temper, for disappointment in
raising money, and any serious reflections upon his situation, will
(in spite of his affected spirits and dissipation) occasion him many
disagreeable moments.' Lord Carlisle's fears proved groundless in this
respect. As before stated, Fox was always remarkable for his sweetness
of temper, which remained with him to the last; but it is most painful
to think how much mankind has lost through his recklessness.

Gibbon writes to Lord Sheffield in 1773, 'You know Lord Holland is
paying Charles Fox's debts. They amount to L140,000.'(125)

(125) Timbs, _Club Life in London_.

His love of play was desperate. A few evenings before he moved the
repeal of the Marriage Act, in February, 1772, he had been at Brompton
on two errands,--one to consult Justice Fielding on the penal laws, the
other to borrow L10,000, which he brought to town at the hazard of being
robbed. He played admirably both at Whist and Piquet,--with such skill,
indeed, that by the general admission of Brookes' Club, he might have
made four thousand pounds a-year, as they calculated, at these games,
if he could have confined himself to them. But his misfortune arose from
playing games of chance, particularly at Faro.

After eating and drinking plentifully, he would sit down at the Faro
table, and invariably rose a loser. Once, indeed, and once only, he won
about eight thousand pounds in the course of a single evening. Part of
the money he paid to his creditors, and the remainder he lost almost
immediately.

Before he attained his thirtieth year he had completely dissipated
everything that he could either command or could procure by the most
ruinous expedients. He had even undergone, at times, many of the
severest privations incidental to the vicissitudes that attend a
gamester's progress; frequently wanting money to defray the common daily
wants of the most pressing nature. Topham Beauclerc, who lived much
in Fox's society, declared that no man could form an idea of the
extremities to which he had been driven to raise money, often losing
his last guinea at the Faro table. The very sedan-chairmen, whom he
was unable to pay, used to dun him for arrears. In 1781, he might be
considered as an extinct volcano,--for the pecuniary aliment that had
fed the flame was long consumed. Yet he even then occupied a house or
lodgings in St James's Street, close to Brookes', where he passed almost
every hour which was not devoted to the House o