“Well, sir, I wore it at the duel, like the thoughtless fool that I was.  It was Major Hunter, of the Guards, with whom I had had a little tracasserie, because I hinted that he should not come into Brookes’s smelling of the stables.  I fired first, and missed.  He fired, and I shrieked in despair.  ’He’s hit!  A surgeon!  A surgeon!’ they cried.  ‘A tailor!  A tailor!’ said I, for there was a double hole through the tails of my masterpiece.  No, it was past all repair.  You may laugh, sir, but I’ll never see the like of it again.”

I had seated myself on a settee in the corner, upon the Prince’s invitation, and very glad I was to remain quiet and unnoticed, listening to the talk of these men.  It was all in the same extravagant vein, garnished with many senseless oaths; but I observed this difference, that, whereas my uncle and Sheridan had something of humour in their exaggeration, Francis tended always to ill-nature, and the Prince to self-glorification.  Finally, the conversation turned to music—­I am not sure that my uncle did not artfully bring it there, and the Prince, hearing from him of my tastes, would have it that I should then and there sit down at the wonderful little piano, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which stood in the corner, and play him the accompaniment to his song.  It was called, as I remember, “The Briton Conquers but to Save,” and he rolled it out in a very fair bass voice, the others joining in the chorus, and clapping vigorously when he finished.

“Bravo, Mr. Stone!” said he.  “You have an excellent touch; and I know what I am talking about when I speak of music.  Cramer, of the Opera, said only the other day that he had rather hand his baton to me than to any amateur in England.  Halloa, it’s Charlie Fox, by all that’s wonderful!”

He had run forward with much warmth, and was shaking the hand of a singular-looking person who had just entered the room.  The new-comer was a stout, square-built man, plainly and almost carelessly dressed, with an uncouth manner and a rolling gait.  His age might have been something over fifty, and his swarthy, harshly-featured face was already deeply lined either by his years or by his excesses.  I have never seen a countenance in which the angel and the devil were more obviously wedded.  Above, was the high, broad forehead of the philosopher, with keen, humorous eyes looking out from under thick, strong brows.  Below, was the heavy jowl of the sensualist curving in a broad crease over his cravat.  That brow was the brow of the public Charles Fox, the thinker, the philanthropist, the man who rallied and led the Liberal party during the twenty most hazardous years of its existence.  That jaw was the jaw of the private Charles Fox, the gambler, the libertine, the drunkard.  Yet to his sins he never added the crowning one of hypocrisy.  His vices were as open as his virtues.  In some quaint freak of Nature, two spirits seemed to have been joined in one body, and the same frame to contain the best and the worst man of his age.