uit of the sweet, elusive shadow which is {144} called
pleasure. Fox's love for literature was indeed its own reward. In the
darkest hours of a life that tasted the bitterness of many public and
many private sorrows he could steep his vexed spirit in the sweet
waters watched by the Muses, and arise cleansed, inspirited, and
comforted. Though he saw those public honors that his genius deserved
denied, though he lost those chances of command by which he could best
have served his country, though his own fault wrecked his fortune and
his own follies wasted his substance and delivered the home of his
glorious youth into alien hands, he could turn from troubles that would
have broken the spirit and cracked the heart of a less heroic fighter,
to find solace and consolation in the golden music of the "Odyssey" and
the majestic cadences of Virgil.

Fox loved the classics with the passion of a poet, not with the
patience of a pedant, and found that noble rapture in the human beauty
of Euripides which Parson Adams found in the divine grandeur of
Aeschylus. But if his reading in the literatures of Greece and Rome
was wide and deep, it was not limited to the literatures which the
world calls classic. France, Italy, Spain, offered him their best, and
found him a worthy worshipper, the faithful lover and loyal student of
all that was best in each. He was the comrade of Don Quixote as he was
the comrade of Orlando Furioso and the comrade of Gil Blas. But he was
never one of those who exalt the laurels of other lands to the neglect
of those of their own. He knew English literature and loved English
literature as well as if he had never scanned a Latin line or
conjugated a Greek verb or read a page of Moliere, or Calderon, or
Metastasio. He knew Chaucer as well as it was possible for any one
then or for generations later to know Chaucer, and he appreciated him
as few have appreciated him before or since. The poets of his own time
were as dear to him in their degree as the singer of England's morning
song. It is hardly necessary to say that he was as familiar with
Shakespeare as every one should be and as very few are. Only one arc
was wanting to the circle of his splendid {145} culture, only one
string was lacking to the bow of his prodigious reading. There was a
great literature growing up in a neighboring country of which Charles
Fox knew nothing, and of which we cannot doubt that he would have
rejoiced to know much. It