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who came of the family of Edwardes, till it was purchased of his lordship by Henry Fox, who subsequently became a lord himself, and took his title from the mansion. This was

about a hundred years ago, in the beginning of the reign of George the Third.

Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland of the new race, was the younger son of that marvellous old gentleman, Sir Stephen Fox, who, after having had a numerous offspring by one wife, married another at the age of seventy-six, and had three more children, two of whom founded the noble families of Holland and Ilchester. It was reported that he had been a singing-boy in a cathedral. Walpole says he was a footman; and the late Lord Holland, who was a man of too noble a nature to affect ignorance of such traditions, candidly owns that he was a man of "very humble origin." Noble families must begin

with somebody; and with whom could the new one have better begun than with this stout and large-hearted gentleman, who after doing real service to the courts in which he rose, and founding institutions for the benefit of his native place, closed a life full of health, activity, and success, in the eighty-ninth year of his age?

Henry Fox was as full of vitality as his father, and he carried the stock higher; but, though very knowing, he was not so wise, and did not end so happily. With him began the first parliamentary emulation between a Fox and a Pitt, which so curiously descended to their sons. Many persons now living remember the second rivalry. The first was so like it, that Walpole, in one of his happy comprehensive dashes, describes the House of Commons, for a certain period, as consisting of "a dialogue between Pitt and

Fox." The oratory, in the high sense of the word, was on the Pitt side; but Fox, though an unequal speaker, partly fluent and partly hesitating, had acuteness, argument, and a natural manner; and it was a rare honour, even for the short time in which he did so, to divide the honours of emulation with the man who has been since styled the

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great Earl of Chatham." Fox had begun life as a partizan of Sir Robert Walpole; and in the course of his career, held lucrative offices under Government-that of Paymaster of the Forces, for one-in which he enriched himself to a degree which incurred a great deal of suspicion. He was latterly denounced, in a city address, as the "defaulter of unaccounted millions." Public accounts, in those times, were strangely neglected; and the family have said, that his were in no worse condition than those of

others; but they do not deny that he was a jobber. Fox, however, for a long time, did not care. The joyousness of his temperament, together with some very lax notions of morality, enabled him to be at ease with himself, as long as his blood spun so well. He jobbed and prospered; ran away with a duke's daughter; contrived to reconcile himself with the family (that of Richmond); got his wife made a baroness; was made a Lord himself, Baron Holland of Foxley; was a husband, notwithstanding his jobbing, loving and beloved; was an indulgent father; a gay and social friend-in short, had as happy a life of it as health and spirits could make; till, unfortunately, health and spirits failed; and then there seems to have been a remnant of his father's better portion within him, which did not allow him to be so well satisfied with himself in his decline. Out-tricked

and got rid of by the flighty Lord Shelburne, and forsaken by the selfish friends with whom he had jobbed and made merry and laughed at principle, he not only experienced the last mortifications of a man of the world, but had retained at least enough belief in the social virtues to be made seriously unhappy by the conduct of his worthless companions, particularly by that of Rigby, the most worthless of them all. His lordship had a talent for vers de société, and tried to console himself with a Lament, in which the name of Rigby, now unknown out of the pale of party recollections, comes in, like an involuntary burlesque

"White-liver'd Grenville and self-loving Gower
Shall never cause one peevish moment more;
Not that their spite required I should repair
To southern climates and a warmer air,

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