at might have been a
great career. From this time Fox ceased to take any real part in
public business, and if his presence lent no lustre to the Lords, his
absence made the character of the Commons more honorable. Fox, with
all his faults, and they were many and grave, had in him the gifts of
the politician and the capacity of the statesman. Dashwood was a
vulgar fool, who, as Horace Walpole said, with the familiarity and
phrase of a fishwife, introduced the humors of Wapping behind the veil
of the Treasury. But Fox was a very different type of man. Had he
been as keen for his own honor as he was eager in the acquisition of
money, had he been as successful in building up a record of great deeds
as he was successful in building up an enormous fortune, he might have
left behind him one of the greatest names in the history of his age.
But he carried with him to the Upper House the rare abilities which he
had put to such unworthy uses, and he lives in memory chiefly as the
father of his son. In having such a son he rendered the world a good
service, which he himself labored with infinite pains to make into an
evil service.

A young, inexperienced, and headstrong King found himself suddenly the
central figure of perhaps as singular a set of men as ever were
gathered together for the purpose of directing the destinies of a
nation. A famous caricature of the period represents the front of a
marionette-show, through an aperture of which the hand of Bute pulls
the wires that make the political puppets work, while Bute himself
peeps round the corner of the show to observe their antics. No
stranger dolls ever danced around a royal figure to the manipulation of
a favorite's fingers. At {34} a time when political parties as they
are now familiar to us did not exist, when Whiggism was so dominant
that Opposition in the modern sense was unknown, when the pleasures and
the gains of administration were almost entirely reserved for a
privileged caste, and when self-interest was the rarely disavowed spur
of all individual action, it is scarcely surprising to find that the
vast majority of the statesmen of the day were as unadmirable in their
private as they were unheroic in their public life. For then and long
after, the political atmosphere, bad at its best, was infamous at its
worst, and by an unhappy chance the disposition of the King led him to
favor in their public life the very men whose private life would have
filled him