power to the accomplishment of great but practicable schemes.

The marvel, or at any rate the merit, is greater: Pitt was by no means an excited visionary; he had by no means one of those minds upon which great ideas fasten as a fanaticism. There was among his contemporaries a great man who was, in the highest gifts of abstract genius, in the best acquisitions of political culture, far superior to him: but in the mind of Burke, great ideas were a supernatural burden, a superincumbent inspiration; he saw a great truth, and he saw nothing else. At all times with the intense. irritability of genius, in later years with the extreme one-sidedness of insanity, he was content, in season and out of season, with the great visions which had been revealed to him, with the great lessons which he had to teach and which he could but very rarely induce any one to hear. But Pitt's mind was an absolute contrast to this: he had an extreme discretion, tested at. the most trying conjunctures. In 1784, when he had no power, when there was a hostile majority in the House of Commons, when he had no sure majority in the House of Lords, when the support of the King, which he undeniably had, was an undeniable difficulty, -for he did not intend to be a second Lord North; he did not intend to be a servitor of the Palace; he would not have stooped to carry out measures which he disapproved of, he would not have been willing to enunciate measures as to which he had not been consulted, at this very moment, with most of the constitutional powers against him, with the very greatest greatly against him, with no useful part of it truly for him, he never made a false step; he guided the most feeble administration of modern times so ably and so dexterously that in a few months it became the strongest. A mind with so delicate a tact as this is entitled to some merit for adhering to distant principles. It is those who understand the present that feel the temptation of the present; it is those

who comprehend the hour that feel the truly arduous though upon paper it may seem the petty — difficulty of thinking beyond the hour. It is no merit in those who cannot have the present, to attempt to act for posterity, there is nothing else left to them, they have no other occupation open to them; but it is a great merit in those who can have what is plain, apparent, and immediate, to think of the unseen, unasking, impalpable future.

It is this singular discretion which is Mr. Pitt's peculiar merit, because he belongs to the class of statesmen who are most apt to be defective in that discretion. He was an oratorical statesman; and an oratorical statesman means, ex vi termini, an excitable statesman. His art consists in the power of giving successfully in a more than ordinary manner the true feelings and sentiments of ordinary men; not their superficial notions nor their coarser sentiments, - for with these any inferior man may deal, but their most intimate nature, that which in their highest moments is most truly themselves. How is the exercise of this art to be reconciled with terrestrial discretion? Is the preacher to come down from his pedestal? is he who can deal worthily with great thoughts to be asked also to deal fittingly with small details? is it possible that the same mind which can touch the hearts of all men can also be alive to the petty interests of itself? is the microscopic power to be added to the telescopic power? is the capacity for careful management to be added to the power of creating unbounded enthusiasm? Yet this is the perpetual difficulty of parliamentary statesmen. A dry man can do the necessary business, an excitable man can give to the popular House of Parliament the necessary excitement: Mr. Pitt was able, with surpassing ability and surpassing ease, to do both,- scarcely any one else has been so.

This great parliamentary position he owed to a combination of parliamentary abilities; of which only VOL. III.-11

one or two can be, within our necessary limits, distinctly specified, but one or two of which are very prominent.

First, his singular oratorical power. He was, Lord Macaulay tells us, "at once the only man who could -open a Budget without notes, and . . . who . . . could speak that most elaborately evasive and unmeaning of human compositions, a king's speech, without premeditation."* He had the eloquence of business both in its expressive and its inexpressive forms, and he had likewise the eloquence of character; that is, he had the singular power, which not half a dozen men in a generation possess, of imparting to a large audience the exact copy of the feelings, the exact impress of the determination, with which they are themselves possessed. On a matter of figures, "Pitt said so" was enough; on a question of legislative improvement. an apathetic Parliament caught some interest from his example; in the deepest moments of national despair, an anxious nation could show some remains of their characteristic courage from his bold audacity and unwearied, inflexible, and augmenting determination.

No man could have achieved this without a sanguine temperament; and accordingly, good observers pronounced Mr. Pitt the most sanguine man they had ever known. In no stage of national despondency, in no epoch of national despair, was his capacity of hope one of the important capacities for great men in anxious affairs-ever shaken. At the crisis of his early life, Lord Temple's resignation, which seemed the last possible addition to the coalition of difficulties. under which he was laboring, is said to have deprived him of sleep; but nothing else ever did so after his power attained its maturity, and while his body retained its strength.

Biography of Pitt; he gives the second clause as Windham's statement, but the latter merely said that Pitt seemed (from his style of oratory, in which the sound was often weightier than the substance) as if he could have done so, -not that he ever did. — ED.

Over the House of Commons, too, his anxious love of detail had an influence which will not surprise those who know how sensitive that critical assembly is to every sort of genuineness, and how keenly watchful it is for every kind of falsity. The labor bestowed on his reform of the customs acts, on his Indian measures, on his financial proposals from year to year, is matter of history; no one can look with an instructed eye at these measures without instantly being conscious of it. In addition to his other great powers, Mr. Pitt added the rare one of an intense capacity for work, in an age when that capacity was rarer than it is now, and in a Parliament where the element of dandies and idlers was far more dominant than it has since become.

Nor would this enumeration of Pitt's great parliamentary qualities be complete - it would want, perhaps, the most striking and obvious characteristic — if we omitted to mention Pitt's well-managed shyness and his surpassing pride. In all descriptions of Pitt's appearance in the House of Commons, a certain aloofness fills an odd space; he is "a thing apart,"* different somehow from other members. Fox was the exact opposite, -he was "a good fellow"; he rolled into the House, fat, good-humored, and popular. Pitt was spare, dignified, and reserved; when he entered the House, he walked to the place of the Premier without looking to the right or to the left, and he sat at the same place. He was ready to discuss important business with all proper persons, upon all necessary occasions; but he was not ready to discuss business unnecessarily with any one, nor did he discuss anything but business with any save a very few intimate friends, with whom his reserve at once vanished, and his wit and humor at once expanded, and his genuine interest in all really great subjects was at once displayed. In a popular assembly this sort

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart."-Byron, "Don Juan," Canto i., stanza cxciv.

of reserve, rightly manipulated, is a power. It is analogous to the manner which the accomplished author of "Eōthen" recommends in dealing with Orientals: "it strikes terror and inspires respect."* A recent book of memoirs illustrates it: During Addington's administration, a certain rather obscure 'Mr. G—” was made a Privy Councilor,† and the question was raised in Pitt's presence as to the mode in which he could have obtained that honor. Some one said, "I suppose he was always talking to the Premier, and bothering him." Mr. Pitt quietly observed, "In my time I would much rather have made him a Privy Councilor than have spoken to him." It is easy to conceive the mental exhaustion which this well-managed reserve spared him, the number of trivial conversations which it economized, the number of imperfect ambitions which it quelled before they were uttered. An ordinary man could not of course make use of it; but Pitt at the earliest period imparted to the House of Commons the two most important convictions for a member in his position,he convinced them that he would not be the king's creature, and that he desired no pecuniary profit for himself. As he despised royal favor and despised real money, the House of Commons thought he might well despise them.

We have left ourselves no room to speak of Mr. Pitt's policy at the time of the French revolution,—it would require an essay of considerable length to do it substantial justice; but we may observe that the crisis which that revolution presented to an English statesman was one rather for a great dictator than for a great administrator. The English people were at first, in general, pleased with the commencement of the French revolution. "Anglo-manie," it seemed, had been prevalent on the Continent; the English

*Chap. xvii., near the opening.

+ This initial fits only Sir Wm. Grant; if so meant, it is a silly slur on one of the greatest of judges and parliamentary orators.- ED.