emerging from his sleeve, was a roll of parch

ment.

Monsieur Tardy, tall, thin, and already old, looked down on this sight for a moment in solemn silence. Then he said to one of his workmen : "Michel, hand me that roll." The workman obeyed.

He unrolled it and went to the small ogive window to read it. The workmen, leaning on their pickaxes, waited silently while the commandant said:

"It is in Spanish. We see there Don Ramon Hurtado, captain in the army of Montecuculi-the adversary of Turenne and of the Prince de Condé-killed in a combat near the Château of Bernardhausen, now called Phalsbourg, in the year of our Lord 1675.”

Having uttered these words in a reverential, solemn tone, he gave the parchment back to the workman, saying:

"Put that back in the tomb, and do not touch this old soldier's sword. Thus it is that our comrades may be found all over Europe from Lisbon to Moscow, and all honest men will say, 'Let the soldier sleep-we will not touch his sword!' Come, my friends, we will put back the stone, and let Don Ramon slumber in peace."

The workmen obeyed.

Justine and I ran quickly down the path, for we were aghast at what we had seen. We said nothing to any one about it, fearing that we might be scolded; but toward night, as we went back to town, we clung to the hands of Nicole and Françoise, and every minute or two looked back to see if Don Ramon Hurtado were not following us.

From the French of ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN (Revue des Deux Mondes).

HE impression produced by Mr. Trevelyan's life of his famous uncle, Lord Macaulay, was so favorable as to insure a ready hearing for any work to which he might subsequently attach his name; but "The Early History of Charles James Fox"* is a book which would have attracted no small share of attention even if it had had no predecessor to arouse popular expectation. Combining the most pleasing features of biography and history, it is written with an opulence of knowledge and a brilliancy of style which remind one of Lord Macaulay himself; and it deals with a personality as interesting and as winning as any that has ever appeared upon the stage of English politics. Moreover, aside from the interest attaching to the personal character of Fox, the period covered by his career was one of the most remarkable of which history affords any record. That period, of which the French Revolution was the culminating phase, witnessed the final break-up of the mediæval régime in Europe, the overthrow of ideas and institutions which had been the slow growth of centuries, the emancipation of the human intellect from the fetters of the Dark Ages, and the beginning of what alone can in strictness be regarded as modern history. The turmoil of this great catas

*The Farly History of Charles James Fox. By George Otto Trevelyan, author of "The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay." 8vo. New York: Harper & Brothers.

VOL. X.-2

trophe was less felt in England than in any other European country; but even there the effects were profound and varied, and Fox was, in a certain sense, as much the child of the period as Mirabeau himself.

In the present installment of his work-for this volume can only be regarded as a fragment of a much more comprehensive design—Mr. Trevelyan does not bring the record of Fox's career down to the beginning of the storm upon whose waves he subsequently rode so high; but in this case coming events have indeed cast their shadows before, and the very minute and labored picture of the order of things amid which Fox passed his youth would be almost meaningless unless it were intended to be contrasted with an equally authentic picture of the epoch which superseded it. If Mr. Trevelyan's work is carried on upon the scale and with the skill with which it has been begun, we shall have a picture of the revolutionary period in England as vivid in its outlines and as minute in its details as those which have been painted by De Tocqueville and Taine of the same period in France; and, if such work belongs rather to the historian than to the biographer, it must be admitted that the figure and the career of Fox afford a convenient center around which to adjust the significant facts in their relative degrees of prominence and importance.

The sentence in Mr. Trevelyan's opening

chapter, in which he refers somewhat disparagingly to "those who hold that biography should consist in long-flowing and discursive attempts at the solution of a series of third-rate problems," furnishes the key to his own method. He dwells with almost too little emphasis, for the purposes of biography, upon those personal details which, in general, constitute the main charm of such work; and those minute questions of fact or conjecture, upon which the Malones and the Crokers expend such indefatigable labor, he simply ignores. As a portrait of Fox and a picture of the society and the times in which he lived, Mr. Trevelyan's work is as satisfactory as it is fascinating; but, as a record of Fox's life, even during that early portion of it when events were so few, it is deficient both in precision and in consecutiveness. Too often the central figure is pushed aside in order to make room for those who at the time happened to share with him the popular attention; and there are whole chapters in which Wilkes or Junius, rather than Fox, might be supposed to be the hero of the narrative. The truth is that, by the strong bent of his mind, as well as by the course of his studies, Mr. Trevelyan is rather an historian than a biographer; and though he possesses in an eminent degree one of the most essential requisites of a biographer-sympathetic insight into characteryet his broad survey of causes and events and his slender appetite for personal gossip tend more or less to disqualify him for that microscopic scrutiny and that concentration of view which are indispensable to good biography.

Whatever may be the defects of Mr. Trevelyan's method, however, there can be no two opinions as to the value and readableness of the product. There is not a page in the book which would not afford pleasure, even in the reperusal, and, when the break-off-it can hardly be called the end of the narrative is reached, the reader's appetite for more is of a degree of keenness in comparison with which young Oliver Twist's must have appeared as satiety. By reason of the frequency of its episodes and the vivid picturesqueness of its style, the work lends itself with exceptional facility to illustrative quotation; but, in availing ourselves somewhat extensively of the opportunity thus afforded, we must warn the reader that even the most brilliant passage loses something of its effectiveness when separated from its context. We can say of Mr. Trevelyan's work, what can hardly be said of any work of Macaulay's, that the whole is superior to any particular part.

The initial chapter of the work, and one of the best in it, is devoted to a sketch of Fox's father and grandfather, who exhausted the list of his ancestors who have appeared above the hori

zon of history. The third Lord Holland, who figures so prominently in the literary annals of the first third of the century, used to say frankly that the founder of his family came of very humble stock; and Mr. Trevelyan makes no attempt to get behind that Sir Stephen Fox who, "if not the most well-graced, was at any rate one of the best paid, actors on the stage of the seventeenth century." As a boy, Stephen Fox is said to have been in the choir of Salisbury Cathedral; at the age of fifteen his "beauty of person and towardliness of disposition" recommended him to the notice of the Earl of Northumberland, High Admiral of England; during the civil war he served in an administrative capacity on the staff of the royal army; and after the disastrous battle of Worcester he took an active part in assisting the escape of Prince Charles to Normandy. Following the Prince into exile, Fox was enabled to render him essential service as manager of his household affairs; and, as soon as the master had his own again, the servant's fortunes rose rapidly. He was appointed first clerk of the Board of Green Cloth, paymaster of two regiments, and, before long, paymaster-general of all his Majesty's forces in England. Later on in his career he became Master of the Horse and one of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury; he was knighted; he was elected to Parliament from Salisbury; he obtained places which were enormously lucrative; and he was soon rolling in wealth, "honestly got, and unenvied," says Evelyn, "which is next to a miracle." A favorite with twelve successive Parliaments and four monarchs, it was not until Anne mounted the throne that Sir Stephen Fox retired into private life, full of years and emoluments.

The second Stephen Fox became Earl of Ilchester; but it was a younger son, Henry Fox, who followed most closely in the paternal footsteps. He spent a stormy and dissolute youth, and did not turn to serious affairs until he had wasted his best years and the greater part of his patrimony; he entered Parliament at thirty and got office at thirty-two; he contracted a runaway match with Lady Caroline Lennox, who was a great-granddaughter of Charles II, and consequently of the blood royal; he acquired the reputation of being the readiest speaker in the House of Commons; he succeeded in transferring larger amounts of the public money from the treasury into his private pockets than even his father had done; he became the first Lord Holland, and, by reason of his unscrupulous rapacity, “the most fiercely-hated public man of his own, or perhaps of any other, generation"; and, most important of all, he became the father of Charles James Fox.

Mr. Trevelyan's portrait of Lord Holland is

Never

"Lord Holland was neither so wicked nor so unhappy as the world supposed him. He had never courted esteem, and, while his health was still fairly good and his nerves strong, he cared not a farthing for popularity. He looked upon the public as a milch-cow, which might bellow and toss its horns as much as ever it pleased, now that he had filled his pail and had placed the gate between himself and

the animal. But, though he had no self-respect to wound, he could be touched through his affection; for this political buccaneer, whose hand had been against every man and in every corner of the national till, was in private a warm-hearted and faithful friend. Lord Holland can not be called nice in the choice of some among the objects on whom he bestowed his regard; but, once given, it never was withdrawn. He had attached himself to Rigby with a devotion most unusual in an intimacy made at Newmarket, and cemented over the bottle; and his feelings were more deeply and more permanently hurt by the unkindness of one coarse and corrupt adventurer than by the contempt and aversion of every honest man in the country who read the news papers. To the end of his life he could not mention

his old associate without a touch of pathos which has its effect even upon those whose reason inclines them to regard his expressions of tenderness as the lamentations of a rogue who has been jockeyed by his accomplice. . . . Whatever Lord Holland suffered by the coldness and treachery of the outside world was amply made up to him within his domestic circle. As will always be the case with a man of strong intelligence and commanding powers, who has the gift of forgetting himself in others, there was no limit to the attachment which he inspired and the happiness which he spread around him. In all that he said and wrote, his inability to recognize the existence of public duty contrasts singularly with his admirable unconsciousness that he had any claims whatever upon those whom he loved; and, as a sure result, he was not more hated abroad than adored at home. That home presented a beautiful picture of undoubting and undoubted affection; of perfect similarity in tastes and pursuits; of mutual appreeiation, which thorough knowledge of the world, and the strong sense inherent in the Fox character, never allowed to degenerate into mutual adulation. There seldom were children who might so easily have been guided into the straight and noble path, if the father had possessed a just conception of the distinction between right and wrong; but the notion of making anybody of whom he was fond uncomfortable, for the sake of so very doubtful an end as the attainment of self-control, was altogether foreign

CHARLES JAMES FOX was born on the 24th of January, 1749. As a child he was remarkably precocious, and the habits of the family were such as to foster and bring out any precocity either of intellect or of temper. How little of the usual restraints and admonitions he was

subjected to is illustrated by two anecdotes which Mr. Trevelyan has preserved. One of these is to the effect that, Charles having declared his intention to destroy a watch, Lord Holland merely said, "Well, if you must, I suppose you must." Fox himself remembered being present in the room when his mother made a desponding remark about his passionate temper. "Never mind," said his father, always for leaving both well and ill alone, "he is a very sensible little fellow, and will learn to cure himself." A favorite comment of Lord Holland's was: "Let nothing be done to break his spirit. The world will do that fast enough."

Fox's earliest steps in education appear to have been guided by his mother, but he very soon got beyond the teaching of women, as women were then educated, and, to quote Mr. Trevelyan, "an unlucky blunder which poor Lady Caroline made in a question of Roman history settled at once and for ever her claims as an instructress in the estimation of her irrepressible son." At the age of seven, therefore, he was sent to a school at Wandsworth, kept by a Monsieur Pampellonne, and then much in vogue among the aristocracy. Eighteen months afterward he himself decided to go to Eton, and to Eton he accordingly went, for even at that early age he was completely master of his own movements. Of his life at Eton, Mr. Trevelyan says:

"Though saddled with the incumbrance of a private tutor, Charles Fox was highly popular among his schoolfellows. There was that about him which everywhere made him the king of his company, without effort on his own part, or jealousy on the part of others. Young and old alike watched with hope and delight the development of that fascinating yet masterful character. Lord Holland was proud and glad to admit that the son bade fair to be 'as much and as universally beloved' as ever the father was hated. When the boy was still in his fourteenth year, the Duke of Devonshire, who was not a man to sow compliments broadcast, concluded a letter, addressed to the paymaster on high matters of state, with the words 'Commend me to your son Charles for his

sagacity.' Never was there a more gracious child, more rich in promise, more prone to good, when, in the spring of 1763, the devil entered into the heart of Lord Holland. Harassed by his dispute with Lord Shelburne, and not unwilling to withdraw himself and his new title for a time from the notice of his countrymen, he could think of no better diversion than to take Charles from his books, and convey

him to the Continent on a round of idleness and

dissipation. At Spa his amusement was to send his son every night to the gaming-table with a pocketful of gold; and (if family tradition may be trusted where it tells against family credit) the parent took not a little pains to contrive that the boy should leave France a finished rake. After four months spent in this fashion, Charles, of his own accord, persuaded his father to send him back to Eton, where he passed another year with more advantage to himself than to the school. His Parisian experiences, aided by his rare social talents and an unbounded command of cash, produced a visible and durable change for the worse in the morals and habits of the place."

While still at Eton, Fox attracted great attention as a declaimer; and, in fact, long before, as Mr. Trevelyan says, he "could get quite as many words into a minute as the conditions of human respiration would allow." He often obtained leave to run up to London when an interesting debate was in progress in the House of Commons, and his father regarded him as already in training for the career which he subsequently followed. In 1764, at the age of fifteen, he left Eton for Oxford, and entered at Hertford College, then almost exclusively patronized by young men of family. Lord Malmesbury, who was in the same set as Charles Fox, though not in the same college, tells us that the lads who ranked as "gentlemen-commoners" enjoyed the privilege of living as they pleased, and were never required to attend either lectures, or hall, or chapel. "The men with whom I lived," he says, "were very pleasant but very idle fellows. Our life was an imitation of high life in London. Luckily, drinking was not the fashion; but what we did drink was claret, and we had our regular round of evening card-parties, to the great annoyance of our finances. It has often been a matter of surprise to me how so many of us made our way so well in the world, and so creditably."

There was less reason for surprise in the case of Fox than in most of the others, because, though dissipated, he was not idle. "He read," says Mr. Trevelyan, "as hard as any young Englishman who does not look to university success for his livelihood or advancement will ever read for reading's sake. . . . He loved Oxford as dearly as did Shelley, and for the same reasons, and quitted it almost as much against his will.

By his own request he was permitted to spend a second year at college, where he resided continuously, both in and out of term-time, whenever his father could be induced to spare his company. He remained at Oxford during the long vacation of 1765, reading as if his bread depended on a fellowship, and was seldom to be seen outside his own rooms, except when standing at the bookseller's counter, deep in Ford or Massinger.”

All too soon this life of wholesome and stu

dious application was interrupted. In the spring of 1766 he was taken from Oxford by his father, and in the autumn the entire family started for the Continent, making their way slowly to Naples, where they spent the winter. Lord Holland returned to England in the spring of 1767; but Charles remained away for two years, perfecting himself in French and Italian, devouring Dante and Ariosto, visiting Voltaire at his villa by the Lake of Geneva, and amusing himself (in company with his friend Lord Carlisle) in ways which Mr. Trevelyan describes with discreet reserve in the following paragraph:

"The history of their proceedings may be read in the fourth book of the 'Dunciad.' Lads of eighteen and nineteen, who had been their own masters almost since they could remember; bearing names that were a passport to any circle; with unimpaired health, and a credit at their banker's which they were not yet old enough to have exhausted, made their grand tour after much the same fashion at all periods of the eighteenth century; and it is unnecessary to repeat what Pope has told in a manner that surpasses himself. Traveling with eight servants apiece; noticed by queens; treated as equals by ambassadors; losing their hearts in one palace and their money in another, and yet, on the whole, getting into less mischief in high society than when left to their own devices, they

'... sauntered Europe round,
And gathered every vice on Christian ground;
Saw every court; heard every king declare
His royal sense of operas or the fair;
Tried all hors-d'œuvres, all liqueurs defined,
Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined.'

Fox threw into his follies a vivacity and an originality which were meant for better things. Looking forward to the day when, as arbiter of dress, he was to lead the taste of the town through all stages from coxcombry to slovenliness, he spared no pains to equip himself for the exercise of his lofty functions. He tried upon Italian dandies the effect of the queer little French hat and the red heels with which he James's Street; and, before he and his friend left designed to astonish his brother-macaronies of St. the Continent, the pair of scapegraces drove post all the way from Paris to Lyons in order to select patterns for their embroidered waistcoats."

From these gay follies and dissipations Fox

was summoned in 1768 to take his place in the House of Commons as representative of a borough which his father had hired for him, says Mr. Trevelyan, as he might have hired a manor for him to shoot over in the autumn. "He remained on the Continent during the opening session of the new Parliament, which met in May [1768] in order to choose a Speaker and transact some routine business; and it was not until the following winter that he made his first appearance upon a stage where, almost from the moment of his entry, he became the observed of all observers."

At this stage of his history, having brought his hero to the threshold of his entrance into public life, Mr. Trevelyan suspends his narrative of Fox's actions in order to describe "the society in which he moved, the moral atmosphere which he breathed, and the temptations by which he was assailed." Many books have been written upon the social aspects of the eighteenth century in England, and numerous essays have been devoted to illustrating as many special features of it; but, on the whole, we know of nothing which for vividness and picturesqueness, for clearness of outline and precision of detail, equals the two long chapters that Mr. Trevelyan has devoted to this subject. Perhaps the best writing in the book is contained in these chapters; and, where every paragraph invites quotation, it is difficult to make such a selection of passages as will convey to the reader an idea of the interest and variety of their contents.

Before laying in the colors upon his canvas, Mr. Trevelyan very properly points out the necessary qualification with which his descriptions must be accepted-the fact, namely, that the life which he depicts was led, not by the English people-fortunately for mankind the great mass of a nation is never so deeply contaminated --but by the aristocracy; "a few thousand persons who thought that the world was made for them, and that all outside their own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism." Aside from this, the picture is so carefully drawn and so copiously buttressed with facts that it may be said to carry its authenticity upon its face.

Speaking of the inevitable influence of what he saw around him upon a nature so impression

able as Fox's, Mr. Trevelyan says:

"There is no form of personal example more sure to be observed and copied than that which a political leader presents to the younger portion of his followers; and it may well be believed that Charles Fox, entering public life at an age when in our generation he would still be a freshman at college, was not likely to get much good by studying the patterns in fashion among the party to which Lord Holland ordained that he should belong. Youth as

he was, and absolutely in the hands of a parent whose fascinating manners aided and disguised an uncommon force of will, and to whom every corner of the great world was intimately known, he had little choice in this or in any other vital matter. His bench in Parliament was ready for him, and his niche in society. Few have had the downward path made smoother before them, or strewed with brighter flowers and more deadly berries. He was received with open arms by all that was most select and least censorious in London. Those barriers that divide the outer court from the inner sanctum-barriers within which Burke and Sheridan never stepped, and which his own father with difficulty surmounteddid not exist for him. Like Byron, Fox had no occasion to seek admission into what is called the highest circle, but was part of it from the first. Instead of being tolerated by fine gentlemen, he was one of themselves-hand and glove with every noble rake who filled his pockets from the Exchequer and emptied them over the hazard-table; and smiled on by all the dowagers and maids of honor as to the state of whose jointures and complexions our envoy at Florence was kept so regularly and minutely in

formed."

Of what that society into which Fox thus entered was, we are not left without data for conjecture:

"The frivolity of the last century was not confined to the youthful, the foolish, or even to the idle. There never will be a generation which can not sup- ' ply a parallel to the lads who, in order that they might the better hear the nonsense which they were talking across a tavern table, had Pall Mall laid down with straw at the cost of fifty shillings a head for the party; or to the younger brother who gave who brought him a nosegay of roses for his buttonhalf a guinea every morning to the flower-woman hole. These follies are of all times; but what was peculiar to the period when Charles Fox took his seat in Parliament and his place in society consisted in the phenomenon (for to our ideas it is nothing else) that men of age and standing, of strong mental powers and refined cultivation, lived openly, shamelessly, and habitually, in the face of all England, as no one who had any care for his reputation would now live during a single fortnight of the year at Monaco. As a sequel to such home-teaching as Lord Holland was qualified to impart, the young fellow, on his entrance into the great world, was called upon to shape his life according to the models

that the public opinion of the day held up for his

imitation; and the examples which he saw around him would have tempted cooler blood than his, and turned even a more tranquil brain. The ministers who guided the state, whom the King delighted to honor, who had the charge of public decency and order, who named the fathers of the Church, whose duty it was (to use the words of their own monarch) to prevent any alteration in so essential a part of the Constitution as everything that relates to religion,' were conspicuous for impudent vice, for daily dissi