He had run forward with much warmth, and was shaking the hand of a singular-looking person who had just entered the room. The new-comer was a stout, square-built man, plainly and almost carelessly dressed, with an uncouth manner and a rolling gait. His age might have been something over fifty, and his swarthy, harshly-featured face was already deeply lined either by his years or by his excesses. I have never seen a countenance in which the angel and the devil were more obviously wedded. Above, was the high, broad forehead of the philosopher, with keen, humorous eyes looking out from under thick, strong brows. Below, was the heavy jowl of the sensualist curving in a broad crease over his cravat. That brow was the brow of the public Charles Fox, the thinker, the philanthropist, the man who rallied and led the Liberal party during the twenty most hazardous years of its existence. That jaw was the jaw of the private Charles Fox, the gambler, the libertine, the drunkard. Yet to his sins he never added the crowning one of hypocrisy. His vices were as open as his virtues. In some quaint freak of Nature, two spirits seemed to have been joined in one body, and the same frame to contain the best and the worst man of his age. “I’ve run down from Chertsey, sir, just to shake you by the hand, and to make sure that the Tories have not carried you off.” “Hang it, Charlie, you know that I sink or swim with my friends! A Whig I started, and a Whig I shall remain.” I thought that I could read upon Fox’s dark face that he was by no means so confident about the Prince’s principles. “Pitt has been at you, sir, I understand?” “Yes, confound him! I hate the sight of that sharp-pointed snout of his, which he wants to be ever poking into my affairs. He and Addington have been boggling about the debts again. Why, look ye, Charlie, if Pitt held me in contempt he could not behave different.” I gathered from the smile which flitted over Sheridan’s expressive face that this was exactly what Pitt did do. But straightway they all plunged into politics, varied by the drinking of sweet maraschino, which a footman brought round upon a salver. The King, the Queen, the Lords, and the Commons were each in succession cursed by the Prince, in spite of the excellent advice which he had given me about the British Constitution. “Why, they allow me so little that I can’t look after my own people. There are a dozen annuities to old servants and the like, and it’s all I can do to scrape the money together to pay them. However, my”—he pulled himself up and coughed in a consequential way—“my financial agent has arranged for a loan, repayable upon the King’s death. This liqueur isn’t good for either of us, Charlie. We’re both getting monstrous stout.” “I can’t get any exercise for the gout,” said Fox.