Indeed we can only account for his great successes as an orator, his amazing repute, and his exceptional popularity, when we sum up a half score of contributory causes, which lie outside of the cold print of the Parliamentary record; among these, we count--his Holland wealth and training, his environments of rank and luxury, his picturesque bearing, his _bonhomie_, his scorn of the rank he held, his accessibility to all, his outspoken, democratic sympathies, that warmed him into outbursts of generous passion, his fearlessness, his bearding of the king, his earnestness whenever afoot, his very shortcomings too, and the crowding disabilities that grew out of his trust--his simplicities--his lack of forethought, his want of moneyed prudence, his free-handedness, his little, unfailing, every-day kindnesses--these all backed his speeches and put a tender under-tone, and a glow, and a drawing power in them, which we look for vainly in the rhetoric or the argumentation. He was often in Parliament--sometimes in the Ministry; but his disorderly and reckless life (gaming was not his {192} worst vice) made his fellow-politicians wary, and put a bar to any easy confidences between himself and the old-fashioned, sober-sided, orderly George III. We must think of him as an accomplished, generous-hearted, impulsive, dissolute wreck of a man. [Sidenote: William Pitt.] If I mention Pitt,[3] it is only because you will find in your historical reading, his name always coupled with that of Fox; but he never went to our Literary Club; had little companionship with literary men; yet he had keen scholarship--within a somewhat limited range--and an insatiate ambition. He was tall, spare, pale-faced, haughty, with a contempt for sentiment, and a contempt for money; and of intellect--all compact. At an age when many are still at college, he had made amazing speeches in Parliament; not profuse, not swollen with words, not rhetorical--but clear, sharp, polished, strenuous, with now and then the glitter of some apt and resonant line from his classics.[4] {193}