and the love of women was given to him with a generosity
that was only equal to the lovable nature that compelled and commanded
it. His career is one record of unrivalled precocity. As a child he
had been his father's friend rather than his father's plaything; as a
{143} lad he was his father's travelling companion, and learned from
that father the pleasant art of sowing wild oats not with the hand but
with the whole sack. He returned to England a proficient gambler, a
finished rake, the dear friend of famous men, the darling of beautiful
women, to enter, before he was of age, upon that political career in
which it seemed certain that if he would follow in his father's steps
he might hope for more than his father's fortunes. If Charles Fox had
been quite cankered by his father's care, if the essence of his genius
had been corruptible, he might have given the King's friends a leader
as far removed from them as Lucifer from his satellites, and contrived
perhaps--though that indeed would have been difficult--to amass almost
as much money as he was able to spend with comfort. To judge by the
young man's initial enterprise, his Parliamentary career promised to be
as brilliant and as brutal as any king who hated Chatham and hated
Wilkes and hated the American colonies could possibly desire. The
furious intolerance of his maiden speech was happily, however, only
like that false dawn familiar to travellers in the East. The true
sunrise was yet to come. But for six years he was as consistent in his
support of Lord North and the policy that North represented as for the
rest of his career he was consistent in opposition to it.

[Sidenote: 1768--Fox's scholarship]

The life of Fox recalls, in its brilliant activity, in its no less
brilliant scholarship, the dazzling careers of some of those Italian
princes who were equally at home and equally distinguished in the
battlefield and in the library, equally happy in handling their weapons
or in turning the pages of the latest volume from the presses of Aldus
that renewed the youth of some masterpiece of Greece or Rome. Fox's
scholarship would have been remarkable in a man whose days and nights
were devoted to scholarship alone. It was little less than marvellous
in a man who gave a large part of his days to the fiercest political
fights of a fiercely political age and a large part of his nights to
the fascination of the card-table, the disasters of the dice-box, and
the purs