Such is a brief sketch of the public life of Fox. With the exception of the first ea years of it, in which he was either a supporter or a member of a court administration, It was in substances consistent. From the beginning to tho end It was honest. There are parts of his public life certainly which have led other. to call his honesty into question, and to deny to him the quality of consistency; and of these or at any rate of some of them, there are those among his frieuds and admirers who have expressed disapprobation. Such parts are his early connection with the court, his coalition with Lord North, and, shortly before his death, his coalition with Lord Grenville. The charge that ho was actuated by private pique when, In 1774, he became au opponent of Lord North's ministry, has been already met, so far as it is possible to meet a charge which it is so very easy to make. But in a case where no unworthy motives have operated to produce a change of course, and it proceeds from change of opinion, it is for a vulgar mind alone to make this a ground of attack and abuse. And equally vulgar is that view of a statesman's duty which would preveut him from ever entering into alliance with one to whom nt a previous period ho may have been opposed, even though the question or ques.
tions on which they differed may now have been settled, and there may only remain questions upon which they are agreed. Fox was assuredly not, in the full and strict sense of the term, a philosophic) etatcsman, yet he came nearer to it perhaps than most other English statesmen of his time. His speeches always display in a pre-eminent degree a sense of the importance of principle. Sir James Mackintosh has said of him, as an orator, that "he possessed above all moderns that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence which formed the prince of orators. Ho was the most Demosthenean speaker since the days of Demosthenes." Fox's speeches were collected, and published in six volumes with a short biographical and critical iutroductiou by Lord Erakine, in 1825. The fragment which he left of his projected History of the reign of James IL,' a feeble and valueless production, was published in 1808, with a preface by Lord Holland. Of the long.
talked-of ' Memorials of Charles James Fox,' begun by Lord Holland, Lord John Russell has published three volumes, and announced a fourth to complete the work ; but the work, though essential for the history of the period, has been prepared in a very disjointed and unsatisfactory manner.