(January 1859.)
William Pitt, the second son of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of Lady Hester Granville, daughter of Hester Countess Temple, was born on the 28th of May 1759.The child inherited a name which, at the time of his birth, was the most illustrious in the civilised world, and was pronounced by every Englishman with pride, and by every enemy of England with mingled admiration and terror.During the first year of his life, every month had its illuminations and bonfires, and every wind brought some messenger charged with joyful tidings and hostile standards.In Westphalia the English infantry won a great battle which arrested the armies of Louis the Fifteenth in the midst of a career of conquest;Boscawen defeated one French fleet on the coast of Portugal;Hawke put to flight another in the Bay of Biscay; Johnson took Niagara; Amherst took Ticonderoga; Wolfe died by the most enviable of deaths under the walls of Quebec; Clive destroyed a Dutch armament in the Hooghly, and established the English supremacy in Bengal; Coote routed Lally at Wandewash, and established the English supremacy in the Carnatic.The nation, while loudly applauding the successful warriors, considered them all, on sea and on land, in Europe, in America, and in Asia, merely as instruments which received their direction from one superior mind.It was the great William Pitt, the great commoner, who had vanquished French marshals in Germany, and French admirals on the Atlantic; who had conquered for his country one great empire on the frozen shores of Ontario, and another under the tropical sun near the mouths of the Ganges.It was not in the nature of things that popularity such as he at this time enjoyed should be permanent.That popularity had lost its gloss before his children were old enough to understand that their father was a great man.He was at length placed in situations in which neither his talents for administration nor his talents for debate appeared to the best advantage.The energy and decision which had eminently fitted him for the direction of war were not needed in time of peace.The lofty and spirit-stirring eloquence which had made him supreme in the House of Commons often fell dead on the House of Lords.A cruel malady racked his joints, and left his joints only to fall on his nerves and on his brain.During the closing years of his life, he was odious to the court, and yet was not on cordial terms with the great body of the opposition.Chatham was only the ruin of Pitt, but an awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man of sense and feeling without emotions resembling those which are excited by the remains of the Parthenon and of the Coliseum.In one respect the old statesman was eminently happy.Whatever might be the vicissitudes of his public life, he never failed to find peace and love by his own hearth.He loved all his children, and was loved by them; and, of all his children, the one of whom he was fondest and proudest was his second son.
The child's genius and ambition displayed themselves with a rare and almost unnatural precocity.At seven, the interest which he took in grave subjects, the ardour with which he pursued his studies, and the sense and vivacity of his remarks on books and on events, amazed his parents and instructors.One of his sayings of this date was reported to his mother by his tutor.In August 1766, when the world was agitated by the news that Mr Pitt had become Earl of Chatham, little William exclaimed, "I am glad that I am not the eldest son.I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa." A letter is extant in which Lady Chatham, a woman of considerable abilities, remarked to her lord, that their younger son at twelve had left far behind him his elder brother, who was fifteen."The fineness," she wrote, "of William's mind makes him enjoy with the greatest pleasure what would be above the reach of any other creature of his small age." At fourteen the lad was in intellect a man.Hayley, who met him at Lyme in the summer of 1773, was astonished, delighted, and somewhat overawed, by hearing wit and wisdom from so young a mouth.The poet, indeed, was afterwards sorry that his shyness had prevented him from submitting the plan of an extensive literary work, which he was then meditating, to the judgment of this extraordinary boy.The boy, indeed, had already written a tragedy, bad of course, but not worse than the tragedies of his friend.This piece is still preserved at Chevening, and is in some respects highly curious.There is no love.The whole plot is political;and it is remarkable that the interest, such as it is, turns on a contest about a regency.On one side is a faithful servant of the Crown, on the other an ambitious and unprincipled conspirator.At length the King, who had been missing, reappears, resumes his power, and rewards the faithful defender of his rights.A reader who should judge only by internal evidence would have no hesitation in pronouncing that the play was written by some Pittite poetaster at the time of the rejoicings for the recovery of George the Third in 1789.
The pleasure with which William's parents observed the rapid development of his intellectual powers was alloyed by apprehensions about his health.He shot up alarmingly fast; he was often ill, and always weak; and it was feared that it would be impossible to rear a stripling so tall, so slender, and so feeble.Port wine was prescribed by his medical advisers: and it is said that he was, at fourteen, accustomed to take this agreeable physic in quantities which would, in our abstemious age, be thought much more than sufficient for any full-grown man.