As it was with the faces of the men of this noble family, so was it also with their minds.  Nature had done much for them all.  She had moulded them all of that clay of which she is most sparing.  To all she had given strong reason and sharp wit, a quick relish for every physical and intellectual enjoyment, constitutional intrepidity, and that frankness by which constitutional intrepidity is generally accompanied, spirits which nothing could depress, tempers easy, generous, and placable, and that genial courtesy which has its seat in the heart, and of which artificial politeness is only a faint and cold imitation.  Such a disposition is the richest inheritance that ever was entailed on any family.

But training and situation greatly modified the fine qualities which nature lavished with such profusion on three generations of the house of Fox.  The first Lord Holland was a needy political adventurer.  He entered public life at a time when the standard of integrity among statesmen was low.  He started as the adherent of a minister who had indeed many titles to respect, who possessed eminent talents both for administration and for debate, who understood the public interest well, and who meant fairly by the country, but who had seen so much perfidy and meanness that he had become sceptical as to the existence of probity.  Weary of the cant of patriotism, Walpole had learned to talk a cant of a different kind.  Disgusted by that sort of hypocrisy which is at least a homage to virtue, he was too much in the habit of practising the less respectable hypocrisy which ostentatiously displays, and sometimes even simulates vice.  To Walpole Fox attached himself, politically and personally, with the ardour which belonged to his temperament.  And it is not to be denied that in the school of Walpole he contracted faults which destroyed the value of his many great endowments.  He raised himself, indeed, to the first consideration in the House of Commons; he became a consummate master of the art of debate; he attained honours and immense wealth; but the public esteem and confidence were withheld from him.  His private friends, indeed, justly extolled his generosity and good nature.  They maintained that in those parts of his conduct which they could least defend there was nothing sordid, and that, if he was misled, he was misled by amiable feelings, by a desire to serve his friends, and by anxious tenderness for his children.  But by the nation he was regarded as a man of insatiable rapacity and desperate ambition; as a man ready to adopt, without scruple, the most immoral and the most unconstitutional manners; as a man perfectly fitted, by all his opinions and feelings, for the work of managing the Parliament by means of secret-service money, and of keeping down the people with the bayonet.  Many of his contemporaries had a morality quite as lax as his:  but very few among them had his talents, and none had his hardihood and energy.  He could not, like Sandys and Doddington,