"Fox," he said, is a liberal man; he would always be _aut Caesar
aut nullus_; whenever I have seen him he has been _nullus_. Lord Holland
said Fox made it a rule never to talk in Johnson's presence, because he
knew all his conversations were recorded for publication, and he did not
choose to figure in them.' Fox could not have known what was not the
fact. When Boswell was by, he had reason for his silence; but otherwise
he might have spoken out. 'Mr. Fox,' writes Mackintosh (_Life_, i. 322)
'united, in a most remarkable degree, the seemingly repugnant characters
of the mildest of men and the most vehement of orators. In private life
he was so averse from parade and dogmatism as to be somewhat inactive in
conversation.' Gibbon (_Misc. Works_, i. 283) tells how Fox spent a day
with him at Lausanne:--'Perhaps it never can happen again, that I should
enjoy him as I did that day, alone from ten in the morning till ten at
night. Our conversation never flagged a moment.' 'In London mixed
society,' said Rogers (_Table-Talk_, p. 74), 'Fox conversed little; but
at his own house in the country, with his intimate friends, he would
talk on for ever, with all the openness and simplicity of a child.
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