But I linger longer on this name than the man deserves. Pathos there is in his stories, to be sure, that makes you wilt in spite of yourself; but a mile away from those Bond Street chambers where this pale, thin, silk-stockinged clergyman lives, and has his dinner invitations ten deep, is that old scar-faced Dr. Johnson about whom the beggars crowd; who can put no such pathos into his {218} cumbrous sentences indeed; but the presence of that old, blind, petulant woman in his house--who had waited on his lost wife--is itself a bit of pathos that I think will outlast the story of _Maria_--and that should do so forty times over. I wish I could blot out the silk stockings, the rustling cassock, the simper, the pestilent love letters, the pretences, the artificialities of the man; they are oppressive; they rob his words of weight. Wit--to be sure, and humor--truculent, sparkling--more than enough; for the rest, there is hypocrisy, pretension--beastliness--untruth--all pinned under a satinquilted cloak of vague and unreal piety. [1] Charles James Fox, b. 1749; d. 1806. Elected to club membership in 1774. His great great-grandmother was the Duchess of Portsmouth; and the Lord Holland so well known for his entertainments at Holland House, early in this century, was a nephew of Charles James Fox. Life by George Otto Trevelyan. [2] Instance, speech on French affairs and the question of making peace with Napoleon--just then elected First Consul. Date of February, 1800. [3] William Pitt, b. 1759; d. 1806. Younger son of the Earl of Chatham. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1773. [4] Wraxall in his Memoirs (p. 344) cites special instance in the speech, where he deprecates new alliance between North and Fox--alluding to personal results to himself:-- "Fortuna sævo læta negotio et----" (leaving out the _mea virtute_) then pounding on the table, and adding with oratorical vim "----probamque Pauperiem sine dole quæro." Here (says Wraxall, who was an auditor) he cast his eyes down--passing his handkerchief across his lips--to recover breath only. Certainly he was grandly clear of anything like avarice; no great statesman of England (unless Gladstone) ever thought so little of money. [5] See Francis Horner article in _Edinburgh Review_, October, 1843. [6] Richard Brinsley Sheridan, b. 1751; d. 1816. Moore's Biography, interesting but not authoritative. Mrs. Oliphant's sketch in the Morley _Lives_, is one of that lady's most charming books. [7] It was on February 7, 1787, that Sheridan made his first notable speech on the Begum charge in the House of Commons; the second, in the impeachment trial in Westminster Hall, in June, 1788. Others followed of less interest toward the close of the trial in 1794. The best reports are of the speeches made in 1788, published at the instigation of Sir Cornewall Lewis, in 1859. See _Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox_, by W. Fraser Rae. 1874.