(_Edinburgh Review_, July, 1841.)
Many {412}reasons make it impossible for us to lay before our readers,
at the present moment, a complete view of the character and public
career of the late Lord Holland. But we feel that we have already
deferred too long the duty of paying some tribute to his memory. We feel
that it is more becoming to bring without further delay an offering,
though intrinsically of little value, than to leave his tomb longer
without some token of our reverence and love.
We shall say very little of the book which lies on our table. And yet
it is a book which, even if it had been the work of a less distinguished
man, or had appeared under circumstances less interesting, would have
well repaid an attentive perusal. It is valuable, both as a record of
principles and as a model of composition.
We find in it all the great maxims which, during more than forty years,
guided Lord Holland’s public conduct, and the chief reasons on which
those maxims rest, condensed into the smallest possible space, and
set forth with admirable perspicuity, dignity, and precision. To his
opinions on Foreign Policy we for the most part cordially assent; but,
now and then we are inclined to
(1) _The Opinions of Lord Holland, as recorded in the
Journals of the House of Lords, from 1797 to 1841. Collected
and edited by D. C. Moylan_, of Lincoln’s-Inn, Barrister-
at-Law. 8vo. London: 1841.
{413}think them imprudently generous. We could not have signed the
protest against the detention of Napoleon. The protest respecting
the course which England pursued at the Congress of Verona, though it
contains much that is excellent, contains also positions which, we are
inclined to think, Lord Holland would, at a later period, have admitted
to be unsound. But to all his doctrines on constitutional questions,
we give our hearty approbation; and we firmly believe that no British
government has ever deviated from that line of internal policy which he
has traced, without detriment to the public.
We will give, as a specimen of this little volume, a single passage, in
which a chief article of the political creed of the Whigs is stated and
explained, with singular clearness, force, and brevity. Our readers
will remember that, in 1825, the Catholic Association raised the cry of
emancipation with most formidable effect. The Tories acted after their
kind. Instead of removing the grievance they tried to put down the
agitation, and brought in a law, apparently sharp and stringent, but
in truth utterly impotent, for restraining the right of petition. Lord
Holland’s Protest on that occasion is excellent.
“_We are,” says he, “well aware that the privileges of the people, the
rights of free discussion, and the spirit and letter of our popular
institutions, must render,--and they are intended to render,--the
continuance of an extensive grievance, and of the dissatisfaction
consequent thereupon, dangerous to the tranquillity of the country,
and ultimately subversive of the authority of the state. Experience and
theory alike forbid us to deny that effect of a free constitution; a
sense of justice and a love of liberty equally deter us from lamenting
it. But we have always been taught to look for the remedy of such
disorders in the redress of the grievances which justify them, and
in the removal of the dissatisfaction from which they flow--not in
restraints on ancient privileges, {414}not in inroads on the right
of public discussion, nor in violations of the principles of a free
government. If, therefore, the legal method of seeking redress, which
has been resorted to by persons labouring under grievous disabilities,
be fraught with immediate or remote danger to the state, we draw
from that circumstance a conclusion long since foretold by great
authority--namely, that the British constitution, and large exclusions,
cannot subsist together; that the constitution must destroy them, or
they will destroy the constitution._”
It was not, however, of this little book, valuable and interesting as it
is, but of the author, that we meant to speak; and we will try to do so
with calmness and impartiality.
In order to fully appreciate the character of Lord Holland, it is
necessary to go far back into the history of his family; for he had
inherited something more than a coronet and an estate. To the House of
which he was the head belongs one distinction which we believe to be
without a parallel in our annals. During more than a century, there has
never been a time at which a Fox has not stood in a prominent station
among public men. Scarcely had the chequered career of the first
Lord Holland closed, when his son, Charles, rose to the head of the
Opposition, and to the first rank among English debaters. And before
Charles was borne to Westminster Abbey a third Fox had already become
one of the most conspicuous politicians in the kingdom.
It is impossible not to be struck by the strong family likeness which,
in spite of diversities arising from education and position, appears in
these three distinguished persons. In their faces and figures there was
a resemblance, such as is common enough in novels, where one picture is
good for ten generations, but such as in real life is seldom found.
The ample person, the massy {415}and thoughtful forehead, the large
eyebrows, the full cheek and lip, the expression, so singularly
compounded of sense, humour, courage, openness, a strong will and a
sweet temper, were common to all. But the features of the founder of the
House, as the pencil of Reynolds and the chisel of Nollekens have
handed them down to us, were disagreeably harsh and exaggerated. In
his descendants, the aspect was preserved, but it was softened till it
became, in the late lord, the most gracious and interesting countenance
that was ever lighted up by the mingled lustre of intelligence and
benevolence.
As it was with the faces of the men of this noble family, so was it also
with their minds. Nature had done much for them all. She had moulded
them all of that clay of which she is most sparing. To all she had
given strong reason and sharp wit, a quick relish for every physical and
intellectual enjoyment, constitutional intrepidity, and that frankness
by which constitutional intrepidity is generally accompanied, spirits
which nothing could depress, tempers easy, generous, and placable,
and that genial courtesy which has its seat in the heart, and of
which artificial politeness is only a faint and cold imitation. Such
a disposition is the richest inheritance that ever was entailed on any
family.
But training and situation greatly modified the fine qualities which
nature lavished with such profusion on three generations of the house of
Fox. The first Lord Holland was a needy political adventurer. He entered
public life at a time when the standard of integrity among statesmen was
low. He started as the adherent of a minister who had indeed many
titles to respect, who possessed eminent talents both for administration
{416}and for debate, who understood the public interest well, and
who meant fairly by the country, but who had seen so much perfidy and
meanness that he had become sceptical as to the existence of probity.
Weary of the cant of patriotism, Walpole had learned to talk a cant of a
different kind. Disgusted by that sort of hypocrisy which is at least
a homage to virtue, he was too much in the habit of practising the less
respectable hypocrisy which ostentatiously displays, and sometimes
even simulates vice. To Walpole Fox attached himself, politically and
personally, with the ardour which belonged to his temperament. And it
is not to be denied that in the school of Walpole he contracted faults
which destroyed the value of his many great endowments. He raised
himself, indeed, to the first consideration in the House of Commons; he
became a consummate master of the art of debate; he attained honours and
immense wealth; but the public esteem and confidence were withheld from
him. His private friends, indeed, justly extolled his generosity and
good nature. They maintained that in those parts of his conduct which
they could least defend there was nothing sordid, and that, if he was
misled, he was misled by amiable feelings, by a desire to serve his
friends, and by anxious tenderness for his children. But by the nation
he was regarded as a man of insatiable rapacity and desperate ambition;
as a man ready to adopt, without scruple, the most immoral and the most
unconstitutional manners; as a man perfectly fitted, by all his opinions
and feelings, for the work of managing the Parliament by means of
secret-service-money, and of keeping down the people with the bayonet.
Many of his contemporaries had a morality quite as lax as his: but very
few among them had his talents, and none had his hardihood and energy.
{417}He could not, like Sandys and Doddington, find safety in contempt.
He therefore became an object of such general aversion as no statesman
since the fall of Strafford has incurred, of such general aversion
as was probably never in any country incurred by a man of so kind and
cordial a disposition. A weak mind would have sunk under such a load
of unpopularity. But that resolute spirit seemed to derive new firmness
from the public hatred. The only effect which reproaches appeared to
produce on him, was to sour, in some degree, his naturally sweet temper.
The last acts of his public life were marked, not only by that audacity
which he had derived from nature, not only by that immorality which he
had learned in the school of Walpole, but by a harshness which almost
amounted to cruelty, and which had never been supposed to belong to his
character. His severity increased the unpopularity from which it had
sprung. The well-known lampoon of Gray may serve as a specimen of
the feeling of the country. All the images are taken from shipwrecks,
quicksands, and cormorants. Lord Holland is represented as complaining,
that the cowardice of his accomplices had prevented him from putting
down the free spirit of the city of London by sword and fire, and
as pining for the time when birds of prey should make their nests in
Westminster Abbey, and unclean beasts burrow in St. Paul’s.
Within a few months after the death of this remarkable man, his second
son Charles appeared at the head of the party opposed to the American
War. Charles had inherited the bodily and mental constitution of his
father, and had been much, far too much, under his father’s influence.
It was indeed impossible that a son of so affectionate and noble
a nature should not have {418}been warmly attached to a parent who
possessed many fine qualities, and who carried his indulgence and
liberality towards his children even to a culpable extent. Charles saw
that the person to whom he was bound by the strongest ties was, in the
highest degree, odious to the nation; and the effect was what might have
been expected from the strong passions and constitutional boldness of
so high-spirited a youth. He cast in his lot with his father, and took,
while still a boy, a deep part in the most unjustifiable and unpopular
measures that had been adopted since the reign of James the Second. In
the debates on the Middlesex Election, he distinguished himself, not
only by his precocious powers of eloquence, but by the vehement and
scornful manner in which he bade defiance to public opinion. He was at
that time regarded as a man likely to be the most formidable champion
of arbitrary government that had appeared since the Revolution, to be
a Bute with far greater powers, a Mansfield with far greater courage.
Happily his father’s death liberated him early from the pernicious
influence by which he had been misled. His mind expanded. His range of
observation became wider. His genius broke through early prejudices. His
natural benevolence and magnanimity had fail play. In a very short time
he appeared in a situation worthy of his understanding and of his heart.
From a family whose name was associated in the public mind with tyranny
and corruption, from a party of which the theory and the practice
were equally servile, from the midst of the Luttrells, the Dysons, the
Barringtons, came forth the greatest parliamentary defender of civil and
religious liberty.
The late Lord Holland succeeded to the talents and to the fine natural
dispositions of his House. But his {419}situation was very different
from that of the two eminent men of whom we have spoken. In some
important respects it was better, and in some it was worse than theirs.
He had one great advantage over them. He received a good political
education. The first lord was educated by Sir Robert Walpole. Mr. Fox
was educated by his father. The late lord was educated by Mr. Fox. The
pernicious maxims early imbibed by the first Lord Holland, made his
great talents useless, and worse than useless, to the state. The
pernicious maxims early imbibed by Mr. Fox led him, at the commencement
of his public life, into great faults which, though afterwards nobly
expiated, were never forgotten. To the very end of his career, small
men, when they had nothing else to say in defence of their own tyranny,
bigotry, and imbecility, could always raise a cheer by some paltry taunt
about the election of Colonel Luttrell, the imprisonment of the lord
mayor, and other measures in which the great Whig leader had borne a
part at the age of one or two and twenty. On Lord Holland no such
slur could be thrown. Those who most dissent from his opinions must
acknowledge that a public life more consistent is not to be found in our
annals. Every part of it is in perfect harmony with every other part;
and the whole is in perfect harmony with the great principles of
toleration and civil freedom. This rare felicity is in a great measure
to be attributed to the influence of Mr. Fox. Lord Holland, as was
natural in a person of his talents and expectations, began at a very
early age to take the keenest interest in politics; and Mr. Fox found
the greatest pleasure in forming the mind of so hopeful a pupil. They
corresponded largely on political subjects when the young lord was only
sixteen; and their {420}friendship and mutual confidence continued to
the day of that mournful separation at Chiswick. Under such training
such a man as Lord Holland was in no danger of falling into those faults
which threw a dark shade over the whole career of his grandfather, and
from which the youth of his uncle was not wholly free.
On the other hand, the late Lord Holland, as compared with his
grandfather and his uncle, laboured under one great disadvantage. They
were members of the House of Commons. He became a Peer while still an
infant. When he entered public life, the House of Lords was a very small
and a very decorous assembly. The minority to which he belonged was
scarcely able to muster five or six votes on the most important nights,
when eighty or ninety lords were present. Debate had accordingly become
a mere form, as it was in the Irish House of Peers before the Union.
This was a great misfortune to a man like Lord Holland. It was not
by occasionally addressing fifteen or twenty solemn and unfriendly
auditors, that his grandfather and his uncle attained their unrivalled
parliamentary skill. The former had learned his art in “the great
Walpolean battles,” on nights when Onslow was in the chair seventeen
hours without intermission, when the thick ranks on both sides kept
unbroken order till long after the winter sun had risen upon them, when
the blind were led out by the hand into the lobby and the paralytic
laid down in their bed-clothes on the benches. The powers of Charles
Fox were, from the first, exercised in conflicts not less exciting. The
great talents of the late Lord Holland had no such advantage. This was
the more unfortunate, because the peculiar species of eloquence which
{421}belonged to him in common with his family required much practice
to develope it. With strong sense, and the greatest readiness of wit, a
certain tendency to hesitation was hereditary in the line of Fox. This
hesitation arose, not from the poverty, but from the wealth of their
vocabulary. They paused, not from the difficulty of finding one
expression, but from the difficulty of choosing between several. It was
only by slow degrees and constant exercise that the first Lord Holland
and his son overcame the defect. Indeed neither of them overcame it
completely.
In statement, the late Lord Holland was not successful; his chief
excellence lay in reply. He had the quick eye of his house for the
unsound parts of an argument, and a great felicity in exposing them. He
was decidedly more distinguished in debate than any peer of his time
who had not sat in the House of Commons. Nay, to find his equal among
persons similarly situated, we must go back eighty years to Earl
Granville. For Mansfield, Thurlow, Loughborough, Grey, Grenville,
Brougham, Plunkett, and other eminent men, living and dead, whom we will
not stop to enumerate, carried to the Upper House an eloquence formed
and matured in the Lower. The opinion of the most discerning judges
was that Lord Holland’s oratorical performances, though sometimes most
successful, afforded no fair measure of his oratorical powers, and that,
in an assembly of which the debates were frequent and animated, he
would have attained a very high order of excellence. It was, indeed,
impossible to listen to his conversation without seeing that he was
bom a debater. To him, as to his uncle, the exercise of the mind in
discussion was a positive pleasure. With the greatest good nature and
{422}good breeding, he was the very opposite to an assenter. The word
“disputatious” is generally used as a word of reproach; but we
can express our meaning only by saying that Lord Holland was most
courteously and pleasantly disputatious. In truth, his quickness in
discovering and apprehending distinctions and analogies was such as a
veteran judge might envy. The lawyers of the Duchy of Lancaster were
astonished to find in an unprofessional man so strong a relish for the
esoteric parts of their science, and complained that as soon as they
had split a hair, Lord Holland proceeded to split the filaments into
filaments still finer. In a mind less happily constituted, there might
have been a risk that this turn for subtilty would have produced serious
evil. But in the heart and understanding of Lord Holland there was ample
security against all such danger. He was not a man to be the dupe of
his own ingenuity. He put his logic to its proper use; and in him the
dialectician was always subordinate to the statesman.
His political life is written in the chronicles of his country. Perhaps,
as we have already intimated, his opinions on two or three great
questions of foreign policy were open to just objection. Yet even his
errors, if he erred, were amiable and respectable. We are not sure
that we do not love and admire him the more because he was now and
then seduced from what we regard as a wise policy by sympathy with
the oppressed, by generosity towards the fallen, by a philanthropy so
enlarged that it took in all nations, by love of peace, a love which
in him was second only to the love of freedom, and by the magnanimous
credulity of a mind which was as incapable of suspecting as of devising
mischief. {423}To his views on questions of domestic policy the voice of
his countrymen does ample justice. They revere the memory of the man who
was, during forty years, the constant protector of all oppressed races
and persecuted sects, of the man whom neither the prejudices nor the
interests belonging to his station could seduce from the path of
right, of the noble, who in every great crisis cast in his lot with the
commons, of the planter, who made manful war on the slave trade, of the
landowner, whose whole heart was in the struggle against the corn-laws.
We have hitherto touched almost exclusively on those parts of Lord
Holland’s character which were open to the observation of millions.
How shall we express the feelings with which his memory is cherished by
those who were honoured with his friendship? Or in what language shall
we speak of that house, once celebrated for its rare attractions to the
furthest ends of the civilised world, and now silent and desolate as the
grave? To that house, a hundred and twenty years ago, a poet addressed
those tender and graceful lines, which have now acquired a new meaning
not less sad than that which they originally bore.
“Thou hill, whose brow the antique structures grace,
Reared by bold chiefs of Warwick’s noble race,
Why, once so loved, whene’er thy bower appears,
O’er my dim eyeballs glance the sudden tears?
How sweet were once thy prospects fresh and fair,
Thy sloping walks and unpolluted air!
How sweet the glooms beneath thine aged trees,
Thy noon-tide shadow and thine evening breeze!
His image thy forsaken bowers restore;
Thy walks and airy prospects charm no more;
No more the summer in thy glooms allayed,
Thine evening breezes, and thy noon-day shade.”
Yet a few years, and the shades and structures may {424}follow their
illustrious masters. The wonderful city which, ancient and gigantic as
it is, still continues to grow as fast as a young town of logwood by a
water-privilege in Michigan, may soon displace those turrets and gardens
which are associated with so much that is interesting and noble, with
the courtly magnificence of Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the
counsels of Cromwell, with the death of Addison. The time is coming
when, perhaps, a few old men, the last survivors of our generation, will
in vain seek, amidst new streets and squares, and railway stations, for
the site of that dwelling which was in their youth the favourite resort
of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philosophers,
and statesmen. They will then remember, with strange tenderness, many
objects once familiar to them, the avenue and the terrace, the busts and
the paintings, the carving, the grotesque gilding, and the enigmatical
mottoes. With peculiar fondness they will recall that venerable chamber,
in which all the antique gravity of a college library was so singularly
blended with all that female grace and wit could devise to embellish
a drawing-room. They will recollect, not unmoved, those shelves
loaded with the varied learning of many lands and many ages, and those
portraits in which were preserved the features of the best and wisest
Englishmen of two generations. They will recollect how many men who have
guided the politics of Europe, who have moved great assemblies by reason
and eloquence, who have put life into bronze and canvas, or who have
left to posterity things so written that it shall not willingly let
them die, were there mixed with all that was loveliest and gayest in
the society of the most splendid of capitals. They will remember the
peculiar character which belonged to that circle, in {425}which every
talent and accomplishment, every art and science, had its place. They
will remember how the last debate was discussed in one corner, and
the last comedy of Scribe in another; while Wilkie gazed with modest
admiration on Sir Joshua’s Baretti; while Mackintosh turned over
Thomas Aquinas to verify a quotation; while Talleyrand related his
conversations with Barras at the Luxembourg, or his ride with Lannes
over the field of Austerlitz. They will remember, above all, the grace,
and the kindness, far more admirable than grace, with which the princely
hospitality of that ancient mansion was dispensed. They will remember
the venerable and benignant countenance and the cordial voice of him who
bade them welcome. They will remember that temper which years of pain,
of sickness, of lameness, of confinement, served only to make sweeter
and sweeter, and that frank politeness, which at once relieved all the
embarrassment of the youngest and most timid writer or artist, who
found himself for the first time among Ambassadors and Earls. They will
remember that constant flow of conversation, so natural, so animated,
so various, so rich with observation and anecdote; that wit which
never gave a wound; that exquisite mimicry which ennobled, instead
of degrading; that goodness of heart which appeared in every look and
accent, and gave additional value to every talent and acquirement. They
will remember, too, that he whose name they hold in reverence was
not less distinguished by the inflexible uprightness of his political
conduct than by his loving disposition and his winning manners. They
will remember that, in the last lines which he traced, he expressed
his joy that he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox and
{426}Grey; and they will have reason to feel similar joy, if, in looking
back on many troubled years, they cannot accuse themselves of having
done any thing unworthy of men who were distinguished by the friendship
of Lord Holland.