[Born at Hayes, in Kent, 1759. Died 1806. Aged 47.]
It has been well said that the life of William Pitt, the second and
favourite son of the magnificent Earl of Chatham, had neither springtime
nor autumn. It knew neither the fresh delights of boyhood, nor the
tranquil happiness of age. His father had trained him from his very
childhood, like an athlete, for the feverish arena of politics. Before
he was twenty-one, he stood a gladiator armed; and from that age until
his comparatively early death he knew no rest. He was twenty-four--a
period at which our English youth are quitting college, and looking
around them for a profession--when he became Prime Minister of England.
For seventeen years, in the midst of broil and battle, of discontent at
home and warfare abroad, this great man held the place which his eagle
ambition had chosen for its eyrie on the rock, defying opposition by his
commanding eloquence, by the fertility and grandeur of his resources, by
his singular financial ability, and by his unquenchable energy. In 1801,
he descended from his lofty seat in order to make way for a Minister of
peace; but in 1804, all hope of peace being blasted, he was again
summoned to direct the councils of the nation, and again he exercised
all his varied powers for the development and consummation of the
policy, which, right or wrong, he deemed essential to the safety of
England, and to the tranquillity and freedom of the world. Two years
after his return to office, he fell a victim to his life-long labours
and to an hereditary gout, nourished by intemperate habits. It is
somewhat curious that Pitt, the cherished head of the aristocratic and
Tory party, had expressed himself in favour of nearly all the principles
which the liberals of subsequent times have struggled, not fruitlessly,
to uphold. He was friendly to Church Reform, to Financial Reform, to
Parliamentary Reform, and to the removal of disabilities on account of
religious belief. He died at the same age as Lord Nelson; and as to Lord
Nelson, so to him, a public funeral was decreed. The sum of forty
thousand pounds also was voted to pay his debts. Whatever had been the
faults of Pitt, he was not avaricious. He had made no money by the
State, for he had ever been the most unostentatious of men. The
character of his eloquence was unlike that of his father. It was
logical, dignified, equable: now rising into indignant invective, and
now taking the shape of the keenest and most cutting sarcasm; but always
self-possessed. It did not burst in torrent from an overflowing fount of
wrath and passion like the submerging oratory of Chatham. The form of
Pitt was gaunt, his countenance harsh, and his action ungraceful. He
was, in many respects, one of the greatest Ministers our country has
ever seen. His rapid comprehension was well described by his tutor, who
said that he seemed to him to justify the doctrine of Plato, that the
act of learning is reminiscence only, and not acquisition. He was the
favourite of the nation: Fox of a party.
[By J. Nollekens, R.A.]