“The best father in the world, Richard!” cried Charles.  “If his former friends could but look into his kind heart, and see him in his home, they would not have turned their backs upon him.  I do not mean such scoundrels as Rigby.  And now my father is in exile half the year in Nice, and the other half at King’s Gate.  The King and Jack Bute used him for a tool, and then cast him out.  You wonder why I am of the King’s party?” said he, with something sinister in his smile; “I will tell you.  When I got my borough I cared not a fig for parties or principles.  I had only the one definite ambition, to revenge Lord Holland.  Nay,” he exclaimed, stopping my protest, “I was not too young to know rottenness as well as another.  The times are rotten in England.  You may have virtue in America, amongst a people which is fresh from a struggle with the earth and its savages.  We have cursed little at home, in faith.  The King, with his barley water and rising at six, and shivering in chapel, and his middle-class table, is rottener than the rest.  The money he saves in his damned beggarly court goes to buy men’s souls.  His word is good with none.  For my part I prefer a man who is drunk six days out of the seven to one who takes his pleasure so.  And I am not so great a fool that I cannot distinguish justice from injustice.  I know the wrongs of the colonies, which you yourself have put as clear as I wish to hear, despite Mr. Burke and his eloquence.

   [My grandfather has made a note here, which in justice should be
   added, that he was not deceived by Mr. Fox’s partiality.—­D.  C. C.]

And perhaps, Richard,” he concluded, with a last lingering look at the old pile as he turned his horses, “perhaps some day, I shall remember what you told us at Brooks’s.”

It was thus, boyishly, that Mr. Fox chose to take me into his confidence, an honour which I shall remember with a thrill to my dying day.  So did he reveal to me the impulses of his early life, hidden forever from his detractors.  How little does the censure of this world count, which cannot see the heart behind the embroidered waistcoat!  When Charles Fox began his career he was a thoughtless lad, but steadfast to such principles as he had formed for himself.  They were not many, but, compared to those of the arena which he entered, they were noble.  He strove to serve his friends, to lift the name of a father from whom he had received nothing but kindness, however misguided.  And when he saw at length the error of his ways, what a mighty blow did he strike for the right!

“Here is a man,” said Dr. Johnson, many years afterwards, “who has divided his kingdom with Caesar; so that it was a doubt whether the nation should be ruled by the sceptre of George the Third or the tongue of Fox.”

CHAPTER XL

VAUXHALL