Farquhar. "I cannot tell," replied he; "perhaps you may regain your health." Pitt half smiled, and being left alone with the bishop, the latter desired to pray with him. "I have, as I fear is the case with many others," replied Mr. Pitt, "neglected prayer too much to allow me to hope that it can be very efficacious now. But," rising in bed as he spoke and clasping his hands, he added, "I throw myself entirely upon the mercy of God, through the merits of Christ." The following day he breathed his last (23d of January, 1806).

Parliament paid his

Mr. Pitt had lived and died poor. debts, which amounted to forty thousand pounds, and provided for his three nieces; it also bore the expenses of his funeral. Great consternation seized on the nation at the news of his death. In three months England had lost Nelson and Pitt, the hero of its navy and the great pilot of its political government. In the presence of a growing peril. and an implacable enemy, she found herself, by the premature death of two men, enfeebled and disarmed: she could not, however, give way to despair. Mr. Pitt had said, with modest grandeur, that it was not for one man alone to save Europe. Between the day of the great statesman's death and the definitive pacification of Europe there still stretched long years of a resistance as persevering and energetic as was the attack.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

GEORGE III. AND THE EMPEROR NAPOLEON.

L

1806-1815.

ORD GRENVILLE was now Premier, and his alliance with Fox had borne fruit, for the cabinet prided itself on combining "all the talents: " Fox, Grey, Wyndham, Lord Sidmouth, and Lord Henry Petty, the second son of Lord Lansdowne, whose title he was one day to bear and whose renown he was to support. Canning alone had been excluded from it.

Fox had been intrusted with Foreign Affairs; his physical strength, already enfeebled, had nevertheless outlasted the delicate health of his great rival. Some time before, judging them both in their first youth, Lady Holland had said to her husband: "I have been this morning with Lady Hester Pitt, and there is little William Pitt, not eight years old, and really the cleverest child I ever saw; and brought up so strictly, and so proper in his behavior, that, mark my words, that little boy will be a thorn in Charles's side as long as he lives." The thorn had now ceased to irritate Charles Fox. After eighteen years passed in retirement, in alternations of eager struggles and indolent discouragement, he now took the helm again in an hour of national grief and anxiety. His admiration for the Emperor Napoleon, and the sympathy he had constantly felt for France, naturally inclined him towards peace. He made overtures at once: his envoys were moderate in their claims, as well as in the general tone of their intercourse. A