nist. It has possibly been said, that a man may maintain nice principles of integrity in the prosecution of public affairs, though his conscience and practice are very defective in matters of private morality. But this would never be believed, even if it were true: the universal conviction of mankind rejects it, when it is attempted, in practical cases, to be made the foundation of confidence. So far is this from being believed, that even a conspicuous and complete reformation of private morals, if it be but recent, is still an unsatisfactory security for public virtue; and a very long probation of personal character is indispensable, as a kind of quarantine for a man once deeply contaminated to undergo, in order to engage any real confidence in the integrity of his public conduct; nor can he ever engage it in the same degree, as if an uniform and resolute virtue had marked his private conduct from the beginning. But even if it were admitted, that all the virtues of the statesman might flourish in spite of the vices of the man, it would have been of no use, as an argument for confidence in the integrity of Fox's principles as a statesman, after the indelible stigma which they received in the famous coalition with Lord North. In what degree that portion of the people, that approved Fox's political opinions, really confided in his integrity as a firm and consistent statesman, was strongly brought to the proof at the time of his appointment as one of the principles of the late administration. His admirers in general expressed their expectations in terms of great reserve; they rather wished, than absolutely dared, to believe, that it was impossible he should not prefer a fidelity to those great principles and plans of extensive reform which he had so strenuously inculcated, to any office or associates in office that should require the sacrifice of those plans, and that he would not surely have taken a high official station, without some stipulations for carrying them, at least partially, into effect. But they recollected the tenor of his life; and though they were somewhat disappointed, and deeply grieved, to find him at his very entrance on office proposing and defending one of the rankest abuses, and afterwards inviolably keeping the peace with the grand total of abuses, in both the domestic and the Indian government, they did, at least many of them, confess that they had always trembled for the consequence of bringing to such an ordeal a political integrity which, while they had sometimes for a moment almost half believed in it, they had always been obliged to refer to some far different principle from a firm personal morality, supported by a religious conscience.

"We have remarked on the slight hold which our great orator had on the mind of the nation at large; it was mortifying also to observe, how little ascendency his prodigious powers maintained over the minds of senators and ministers. It was irksome to witness that air of easy indifference with which his most poignant reproaches were listened to; that readiness of reply to his nervous representations of the calamities or injustice of war; the carelessness often manifested while he was depicting the distresses of the people; and the impudent gaiety and sprightliness with which arrant corruption could show, and defend and applaud itself in his presence. It is not for us to pretend to judge of what materials ministers and senators are composed; but we did often think, that if eloquence of such intensity, and so directed, had been corroborated in its impetus by the authoritative force which severe

virtue can give to the stroke of talent, some of them would have been repressed into a very different kind of feeling and manners from those which we had the mortification to behold: we did think that a man thus armed at once with the spear and the ægis, might have caused it to be felt by stress of dire compulsion, How awful goodness is.'

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"On the whole, we shall always regard Fox as a memorable and mournful example of a gigantic agent, at once determined to labour for the public, and dooming himself to labour almost in vain. Our estimate of his talents precludes all hope or fear of any second example of such powerful labours, or such humiliating failure of effect. We wish the greatest genius on earth, whoever he may be, might write an inscription for our eminent statesman's monument, to express, in the most strenuous of all possible modes of thought and phrase, the truth and the warning, that no man will ever be accepted to serve mankind in the highest departments of utility, without an eminence of virtue that can sustain him in the noble defiance, 'Which of you convicts me of sin ?'" 11

William Pitt.

BORN A. D. 1759.-DIED A. D. 1806.

WILLIAM PITT, the second son of the first Earl of Chatham, by Hesther Grenville, sister of Richard, Earl Temple, was born at Hayes, in the county of Kent, on the 28th May, 1759. His gifted father early perceived such indications of genius in the boy as determined him to train him from his most juvenile years for political life. His education was commenced under the immediate eye of his father, who took great delight in personally superintending his studies.

At the age of fourteen he was sent to Pembroke college, Cambridge. "Although," says his biographer, Bishop Tomline, "Mr Pitt was little more than fourteen years of age when he went to reside at the university, and had laboured under the disadvantage of frequent ill health, the knowledge which he then possessed was very considerable; and, in particular, his proficiency in the learned languages was probably greater than ever was acquired by any other person in such early youth. In Latin authors he seldom met with difficulty; and it was no uncommon thing for him to read into English six or seven pages of Thucydides, which he had not previously seen, without more than two or three mistakes, and sometimes without even one. He had such an exactness in discriminating the sense of words, and so peculiar a penetration in seizing at once the meaning of a writer, that, as was justly observed by Mr Wilson, he never seemed to learn, but only to recollect. Whenever he did err in rendering a sentence, it was owing to the want of a correct knowledge of grammar, without which no language can be perfectly understood. This defect, too common in a private education, it was my immediate endeavour to supply; and he was not only soon

"These remarks are from an article on Fox's History of the Early Part of the Reign of James II.' which appeared in the Eclectic Review' for 1808, and which we are persuaded must have flowed from no other pen than that of the gifted and profound author of the essays on 'Popular Ignorance,' and 'Decision of Character.'

master of all the ordinary rules of grammar, but taking great pleasure in the philological disquisitions of critics and commentators, he became deeply versed in the niceties of construction and peculiarities of idiom, both in the Latin and Greek languages. He had also read the first six books of Euclid's Elements, Plane Trigonometry, the elementary parts of Algebra, and the two quarto volumes of Rutherford's Natural Philosophy, a work in some degree of repute while Mr Wilson was a student at Cambridge, but afterwards laid aside. Nor was it in learning only that Mr Pitt was so much superior to persons of his age. Though a boy in years and appearance, his manners were formed, and his behaviour manly. He mixed in conversation with unaffected vivacity; and delivered his sentiments with perfect ease, equally free from shyness and flippancy, and always with strict attention to propriety and decorum. Lord Chatham, who could not but be aware of the powers of his son's mind and understanding, had encouraged him to talk without reserve upon every subject, which frequently afforded opportunity for conveying useful information, and just notions of persons and things. When his lordship's health would permit, he never suffered a day to pass without giving instruction of some sort to his children; and seldom without reading a chapter of the Bible with them. He must indeed be considered as having contributed largely to that fund of knowledge, and to those other advantages, with which Mr Pitt entered upon his academical life."

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On leaving his Alma Mater, young Pitt entered Lincoln's inn, nearly at the same time with Mr Addington. At the end of three years, he was called to the bar, and-as is customary with junior counsel— selected one of the circuits as the scene of his first professional efforts. A gentleman who was very intimate with Pitt, on the western circuit, and afterwards, till they were separated, in 1792, by a difference of political opinions, thus writes of him at this stage of his career: Among lively men of his own time of life, Mr Pitt was always the most lively and convivial in the many hours of leisure which occur to young unoccupied men on a circuit; and joined all the little excursions to Southampton, Weymouth, and such parties of amusement as were habitually formed. He was extremely popular. His name and reputation of high acquirements at the university, commanded the attention of his seniors. His wit, his good humour, and joyous manners, endeared him to the younger part of the bar. In some bribery causes from Cricklade, he was retained as junior counsel; but even in that subordinate character, he had an opportunity of arguing a point of evidence with extraordinary ability. I remember also, in an action of crim. con. at Exeter, as junior counsel, he manifested such talents in cross-examination, that it was the universal opinion of the bar that he should have led the cause. During his short stay in the profession he never had occasion to address a jury; but upon a motion in the court of king's bench, for an habeas corpus to bring up a man to be bailed, who was charged with murder, Mr Pitt made a speech which excited the admiration of the bar, and drew down very complimentary approbation from Lord Mansfield. When he first made his brilliant display in parliament, those at the bar who had seen little of him, expressed surprise; but a few who had heard him once speak in a sort of mock debate at the Crown and Anchor tavern, when a club, called the Western Circuit Club, was dissolved, agreed

that he had then displayed all the various species of eloquence for which he was afterwards celebrated. Before he distinguished himself in the house of commons, he certainly looked seriously to the law as a profession. The late Mr Justice Rooke told me that Mr Pitt dangled seven days with a junior brief and a single guinea fee, waiting till a cause of no sort of importance should come on in the court of common pleas. At Mr Pitt's instance an annual dinner took place for some years at Richmond hill, the party consisting of Lord Erskine, Lord Redesdale, Sir William Grant, Mr Bond, Mr Leycester, Mr Jekyll, and others; and I well remember a dinner with Mr Pitt and several of his private friends, at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, in celebration of Shakspeare's Falstaff. We were all in high spirits, quoting and alluding to Shakspeare the whole day; and it appeared that Mr Pitt was as well and familiarly read in the poet's works as the best Shakspearians present. But to speak of his conviviality is needless. After he was minister he continued to ask his old circuit intimates to dine with him, and his manners were unaltered."

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But he was soon called to a different sphere of life. He had been bred a statesman from his boyhood; and he always contemplated the house of commons as the goal whence he was to start in his political career. At the request of many of his friends he first offered himself to represent the university of Cambridge, but was unsuccessful. Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale, then procured his return for Appleby, on the solicitation of the duke of Rutland, and with the express understanding that the young commoner should enter parliament totally unfettered. On the 26th of February, 1781, the future premier made his maiden-speech. "The subject of debate," says his biographer, was Mr Burke's bill for economical reform in the civil list. Lord Nugent was speaking against the bill; and Mr Byng, member for Middlesex, knowing Mr Pitt's sentiments upon the measure, asked him to reply to his lordship. Mr Pitt gave a doubtful answer; but, in the course of Lord Nugent's speech, he determined not to reply to him. Mr Byng, however, understood that Mr Pitt intended to speak after Lord Nugent; and the moment his lordship sat down, Mr Byng, and several of his friends, to whom he had communicated Mr Pitt's supposed intention, called out, in the manner usual in the house of commons, Mr Pitt's name as being about to speak. This probably prevented any other person from rising; and Mr Pitt, finding himself thus called upon, and observing that the house waited to hear him, thought it necessary to rise. Though really not intending to speak, he was from the beginning collected and unembarrassed. Before Mr Pitt had a seat in parliament he had been a constant attendant in the gallery of the house of commons, and near the throne in the house of lords, upon every important debate; and whenever he heard a speech of any merit on the side opposite to his own opinions, he accustomed himself to consider, as it proceeded, in what manner it might be answered; and when the speaker accorded with his own sentiments, he then observed his mode of arranging and enforcing his ideas, and considered whether any improvement could have been made, or whether any argument had been omitted. To this habit, and to the practice already mentioned, of reading Greek and Latin into English, joined to his wonderful natural endowments, may be attributed that talent for

reply, and that command of language, for which he was from the first so highly distinguished." The young statesman seemed to have been pleased himself with his first essay. On the next day he wrote to his tutor at Cambridge, that "he had heard his own voice in the house of commons, and had reason to be satisfied with the success of his first attempt at parliamentary speaking." On the 31st of May, he spoke again on a motion relative to the commissioners of public accounts; and, for the third and last time during the session, on the 12th of June, in a debate respecting the American war. He expressed himself, on this occasion, in the most indignant terms, reprobating "the cruelty and impolicy of the contest with our colonies. It was conceived," he said, "in injustice; it was nurtured and brought forth in folly; its footsteps were marked with blood, slaughter, persecution, and devastation. In short, every thing that went to constitute moral depravity and human turpitude were to be found in it. It was pregnant with mischief of every kind, while it meditated destruction to the miserable people who were the devoted objects of the black resentments which produced it." Strong to violence as such language was, his speeches elicited the following encomium from Dundas, afterwards Viscount Melville: "I cannot say to Mr Pitt's face, what truth would extort from me, were he absent; yet even now I must declare that I rejoice in the good fortune of my country, and my fellow-subjects, who are destined to derive the most important services from so happy an union of first-rate abilities, high integrity, bold and honest independency of conduct, and the most persuasive eloquence." At the close of the session, some one having observed that Pitt promised to be one of the first speakers ever heard in the house of commons, Fox instantly replied, "He is so already." Some time afterwards, in allusion to a speech delivered by Pitt in support of a motion against the lords of the admiralty, Dunning confessed that nearly all the sentiments which he had collected in his own mind on the subject, had vanished like a dream on the bursting forth of a torrent of eloquence from the greatest prodigy that ever perhaps was seen, in this or in any other country,-a gentleman, possessing the full vigour of youth, united with the wisdom and experience of the maturest age."

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Notwithstanding his success in parliament Pitt still continued at the bar on the following circuit he held briefs in several election causes of considerable importance at Salisbury; and had the satisfaction of being spoken of in high terms, as well by Mr Justice Buller as the famous Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton. In the ensuing session he voted with Fox and the opposition; strongly censuring the conduct of ministers, Lord North, and his friends, particularly with regard to the American war.

Lord North and his friends were at length compelled to resign; but Pitt, as he was not offered a seat in the cabinet, declined taking office under Lord Rockingham, who succeeded to the premiership. On the 22d of May, 1782, he made an unsuccessful motion for a committee to inquire into the state of the representative system. On this occasion he spoke to the following import :—

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"The representation of the commons in parliament," he observed, was a matter so truly interesting, that it had at all times excited the admiration of men the most enlightened; while the defects found in it