So passed Pitt. Cromwell and Napoleon yielded their breath amidst storms and tempests; but no natural convulsion could equal the political cyclone that raged round that lonely bed at Putney. All Europe lay at the feet of the enemy. The monarchs whom Pitt had leagued together in a supreme alliance were engaged either in negotiation or in retreat.

The Prussian minister, ready for either event, had also hurried to the conqueror's tent to secure his friendship and a share of the spoil. There was not the vestige of a barrier to oppose the universal domination of Napoleon, but the snows of Russia and the British Channel. Well might Pitt, in a moment of despair, roll up the map of Europe.

At home his prospects were no brighter. He had to meet Parliament, with Trafalgar indeed to his credit, but with Nelson dead; with Ulm and Austerlitz as the result of his continental combinations; with a scanty and disheartened following. Arrayed against him, and thirsting for his overthrow, were the legions of Fox and Grenville, and the domestic circle of Addington. His friends had no conception of any resource that could save him. Rose and Long competed in dismay. Pitt, however, did not seem greatly to trouble himself. He had defeated a more formidable coalition before, and he believed in himself. His calculation was probably right. With health he would have maintained himself. His last reception in the city showed that he had preserved or regained his popularity with the people at large. He had a working majority in Parliament. And though his colleagues of the Cabinet were flaccid and null, he had a boundless resource in Canning, his political son and political heir. Fox was not to live long; and, after his death, even had Pitt once more failed to induce the King to receive him as a minister, the long desired Administration of all the capacities must have been formed.

Private Life

Of the private life of Pitt there is not much to be said. There are constant attestations of his personal fascination in that intimate and familiar intercourse which was the only kind of society that he enjoyed. He seems to have liked that country house life, which is the special grace of England; we find him visiting at Longleat and Stowe, at Wycombe and Dropmore, at Cirencester and Wilderness, at Buckden and Short Grove, at the villas of Hawkesbury, and Rose, and Long, and Dundas, and Addington. Here we find him indulging--proh pudor--in a game of cards; the once fashionable Speculation or Commerce, now relegated to children.

In all these societies he seems to have left but one unfavourable impression. A high-born spinster, who met him at Dropmore, says: "I was disappointed in that turned-up nose, and in that countenance in which it was impossible to find any indication of the mind, and in that person which was so deficient in dignity that he had hardly the air of a gentleman. If not tropes, I fully expected the dictums of wisdom each time that he opened his mouth. From what I then heard and saw I should say that mouth was made for eating."

This is a harsh judgment. On the other hand, one of the choicest ladies of the French aristocracy, who met him during the Revolution, expressed her delight in his grave and lofty courtesy, and long recalled the patient pleasure with which he heard French books read aloud. To the purity of his French she also paid a tribute. Butler records that his talk was fascinating, full of animation and playfulness. Pitt said of Buckingham that he possessed the condescension of pride. It was said of his own manners in society that he possessed the talent of condescension; than which, if it means that he made condescension tolerable, there is perhaps none more rare.

Curiously enough, he seems to have preserved his boyish spirits to the end. Miss Wynn when she met him at Dropmore, and drew the crude portrait just quoted, records the competition of unearthly howls raised by Pitt and the other assembled statesmen chasing a bird out of the drawing-room, which disturbed her rest and possibly gave her an unfavourable bias.

And Sir William Napier, who as a young ensign first knew Pitt in 1804, has recorded the romp when he and the young Stanhopes and Lady Hester succeeded in blacking the Prime Minister's face with a burned cork.

The struggle was interrupted by the arrival of Hawkesbury and Castlereagh ; and Napier graphically records the change that came over their playfellow as he received them; how the "tall, ungainly, bony figure seemed to grow to the says that Pitt paid attentions to Miss Duncan, who was afterwards Lady Dalrymple Hamilton. But there seems no further confirmation of this statement. However, though we cannot imagine a married Pitt more than a married Pope, it is clear that he did seriously contemplate the married state; and cynics may remark with a smile that he afterwards showed a certain dislike of Lord Buckinghamshire, and a reluctance to admit him to the Cabinet; though other reasons might well account for that.

His life was pure; in an age of eager scandal it was beyond reproach. There was, indeed, within living recollection a doorkeeper of the House of Commons who from some chance resemblance was said to be his son; but Pitt's features, without the intellect and majesty which gave them life, lend themselves easily to chance resemblance and ignoble comparison. Wraxall hints at a licentious amour; but even Wraxall expresses his scepticism. The austerity of his morals inspired many indecorous epigrams, but also a real reverence.

One Weakness

His one weakness, it is said, was for port wine. We have seen that he was reared on port from his childhood; and, when he arrived at man's estate, he was accustomed to consume a quantity surprising in those days, and incredible in these. The habits of that time were convivial; but it is not till Pitt's health was broken that the wine which he took seems to have had more effect on him than a like measure of lemonade. Bishop Tomline has left a memorandum stating that never before 1798 did he see Pitt the least affected by wine.

Addington, when questioned on this point, declared that Mr. Pitt liked a glass of port very well, and a bottle better. Sometimes, indeed, the Speaker, who himself was decorously convivial, had to stop the supplies and say, "Now, Pitt, you shall not have another drop;" though Pitt's eloquence would usually extract another bottle. Addington, however, averred that never had he seen Pitt take too much when he had anything to do, except once when he was called from table to answer an unexpected attack in the House of Commons. It was then so clear that he was under the influence of wine as to distress his friends. One of the clerks of the House was, indeed, made ill by it; he had a violent headache. "An excellent arrangement," remarked Pitt; "I have the wine, and he has the headache."

We read of hard drinking at the Duchess of Gordon's; of Thurlow, Pitt, and Dundas galloping home, after a dinner at old Jenkinson's, through a turnpike, the keeper of which, in default of payment, discharged his blunderbuss at them; and of Stothard, the painter, being told by an innkeeper, as Pitt and Dundas rode off, "I don't care who they are, but one of those gentlemen drank four, and the other three bottles of port last night."

But all this must be judged by the habits of that time and not of ours; when Scottish judges sat on the bench with their stoup beside them; when at least one Viceroy of Ireland could die of drink; when Fox and Norfolk would after a debate get through a great deal of wine, (and what this last meant by a great deal it is scarcely possible to compute); when the English clergy are said to have considered their cellars more than their churches; when a great Scottish patron only stipulated that the ministers whom he chose should be "good-natured in their drink"; when a University common room could only be faced by a seasoned toper; when Lord Eldon and his brother could drink any given quantity of port. It is hardly conceivable, if Pitt bad been guilty of habitual excess, that Wilberforce should have been his constant host or guest at dinner. There is, however, little doubt that, if he dined with a party now, it would be thought that he drank a good deal; and, while the Tories said that he died of a patriot's broken heart, the Whigs averred that he died of port. But in this, as in so much else, it must be constantly reiterated that he must be judged by the temper of his own times and not of ours.

Appearance

He was tall and slender in appearance. The early portraits by Gainsborough represent a face of singular sweetness and charm; the last portrait by Lawrence, who only saw him a few weeks or months before his death, represents a figure of rare majesty, with gray if not white hair.

Of this picture a replica was painted for the King, and hangs in the great Gallery at Windsor. One who had sat with him in Parliament, and who survived until this generation, said that "he had a port-wine complexion, but the most brilliant eye ever seen in a human face"; much the same description as is given of Sheridan's appearance. Hoppner, who painted Pitt from the life for his colleague Mulgrave in 1805, gives him tints of this kind; as Wilberforce said, on seeing Hoppner's portrait, "His face anxious, diseased, reddened with wine, and soured and irritated by disappointments, Poor fellow, how unlike my youthful Pitt!"

Fox said that he could see no indications even of sense in Pitt's face: "did you not know what he is you would not discover any."

Grey thought otherwise; but Wraxall agrees with Fox. "It was not till Pitt's eye lent animation to his other features, which were in themselves tame," says Wraxall, "that they lighted up and became strongly intelligent." In his manners, Pitt, if not repulsive, was cold, stiff) and without sincerity and amenity. He never seemed to invite approach, or to encourage acquaintance. . . . From the instant that Pitt entered the doorway of the House of Commons he advanced up the floor with a quick and firm step, his head erect and thrown back, looking neither to the right nor to the left; nor favouring with a nod or a glance any of the individuals seated on either side, among whom many who possessed five thousand pounds a year would have been gratified even by so slight a mark of attention. It was not thus that Old North or Fox treated Parliament."

His nose, said Romney, was turned up at all mankind. How many a vote he and Peel and Lord John Russell may have lost by this shy self-concentration of demeanour, or how many have been gained by the sunny manner of Palmerston, or the, genial face-memory of Henry Clay, must remain a permanent problem for the student of politics and man.

His action as a speaker, that might have been supposed to resemble the majestic stateliness which a later generation admired in Lord Grey, was vehement and ungraceful, sawing the air with windmill arms, sometimes almost touching the ground. Unfriendly critics said that his voice sounded as if he had worsted in his mouth; but the general testimony is that it was rich and sonorous. Fox never used notes, and Pitt rarely; a specimen of these is given by Lord Stanhope.

His eloquence must have greatly resembled that with which Mr. Gladstone has fascinated two generations, not merely in pellucid and sparkling statement, but in those rolling and interminable sentences, which come thundering in mighty succession like the Atlantic waves on the Biscayane coast, sentences, which other men have "neither the understanding to form nor the vigour to utter."

It seems, however, to have lacked the variety and the melody; the modulation of mood, expression, and tone, which lend such enchantment to the longest efforts on the least attractive subjects of his great successor.

"To Pitt's speeches," says a contemporary by no means prejudiced in his favour," nothing seemed wanting, yet there was no redundancy. He seemed as by intuition to hit the precise point, where, having attained his object as far as eloquence could effect it, he sat down."

This is high praise, indeed; but it can hardly be believed that Pitt was never open to the charge of diffuseness. In those days the leader stood forth as the champion of his party, and stated every argument in a speech of exhaustive length; private members had little to do but to cheer. It was, however, calculated as an almost certain matter of proportion that, if Fox were three hours on his legs, the reply of Pitt would not exceed two. Butler says, not untruly, that, as Fox was verbose by his repetitions, so was Pitt by his amplifications. Neither had before him the terror of the verbatim report, and the coming spectre of that daily paper in which the evening's speaking bears so ill the morning's reading.

Had it been otherwise, they must have condescended to compression; and probably to those notes which guide and restrain argument. Sheridan, indeed, said of Pitt that his brain only worked when his tongue was set agoing, like some machines that are set in motion by a pendulum or some such thing; but this opinion bears the stamp of a certain envy of Pitt's ready and spontaneous flow of speech, felt by one to whom laborious and even verbal preparation was necessary.

Lord Aberdeen, who was Pitt's ward and had heard all three, preferred the oratory of Canning to that of either Pitt or Fox. Sheridan made a more famous speech than either. But no criticism can now affect Pitt's place as an orator. Wilberforce, himself no mean orator, writing in 1825 spoke of the brilliancy of the speaking at that time, when Brougham and Canning and Plunket were at their best, but said also that it was on a distinctly lower level than that of Pitt and Fox.

The stupefaction produced by Pitt's Slave Trade speech on the greatest minds of the Opposition has already been recorded; Dudley, the most fastidious of judges, breaks into enthusiasm in speaking of him. Fox did not seek to disguise his admiration. He said that, although he himself was never in want of words, Pitt was never without the best words possible. His diction, indeed, was his strongest point. His power of clear logical statement, so built up as to be an argument in itself, was another.

And as a constant weapon, too often used, he had an endless command of freezing, bitter, scornful sarcasm, "which tortured to madness." This gave him a curious ascendancy over the warm and brilliant natures of Erskine and Sheridan, over whom he seemed to exercise a sort of fascination of terror. We can scarcely conceive an assembly in which there were greater orators than Erskine, Windham, Sheridan, Grey, and even Burke. But all contemporaries placed Pitt and Fox on a level apart. This alone enables us to compute their genius. And when we consider their generation and those that preceded, we cannot but arrive at the belief that eloquence and stenography are not of congenial growth; and that in an inverse ratio, as the art of reporting improves, the art of oratory declines.

It is said that Pitt did not read much or care, to talk about books. It is probable that he had no time to keep abreast of modern literature, though we know that he delighted in Scott.

But we possess a graphic account of the little sitting-dining- room at Hollwood, with the long easy chair on which the weary minister would throw himself, below the hanging shelf of volumes, among which a thumbed and dog-eared Virgil was specially paramount. His rooms at Hollwood and Walmer, says one of his friends, were strewn with Latin and Greek classics. Lord Grenville, a consummate judge, declared that Pitt was the best Greek scholar he ever conversed with. He was, adds Wellesley, as complete a master of all English literature as he undoubtedly was of the English language. He especially loved Shakespeare and Milton, and recited with exquisite feeling the finer passages of Paradise Lost.

It is unnecessary to multiply testimony of this kind. But it is also, somewhat unexpectedly, recorded that he relished the Adventures of Telemachus, and especially enjoyed the speeches of the dreary Mentor in that too didactic tale. His well- known anxiety to possess a speech of Bolingbroke's seems to have arisen, rather from curiosity as to an orator so renowned, than from any peculiar admiration of his style. Heconsidered, we are told, Gil Blas the, best of all novels.

All this does not amount to much. Few Prime Ministers are able to give much time to literature, when in office; especially at a period when an interminable dinner took up all the leisure that could be snatched from work. As an author he did little; his collected works would scarcely fill a pamphlet. During his last stay at Bath two of his colleagues committed a crime worthy of the lowest circle of the Inferno by sending him their poems to correct.

What, perhaps, was venial in Canning was unpardonable in Mulgrave; but it shows that he was considered as great an authority in literature as in politics. Of his own poetic faculty nothing remains but the dubious reputation of having contributed averse to the 11 University of Gottingen"; two couplets which he bestowed on Mulgrave, and of which it suffices to say that they are not to be distinguished from Mulgrave's own; a translation of an ode of Horace; and some lines not less insignificant. They are on the same level as the stanzas which we unluckily possess of Chatham's. In prose we have only the political articles which he wrote for the Anti-Jacobin, of which those on Finance in Numbers II., III., XII., XXV., as well as the Review of the Session in XXXV., are by him. At least Canning has so ascribed them, in his own handwriting, in his own copy.

He has been loudly blamed for his insensibility to literary merit; so far, at least, as such sensibility is shown by distribution of the funds and patronage of the Crown. We do not know what were his principles as to such matters, for during his twenty years of government he was, though assailed by Mathias and Montagu, never taken to task in Parliament on that subject. This fact, while it deprives us of his explanation, throws so remarkable a light on contemporary opinion as possibly to illustrate his own.

If he was convinced that literature, like war, thrived best upon subsidy, he was culpable indeed. But it is conceivably possible that he may have thought differently. He may have believed that money does not brace but relax the energies of literature; that more Miltons have remained mute and inglorious under the suffocation of wealth, than under the frosts of penury; that, in a word, half the best literature of the world has been produced by duns. Pensionless poetry may at least bear comparison with that which has flourished upon bounties.

Under the chill rays of Pitt, we had Burns, Wordsworth, Cowper, Southey, Scott, Coleridge, Canning, Crabbe, Joanna Baillie, Rogers; and even under the tropical effusion of twelve hundred a year, dispensed in heat-drops of fifty or a hundred pounds apiece, we have had nothing conspicuously superior. It is not easy at any rate to cite the names of many eminent men of letters, who have received material assistance from the State since the time of Pitt. Hook and Moore had reason even to curse the ill-judged bounty of their country, and yet they were provided with lucrative offices. Nothing, Vitt may have thought, is so difficult as for a Parliamentary Government to encourage literature. It may begin by encouraging a Shakespeare, but it is far more likely to discover a Pye. You start with a genius and end with a job.

Apart from these arguments, a more practical and pressing plea can be urged for Pitt. Government then rested largely on patronage-he lived in that respect from hand to mouth; and, when he had but half satisfied the demands of politics, there was no surplus for literature.

His exercise of patronage has been attacked on another point. He is said to have advised the creation of too many peers. He did, indeed, ennoble with unsparing hands. During the first five years of his ministry, he bestowed forty-eight peerages; in two subsequent years (1796 and 1797) he created and promoted thirty-five ; and when he resigned in 1801 he had created or promoted a hundred and forty. He nearly, in fact, doubled the peerage as it stood at the accession of George III. This profusion had the strange result that the Reform Bill of 1831 was, it is said, rejected by Mr. Pitt's peerages against those of older creation.

Pitt had a triple reason for this excessive bounty. In the first place, the economic measure of reform in the civil list, which had been passed in 1782, had so crippled and confined the patronage of ministers, that a profuse creation of peerages was almost the only resource of government, as carried on in those days. But his own reductions of this kind were enormous, and with this special distinction. Burke had reduced the patronage of the Crown and of ministers.

Pitt as Prime Minister laboured faithfully and indefatigably to reduce his own. Between 1784 and 1799 he abolished eightyfive absolute sinecures in the Customs with salaries of from £ 2000 a year downwards. He collected a revenue of twelve millions with 747 fewer officials than it had taken under previous governments to collect a revenue of six. All this was done in the service of the public to make enemies for himself, and diminish the opportunities of rewarding his followers and strengthening his government. Conduct of this kind was unique in those days, and has not been too common since.

He desired, secondly, to recruit and refresh the House by large additions from various classes-from the old landed gentry and the commercial, banking aristocracy. And, thirdly, it was necessary for the security of his own and any future governments to render impossible combinations of great peers to overset the Government. He had to destroy the Whig oligarchy, which had so long wielded a perilous and selfish power.

It was on this ground that he secured the cordial co- operation of the Crown in the creation of peers; though to the end of life he called himself a Whig; a term which it must be remembered was then the only one to describe every shade of what we call Liberalism-the Radicalism of Chatham, or the selfish oligarchy of the Revolution families.

Aristocracy Disdain

One thing more must be said on this head, which is essential to a right understanding of the subject. The main reason which prevailed, consciously or unconsciously, with Pitt in his creation of peers was his disdain of the aristocracy. His sympathies, his views, his policy were all with those middle classes, which then represented the idea of the people. By a strange accident, he became the leader of the nobility; but they supported him on their necks, for his foot was there.

They were the puppets through which he conducted the administration of the country; but he scorned them, and snubbed them, and flooded their blue blood with a plentiful adulteration of an inferior element. Read, for example, the anguish of the Duke of Leeds under his treatment; read his letters to the brother of Cornwallis and the son of Chichester, both noble bishops, discreetly ready for the enlargement of their spiritual opportunities.

Pitt and the aristocracy had not an idea or a sentiment in common; his attitude to them resembled the earlier relations of the late Lord Beaconsfield to the magnates of the party. He was willing to give a peerage to any decent possessor of ten thousand a year; as for his baronets, their name was legion, and his knights were as the sand of the sea. But he had no sympathy with their sympathies, and regarded their aspirations with a sort of puzzled scorn. His mission to appease Buckingham, when that potentate was raging over a distribution of Garters from which he was excluded, must have been one of the most solemn farces on record, for he could not understand the feelings that he had to soothe.

He considered the peers as his election agents; therefore the more the better. And as regards their further objects of promotion or decoration he would, had he had the power, have satisfied them all. A minister of this temper may gratify, but he is not likely to strengthen, an aristocracy.

To estimate Pitt as a statesman, to sum up his career, to strike his account with history, one must take adequate means and scales. Jauntily to dismiss him as a superannuated prodigy, with an account of the reforms he projected and abandoned, with a summary record of his loans and gagging acts, with a severe gaze at the corruption of the Union and the horrors of the Irish Rebellion, with an oblique glance at port wine; to consider him as a trained liberal who became one of the King's tools, and then held power by prerogative in some form or another; to regard him as a man infirm of purpose and tenacious only of office; is to take a view, justified by passages and aspects and incidents of his career, but one neither adequate nor comprehensive.

Men will long canvass his claims and merits as a minister, for the subject matter is so unparalleled. Lord Beaconsfield, for example, who delighted in political paradox, wrote a letter in 1873 to Sir William Harcourt, (whose kindness affords me the opportunity of printing it), which contains his view of Pitt:

"I do not at all agree with you in your estimate of Pitt's career. It is the first half of it which I select as his title deed to be looked upon as a Tory Minister. Hostility to boroughmongering, economy, French Alliance, and commercial treaties, borrowed from the admirable negotiations of Utrecht- the latter half is pure Whiggism, close parliaments, war with Franco, national debt and commercial restriction-all prompted and inspired by the Arch-Whig Trumpeter, Mr. Burke."

These sentences express perhaps rather the light scoff of a bantering spirit than the cold results of historical research. But they represent an opinion always worth reading, even when given partly in jest; and one which derives colour from the confusion caused by the necessary change between Whiggism and Toryism. before and after the sure establishment of the Protestant Succession.

The various classes of opinion have crystallised, roughly speaking, into two schools of thought. The first -- the most common and the least informed -- is that which honours Pitt as one who became Prime Minister at the age of an ensign, who achieved the Union with Ireland, and who was the great antagonist of the French Revolution.

The other -- the more recent and scientific school -- is that which severely divides the life of Pitt into two parts; the first embracing his Administration up to 1793, which was entirely praiseworthy, and which might from its character deserve the commendation of Peel or Cobden; the second the remainder, which was entirely and conspicuously blameworthy.

It may be permitted to hold aloof from both parties; the one does not go sufficiently into detail, the other draws a distinction which is not natural. If you take two portraits of a man, one at the age of three, and the other at threescore and ten, you will trace no resemblance whatever between the faces depicted. And yet the change from the one to the other is so gradual, that there is no one day of his life at which you could say that a man was unlike what he was the day before.

As with the natural, so it is with the political man. A politician may make a sudden and complete retractation, and so abruptly change his historical aspect; just as an individual may meet with an accident that entirely changes his personal appearance. But, putting such catastrophes on one side, it is not possible to draw a line across the life of a statesman with the declaration that all is white on one side and all is black on the other. With Pitt, at any rate, it was the circumstances that changed, and not the man. And the circumstances resolve themselves mainly into one-the French Revolution.

No man can understand Pitt without saturating himself with the French Revolution, and endeavouring to consider it as it must have seemed at its first appearance. In the first five years he had not to deal with it, and they were fruitful years for England. He found our average imports in 1784 £ 11,690,000; in 1793 they had risen by seven millions.

In the same period our exports of British merchandise had risen from ten to eighteen millions, and of foreign merchandise from £ 4,330,000 to £ 6,560,000. In December 1783 the Three per Cents stood at 74; in 1792 they stood at over 96. But the new element clouded the whole firmament. It is safe to say that there was not a sane human being then living in Europe so exalted or so obscure or so dull as not to be affected by the French Revolution; except perhaps that traditional Marquis de l'Aigle, who snapped his fingers at it, and went on hunting at Compiegne without interruption. Was it possible that Pitt, and Pitt alone, should remain heedless and insensible 7 Was it desirable 7

We are now able to fix epochs in the French Revolution, to fancy that we can measure its forces, to point out exactly what, in our philosophical opinions, might have modified, or turned, or arrested it; just as we calculate what would have happened if Hannibal had captured Rome; or as men of powerful imagination have composed eloquent dialogues showing what eminent personages would have said to each other, had they happened to meet. It is all cut and dried; a delicate speculation of infinite science and interest, though critical minds may differ as to its value. But Pitt could only perceive the heavens darkened, and the sound of a rushing mighty wind that filled all Europe.

Seeing and hearing that, he formed perhaps a juster judgment than those who discussed the matter as an elegant question of political balance. He saw that uncontrolled it was overwhelming, and he did not pause to reason as to what might be its eventual effect when another century had passed. An earthquake, or the movement of snows surcharged, or the overflow of some swollen river, may cause absolute ruin for the moment, and great subsequent benefit. But the philosopher who is speculating on the fifth act will disappear in the first. Pitt faced the cataclysm, and made everything subservient to the task of averting it.

All reforms were put on one side, till the barometer should rise to a more promising level. It is impossible, said Windham, to repair one's house in the hurricane season. It is impossible, it may be added, to put Pitt's French Revolution policy in a form more terse and more true. Many may profess to regret that we did not allow full play to the agitation, that we did not sit still to receive what should be prescribed from Paris. They may be right. But those may also be right who, without dogmatising one way or the other, feel unable to estimate. the result of the sudden flow of so fermenting a vintage into the venerable vessel of the British constitution.

It is probable that most people will think that Pitt was right in his forecast of the Revolution, and in his inability to accept it as a boon for a country of such different conditions. For there was no middle course; the Revolution had to be accepted or repelled. But if his view be right, a large latitude must be given for his acts of repression, and suspensions of Habeas Corpus; for the enemy he had to fight was as much subterranean as external. The French fought not less by emissaries than by armies; and so, Pitt would say, if the thing had to be done at all, it had to be done with all possible might and main; there could be no refinement as to means, any more than in a storm -with much mutiny on board. His case for his repressive acts depends on the reality and extent of the alleged conspiracy.

It is common now to think that it was exaggerated. That is always the case with regard to such efforts when they have been baffled. It was so said in the case of Catiline, and so in the case of Thistlewood. What has been rendered abortive it is common to think would never have possessed vitality. But it must be remembered that what Pitt did was not a vain imagination of his own, but founded on the solemn, anxious inquisition and report of Parliament itself. It was Parliament that instructed the Executive: it was Parliament that ordered repressive measures. It is impossible to carry the matter further than this, and there it must be left.

Had he lived now, his career would of course have been different. Instead of being a majestic and secluded figure, supreme in the House of Commons and supported by the direct, incalculable influence of the Crown, he must have looked outside to great democratic constituencies with his finger on their pulse. He would have addressed mass meetings all over the country; he must have lived not so much in Parliament, as with a nation outside, and a nation vastly larger than that with which he had to do.

That, however, was not his position, or the position of any minister then, or for long afterwards. He had to deal with powers which we neither know nor understand; on the throne, an active and ardent politician, buying boroughs by the dozen, and contributing £ 12,000 at each dissolution to the election fund of every minister whom he approved, besides what he might spend at bye elections ; whose personal party in the House of Commons numbered perhaps a third of that assembly, and whose party in the House of Lords controlled that body. Secondly, he had to deal with the boroughmongers, who required to be fed as regularly as the lions at the Tower.

These are the vanished factors of Government. But because he was supported by them, it is not to be supposed that he was not supported by the people. The people were then, politically speaking, the middle classes, and he was the man of the middle classes. When he took office he did so by the act of the King, but the King was clearly the interpreter of the national will.

The petitions, the municipal resolutions, the general election clearly proved this. And the nation seem, so far as we can judge by the limited but sole expressions of their will, by elections and by acclamations, to have followed Pitt to the end of his long administration. Wilkes, who was himself no bad test of popular feeling, followed him from the beginning. He had, it is true, the King and the aristocracy with him; but he truckled to neither the one nor the other. Indeed, it is one of his singular merits that he managed to combine into a solid array of support king, lords, and people. But it is no real charge against him that he utilised as an aid the King and the aristocracy, for there was no possible Government without them.

Nor, when the Whigs succeeded him, did they dream of introducing any other system. They only complained that the King withheld his election contribution from them.

Comparison with Chatham

It is perhaps unnecessary to say more of the circumstances and surroundings of Pitt. But it is impossible to complete any sketch of his career, or indeed to form an adequate estimate of his character, without setting him, if only for a moment, by the side of Chatham. Not merely are they father and son; not merely are they the most conspicuous English Ministers of the eighteenth century; but their characters illustrate each other. And yet it is impossible for men to be more different.

Pitt was endowed with mental powers of the first order; his readiness, his apprehension, his resource were extraordinary; the daily parliamentary demand on his brain and nerve power he met with serene and inexhaustible affluence; his industry, administrative activity, and public spirit were unrivalled; it was perhaps impossible to carry the force of sheer ability further he was a portent. Chatham in most of these respects was inferior to his son. He was a political mystic; sometimes sublime, sometimes impossible, and sometimes insane.

But he had genius. It was that fitful and undefinable inspiration that gave to his eloquence a piercing and terrible note which no other English eloquence has touched; that made him the idol of his countrymen, though they could scarcely be said to have seen his face or heard his voice or read his speeches; that made him a watchword among those distant insurgents whose wish for independence he yet ardently opposed; that made each remotest soldier and bluejacket feel that when he was in office there was a man in Downing Street, and a man whose eye penetrated every where; that made his name at once an inspiration and a dread; that cowed the tumultuous Commons at his frown.

Each Pitt possessed in an eminent degree the qualities which the other most lacked: one, was formed by nature for peace, the other for war. Chatham could not have filled Pitt's place in the ten years which followed 1783: but, from the time that war was declared, the guidance of Chatham would have been worth an army. No country could have too many Pitts: the more she has the greater will she be. But no country could afford the costly and splendid luxury of many Chathams.

To sum up: it is not claimed that Pitt was a perfect character or a perfect statesman. Such monsters do not exist. But it may be confidently asserted that few statesmen and few characters could bear so close a scrutiny. He erred, of course; but it is difficult to find any act of his career which cannot be justified by solid and in most cases by convincing. reasons. It may be said that his party acted more on him than he on them; but the relations of a successful leader with his party are so subtle that it is difficult to distinguish how much he gives and how much he receives.

It is, no doubt, true that the changed conditions of the world compelled him to give up his first task of educating his followers, and to appeal rather to their natural instincts or prejudices. It may be alleged that he clung to office. This is said of every minister who remains long in power. Office is, indeed, an acquired taste, though by habit persons may learn to relish it; just as men learn to love absinthe, or opium or cod-liver oil. But the three years which Pitt spent out of place and almost out of Parliament seem to have been the happiest of his life; and his resignation was generally condemned as groundless and wanton. It may, however, be conceded that unconsciously he may have become inured to office, and as leaving it implies at any rate a momentary defeat, he may have been unwilling to face this.

Men who pine for unofficial repose dread the painful process of leaving office -- tho triumph of enemies and the discomfiture of friends and the wrench of habit-as men weary of life fear the actual process of death. It mayalso be said that, though he generally saw what was right, he did not always ensue it. What minister has or can? He has to deal not with angels but with men; with passions, prejudices, and interests, often sordid or misguided. He must, therefore, compromise the ideal, and do, not the best, but the nearest practicable to the best. But let us remember what is indisputable. No one suspected his honesty; no one doubted his capacity; no one impeached his aims. He had, as Canning said, qualities rare in their separate excellence, and wonderful in their combination. And these qualities were inspired by a single purpose. "I am no worshipper of Mr. Pitt," said Wilberforce in the House of Commons, long after Pitt's death, "but, if I know anything of that great man, I am sure of this, that every other consideration was absorbed in one great ruling passion-the love of his country." It was this that sustained him through all. For he ruled during the convulsion of a new birth at the, greatest epoch in history since the coming of Christ, and was on the whole not unequal to it. There let us leave him; let others quarrel over the details. From the dead eighteenth century his figure still faces us with a majesty of loneliness and courage. There may have been men both abler and greater than he, though it is not easy to cite them ; but in all history there is no more patriotic spirit, none more intrepid, and none more pure.