That the niece of Mr. Pitt should have been his most intimate woman-friend, and the niece of Mr. Fox his one and only love, reads curiously in the light of party politics. But Sir John was no party man. The great Minister, Pitt, had for him an unbounded esteem and affection, on the one side. And Fox, on the other, at a time when a movement was in progress to make Moore Commander-in-Chief in India, sent for him, and frankly informed him that “he could not give his consent” to this scheme. “It was impossible for him,” he said, “in the state in which Europe then was, to send to such a distance a General in whom he had such entire confidence.” Moore stood outside mere political warfare, grandly and simply, as representative of his country. Amid the fighting, the difficulties, the perplexities, of Sicilian politics and struggles, he found time to fall profoundly in love. And he did not marry. He did not even let the girl know that he loved her. Why not? Well, the matter stood thus. Caroline Fox was very young—not yet eighteen. And Moore was already in his forty-sixth year. There was a discrepancy of nearly thirty years between the two, and Sir John did not think it right, at her early age, even to give her the choice. He was not of a nature to love lightly, or to give up his wishes easily, and it was a hard fight. Harder far this conflict than all his battles with the soldiers of Napoleon. Yet he conquered, and to the young girl herself he spoke not a word which might have opened her eyes. To Anderson he explained his reasons, with a frank and touching simplicity, the echo of which comes down to us now through ninety years and more. “She is so young,” he said. “Her judgment may be overpowered. The disparity of age is not perhaps at present very apparent, and my position here, my reputation as a soldier of service, and my intimacy with her father, may influence her to an irretrievable error for her own future contentment. My feelings therefore must be suppressed, that she may not have to suppress hers hereafter with loss of happiness.” Can anything surpass the quiet grandeur of that “must”? This surely is an ideal character—no true flesh and blood—so somebody may object. What! a man in the prime of middle age, eminently handsome, accomplished and fascinating, the idol of his friends, the darling of his country, well off as to worldly goods, with still in all probability a magnificent career before him—that such a man, when deeply in love, should pause to view the question simply and solely with regard to the girl’s happiness, not to his own—that _he_ should humbly question whether, though he might fairly hope then and there to win her, she might not in later years regret her action and wish herself free! This is such a hero, no doubt, as has sometimes figured in fiction. An ideal hero—but——