Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/145

 eloquence of his Anti-Cornlaw League orations, gained Fox an invitation to stand for the working-class constituency of Oldham, for which he was returned after a keen contest in July 1847. His congregation had already found it necessary to provide an assistant minister. He was relieved from embarrassment by the munificence of Samuel Courtauld of Braintree, who settled upon him an annuity of 400l. His last address to his congregation was given in February 1852. He had previously summed up his conclusions in his lectures of the ‘Religious Ideas’ (published in 1849), in which these ideas are treated as the natural production of the human mind in the course of its development, corresponding to external realities, as yet but dimly surmised.

Fox's later exertions were mainly confined to parliament and the composition of the ‘Publicola’ letters for the ‘Weekly Dispatch,’ which he continued until 1861. His success in parliament was limited by his age and the didacticism acquired in the pulpit. Regarded at first as ‘a sort of heterodox methodist parson,’ he soon gained general respect by his tact, discretion, and moderation. His most remarkable speeches were that delivered on seconding Mr. Hume's motion for an extension of the franchise in 1849, and that on the introduction of his own bill for establishing compulsory secular education in 1850. He made the subject of education in large measure his own, and always regretted that Lord John Russell had taken it out of his hands. He usually acted with the politicians of the Manchester school, but differed from them on the Crimean war, and declared his dissent in a great speech to his constituents in the winter of 1855. His success at Oldham had involved the rejection of [q. v.], who had thrown in his lot with Mr. J. M. Cobbett. Fox thus excited the fiercest antagonism in a section of the liberal party. He was defeated in 1852, regained his seat in the autumn of the same year, after tumults described as ‘sacrificial games dedicated to the manes of the late Mr. John Fielden,’ was again ejected in 1857, and re-elected in the same year upon another unexpected vacancy. He then held the seat without opposition until his retirement in 1863, though taking little part in public business. He died after a short illness on 3 June 1864, and was buried in Brompton cemetery. His memory was celebrated in the most fitting manner by a memorial edition of his complete writings.

Fox's master passion was philanthropy, and he had adopted the philosophy of Bentham as that apparently most conducive to human welfare. But his temperament was that of a poet, his tastes were literary, dramatic, musical. His utilitarianism was pervaded with imagination, and he was far more effective as a man of letters than as a thinker, and a speaker than as a reasoner. The orator in him was rather made than born, his seeming gift of improvisation was the acquisition of long and careful practice. The construction of his speeches was in the highest degree rhetorical, and they owed much of their effect to his marvellous elocution. They are, however, admirable for powerful diction, manly sense, and abound in fancy, humour, and sarcasm; nor were his innumerable contributions to the press less excellent in their way. No one could better popularise a truth or embody an abstraction. The great aim of his life was to benefit the classes from which he had sprung. No one has counselled those classes more freely, or on the whole more wisely. His nature, though not exempt from angularities, was genial and affectionate; he said of himself that he could never learn to say ‘No’ till he had attained middle life, and then but imperfectly. He craved for sympathy, and when disappointed of obtaining it, took refuge in a reserve which, combined with the phlegm of his physical constitution, sometimes made him appear inert and inanimate, when in reality his mind was actively at work.



FOX, WILLIAM TILBURY (1836–1879), physician, son of Luther Owen Fox, M.D., of Broughton, Winchester, was born in 1836, and entered the medical school of University College, London, in 1853. In 1857 he obtained the scholarship and gold medal in medicine at the M.B. examination of the university of London, and graduated M.D. in 1858. After a short period of general practice at Bayswater, he selected midwifery as a specialty, and was appointed physician-accoucheur to the Farringdon General Dispensary. At this period he wrote some good papers on obstetrical subjects, published in the ‘Transactions’ of the Obstetrical Society. Becoming interested in the study of microscopic fungi attacking the skin and hair, he