rse than the bulk of his colleagues.
His desertion of William Pitt I found hard to forgive.

"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