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that had he lived his fame would have been obscured by more disastrous failures and more signal defeats.

A motion to honour the departed statesman with a public funeral, and a resting-place in Westminster Abbey, was carried in the House of Commons by a large majority. It afforded Wilberforce an opportunity of bearing testimony to Pitt's patriotism and integrity. He bears the same testimony in his private correspondence. "Pitt," he said, "had foibles, and of course they were not diminished by so long a continuance in office; but for a clear and comprehensive view of the most complicated subject in all its relations; for that firmness of mind which disposes a man to follow out, and when overtaken, to recognise the truth; for magnanimity, which made him ready to change his measures when he thought the good of the country required it, though he knew he should be charged with inconsistency on account of the change; for willingness to give a fair hearing to all that could be urged against his own opinions, and to listen to the suggestions of men whose understandings he knew to be inferior to his own; for personal purity, disinterestedness, integrity, and love of his country, I have never known his equal."

At the funeral, on the 22nd of February, Wilberforce was one of those who bore the banner in front of the coffin. The ceremony was very impressive. It seemed to the onlookers as if the adjoining statue of the great Chatham looked down "with consternation into the grave which was opened for his favourite son, the last perpetuator of the name which he had ennobled." The spot where he lies, near the northern door of the Abbey,

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is assuredly "hallowed ground;" for within its narrow limits sleeps the dust of the two Pitts, of Mansfield, of Fox and Grattan, of Canning, and Wilberforce himself.*

In conclusion, we may refer briefly to two or three particulars of Pitt's private life, for which in the preceding sketch no room could be found. Though he was never married, he was by no means insensible to the charms of female society. Wraxall speaks of his attachment to one of the beautiful Lennoxes, daughters of the Duke of Richmond; Lord Holland connects his name with Miss Duncan, afterwards Lady Dalrymple Hamilton; and Lady Hester Stanhope said there was a young lady whom he so greatly admired that he drank out of her shoe-not an unusual compliment in the time of Pitt. But his affections were chiefly engaged by Lady Eleanor Eden (afterwards Lady Buckinghamshire). It cost him a deep pang to give her up, which he did, it is said, from a feeling that all his time and attention ought to be surrendered to public affairs. It is recorded of him that he was a severe and accurate critic in all matters of female dress. He was partial, in his hours of leisure, to round games with young people, and would play at the simple pastime of "speculation" with the zest of a child. His conversation was often playful,† and always good-humoured

"In no other cemetery do so many great citizens lie within so narrow a place."-Macaulay.

The Hon. Edmund Phipps preserves an example of Pitt's" playful humour," related to him by Mr. Croker, who heard it from Mr. Ward himself. "Pitt had come to dine with Mr. Ward in his retreat at West Moulsey. Summer was closing fast, and damp and cold had robbed gloomy firs, a shady lawn, and small rooms level with the ground, of their chief

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and brilliant;* and his occasional remarks on men and manners sprang from a clear and exact judgment. Had he been less wholly absorbed in politics, his mind would have been healthier and his views broader; but it is sufficiently evident, from the testimony of many authorities, that he was by no means neglectful of the sweet humanities of life, and that his nature was as kindly as his intellect was robust. If these details should seem to depose him from the frigid and solitary pedestal on which the adulation of indiscriminating partisans has raised him, they bring him at all events much nearer to ordinary sympathies; and we doubt whether he will be less admired because the qualities of his heart are found not to be inferior to his rare mental endowments.†

attractions. What could persuade you,' inquired Mr. Pitt, as he looked around him, “what could persuade you, Ward, to come to such a dismal place?' That which is the grand motive to a poor man,-money,' replied Ward. 'Indeed! and pray how much do they give you?' inquired Pitt."-HON. E. PHIPPS, 'Memoirs of R. Plumer Ward,' i. 135.

* Lord Guildford, having met him at the Duke of Rutland's country seat, wrote word that he was sorry to find that "so bad a politician was so very pleasant a man."-HOLLAND, 'Memoirs of the Whig Party,' ii. 34.

+ Pitt said to Lord Malmesbury, "I make no scruple in owning that I am ambitious; but my ambition is character, not office."-Malmesbury, 'Diaries and Correspondence,' iv. 78.

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NOTE.

[The following character of Pitt, by the poet Coleridge, appeared in The Morning Post of March 19th, 1800:-]

Plutarch, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has generally chosen for each pair of lives the two contemporaries who most nearly resembled each other. His work would, perhaps, have been more interesting if he had adopted the contrary arrangement, and selected those rather who had attained to the possession of similar influence, or similar fame, by means, actions and talents the most dissimilar. For power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one, equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it coexist. In our days, the two persons who appear to have influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply and the most diffusively, are beyond doubt the Chief Consul of France and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and in these two are presented to us similar situations, with the greatest dissimilitude of characters.

William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham; a fact of no ordinary importance in the solution of his character, of no mean significance in the heraldry of morals and intellect. His father's rank, fame, political connections, and parental ambition were his mould-he was cast, rather than grew. A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind; and that which he might have been was compelled into that which he was to be. From his early childhood it was his father's custom to make him stand up on a chair and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practised so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings. Not the thing on which he was speaking, but the praises to be gained by the speech, were present to his intuition; hence he associated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise excited by them. But an inconceivably large portion of human knowledge and human power is involved in the science and management of words; and an education of words, though it destroys genius, will often create, and always foster talent. The young Pitt was conspicuous far beyond his fellows, both at school and at college. He was always full-grown: he had neither the promise nor the awkwardness of a growing intellect. Vanity, early

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satiated, formed and elevated itself into a love of power; and in losing this colloquial vanity, he lost one of the prime links that connect the individual with the species, too early for the affections, though not too early for the understanding. At College he was a severe student, his mind was founded and elemented in words and generalities, and these two formed all the superstructure. That revelry and that debauchery which are so often fatal to the powers of intellect, would probably have been serviceable to him; they would have given him a closer communion with realities, they would have induced a greater presentness to present objects. But Mr. Pitt's conduct was correct, unimpressibly correct. His after-discipline, in the special pleader's office, and at the bar, carried on the scheme of his education with unbroken uniformity. His first political connections were with the Reformers; but those who accuse him of sympathising or coalescing with their intemperance, or visionary plans, misunderstand his character, and are ignorant of the historical facts. Imaginary situations in an imaginary state of things rise up in minds that possess a power, and facility in combining images. Mr. Pitt's ambition was conversant with old situations in the old state of things, which furnish nothing to the imagination, though much to the wishes. In his endeavours to realise his father's plan of reform, he was probably as sincere as a being, who had derived so little knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his sincerity had no real root of affection; while it was propped up by his love of praise and immediate power, so long it stood erect and no longer. He became a member of the Parliament-supported the popular opinions, and in a few years, by the influence of the popular party, was placed in that high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of his country, we had almost said the fates of the world, were placed in his wardship-we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, when we reflect in whose wardship the fates of the world were placed!

The influencer of his country and species was a young man, the creature of another's predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended from all the elements of experience; a young man whose feet had never wandered, whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left, whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated reptile! It was a young man whose heart was solitary, because he had existed always among objects of futurity, and whose imagination too was unpopulous, because those objects of hope, to which his habitual wishes had transferred, and as it were projected, his existence, were all familiar and long established objects!-A plant sown and reared in a hot-house, for whom the very air that surrounded him had been regulated by the thermometer