grandeur. Contempt of perfidy, and indignation against cruelty would have called forth those powers in the writer, which we have again and again witnessed with astonishment in the speaker, and when his taste5 had come in to the aid of his other intellectual attainments, we should have found that his education as a scholar, and his pursuits as a statesman, peculiarly qualified him for the most arduous and exalted duties of an historian. His memory seems never to have been oppressed by the number, or distracted by the variety of the materials which he had gradually accumulated. Never indeed will his companions forget the readiness, correctness, and glowing enthusiasm with which he repeated the noblest passages in the best English, French, and Italian poets, and in the best epic and dramatic writers of antiquity. But that he should look for relaxation to his understanding, or amusement to his fancy in the charms of poetry, is less remarkable than that he should find leisure and inclination to exercise his talents on the most recondite, and I add the most minute topics of criticism. He read the most celebrated authors of Greece and Rome, not only with exquisite taste, but with philological precision, and the mind which had been employed in balancing the fate of kingdoms seemed occasionally like that of Cæsar when he wrote upon grammatical Analogy, to put forth its whole might upon the structure of sentences, the etymology of words, the import of particles, the quantity of syllables, and all the nicer distinctions of those metrical canons, which some of our ingenious

countrymen have laid down for the different kinds of verse in the learned languages. Even in these subordinate accomplishments he was wholly exempt from pedantry. He could amuse without ostentation, while he instructed without arrogance. He enlarged his own knowledge of real life by reflecting upon fictitious representations of characters and manners; and by the productions of the comic and the tragic Muse he was prepared to give greater compass to his arguments, greater vivacity to his illustrations, and greater ardour to his remonstrances and warnings in parliamentary discussions. Thus he turned to the most important uses in practice those acquisitions in which the generality of men are content to look only for the gratification of harmless curiosity, or the employment of vacant hours, for speculative improvement or literary fame.

I ought particularly to notice that in Euripides. and Aristophanes he found the richest treasures of that political wisdom, which in common with other enquirers, he sometimes drew from other sources in the works of orators and historians. Critics must

often have observed a peculiar resemblance between Mr. Fox and Demosthenes in their disregard of profuse and petty ornaments, in their application of the sound, the salutary, and sometimes homely maxims which common life supplies for the elucidation of politics, in the devotion of all their mind, and all their soul, and all their strength, to a great subject, and in their eagerness to fix upon some pertinent and striking topic, to recur to it frequently," suddenly, forcibly, and upon each recurrence to hold

it up in a new light, and point it in a new direction. But biographers will do well to record that in conversing with a learned friend he professed to receive more delight from Cicero than from Demosthenes.8 Experience in this, as in other instances, puts to flight the conclusions which theorists might be prone to draw from apparent likeness in the characteristic traits of style. Similitude is not always the effect of voluntary and conscious imitation, nor does approbation always imply direct and general preference for the purposes of composition. We have been told that Euripides was the favourite writer of Milton in his closet; but in Milton's poetry we often meet with the bolder features and the more vivid colouring which enrapture and astonish us in the tragedies of Eschylus.

From our own experience, you and I can rectify the mistakes into which persons unacquainted with Mr. Fox have fallen, when they supposed his talent for conversation to be wholly disproportionate to his excellence in public speaking.

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He that on no occasion would have borrowed Garagantua's mouth,"9 may not have been much disposed to summon the whole force of his mind in the presence of Dr. Johnson, whose Toryism he could endure, because he respected his genius. The plain truth is, that Mr. Fox had neither the general taciturnity of Mr. Addison, who, " without having nine-pence in his pocket, could draw for a thousand pounds;" nor the general felicity of Mr. Burke, who, "take him up where you would, was ready to meet you; who talked, not from the desire of dis

tinction, but because he was full; whose conversation, beyond that of any other man, corresponded with his general fame; and yet who, upon some occasions, was satisfied with ringing the bell" to our indefatigable, inexhaustible, indomitable lexicographer. But you and I can look back to many hours when Mr. Fox was not content to be auditor tantum—when, with the utmost alacrity, he would take his share in the liveliest and the gravest discussions-when he trifled without loss of dignity, or disputed without loss of temper-when he opposed, only because he really dissented, and yielded as soon as he was convinced-when, without prepation, he overcame the strong, and without display he excelled the brilliant. Sometimes indeed he was indolent, but never dull; and sometimes reserved, but never morose. He was swift to hear, for the purpose of knowing and examining what scholars and men of sense were disposed to communicate, and slow to speak, from unwillingness to grapple with the ostentatious, and to annoy the diffident. Though he commanded the attention of senates, he was not therefore presumptuous enough to slight the good opinion of wise and learned companions. But he might often meet them with spirits exhausted by intense exertion in public debate, or private reflection. He might carry with him trains of thinking, which were connected with political subjects of high importance, and which produced in him a temporary indifference to literary discussions. He might, in the society even of literary men, have sometimes looked for opportunities of relaxation,

resemblance, and he could calculate with exactness all the properties of causation, whether simple or complex, proximate or remote. He did not disdain to estimate the force of local and temporary cir cumstances. But in guiding his audience to ultimate decision, he taught them to look beyond those circumstances to the broader character stamped upon human events and human actions by the general laws of the physical and the moral world. For part of this excellence he perhaps was indebted to the habit which pervaded both his private conversation and his public speeches, and which never permitted his words to stray beside the course, or vary from the form, or swell beyond the size, of the conceptions they were intended to convey.

In addition to the cause which I have just now assigned for the intellectual endowments of Mr. Fox, other causes equally efficacious might be adduced with equal propriety. But it is of more importance for me to remark, that many of those endowments afforded the most direct, constant, and powerful aid to his moral qualities. True benevolence is not merely guided, but enlarged and invigorated by true wisdom. It derives from practice that activity and that consistency, the want of which we are often compelled to deplore in the conduct and even the tempers of philosophers, who have employed the greatest talents in the investigation of moral theories. It teaches all men to sympathize with the sorrows and joys of their fellow

* Vid. Cicero, Tusculan. Quæst. lib. i. parag. 4.