition to the bent of human nature. The re-action produced, countervails all common plans; and the supremacy over clerks, secretaries, and members of parliament, affords dangerous data on which to ground expectation, when foreign nations are the subjects of proposed management. An enlarged, and an arrogant mind, are essentially different as to their views, and the comprehensiveness of their operations. To superficial or selfish observers their plans may seem, for a while, similar; but those of the latter are productive of discomfiture, and fertile in disgrace.

I have, however, no desire in stigmatizing one of these personages to elevate the other! Both rest in the grave :-but I should deem it derogatory to Mr. Fox's memory, if I paid any posthumous compliments to the character and talents of a minister, of whom the best that can be said is, that he failed through ignorance, and ruined his country through mistake. Facts are decisively

against him, and the historian who describes them will find, that he misunderstood the law of nations, and that for temporary purposes, and limited objects, he violated the great principles of society, and attempted to produce results which historical reasoning, the nature of man, and the voice of religion, forbad him to expect. There is no political associate of that mistaken minister, possessing any independent qualities of mind, who, if he now dispassionately reconsider the affairs of the last twenty years, but will be forced to avow his own delusion, and acknowledge that the irreparable mischiefs of a pernicious, and obstinatelypursued system, more congenial to vulgar prejudices, than agreeable to grand state maxims, have brought on a change of political relations, on the continent, directly militating against the pretensions of Great Britain as a primary nation,

The passions of the vulgar made and kept Mr. Pitt minister; but the vulgar themselves are daily receiving convincing proofs how little value they have got for their