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 is curious that in a country which had been ruled for three successive reigns by German sovereigns, the German language was entirely neglected and the glorious dawn of German literature entirely ignored. While Fox was still a young man, playing at love, playing at cards, playing at politics, and through all these diversions adding to that mighty store of learning, and training his mind in the finest and most intimate judgments upon the Greek and Roman poets, Germany had been enriched by the masterpiece of the greatest critic since Aristotle, and was fostering the golden youth of the greatest poet since Shakespeare. It would have amazed Fox, as it would have amazed every English scholar then living, if he could have been told that the spirit of the antique world was to be renewed in a country which had given them four generations of phlegmatic princes, and in a language of which few scholars in England knew a single word. [Sidenote: 1768--Fox's quarrel with Lord North]