And so the war crept on; and all through it the great old stiff school-master brandishing his red ruler and making cuts with it over seas. But the time came when he couldn't reach his rebels; and then the long ruler, which was the national power, got broken in half, and it has stayed broken in half ever since. There is interesting record of the first approaches of that insanity which ultimately beset the king, in Mme. d'Arblay's Diary, which we have already mentioned; but he made what seemed an entire recovery from the early stroke of 1788; and was king, in all his headstrong and kingly ways, once {187} more. It was in 1785 when John Adams was presented to him as Envoy of the United States of America--not a presentation, it would seem, that would have any soothing aspect. Yet the old king received Mr. Adams courteously; and under the pretty fustian of conventional speech the one covered his regrets and the other covered his exultation. But it was not many years before the distraught brain--after renewed threats--waylaid the monarch again--this time with a surer grip; his speech, his sight, his hearing, all lost their fineness of quality and went down in the general wreck; in 1810, that mad-cap, that posture-master, that over-fine gentleman--so far as dress and carriage and polite accomplishment could make George IV. a gentleman--took rule; but for years thereafter, his lunatic father, in white hair and long white beard, might be seen stalking along the terrace at Windsor, babbling weak drivel, and humming broken tunes, leading no whither. {188} _Two Orators._ [Sidenote: Charles James Fox.] Among the younger members of the famous Literary Club, some ten years after its foundation, was a muscular, swarthy young fellow[1]--full of wit and humor, a great friend of Burke's until the bitterness of politics parted them; shy of approaches to Dr. Johnson, with whom he differed on almost all points; a man known now in literary ways only by the fragment of British History which he wrote, but known in his own times as the most brilliant of debaters, most liberal in his politics, and always an ardent friend of America. This was Charles James Fox, who could trace back his descent--if he had chosen--through a Duchess of Gordon, to Charles II., and who was a younger son of a very rich Lord Holland, owner and {189} occupant of that famous Holland House, which with its remnant of evergreen garden (in whose alleys we found Addison walking) still makes a venerable breakwater against the waves of brick and mortar which are piling around it.