WILLIAM PITT.

CHAPTER I.

THE TRIUMPH OF YOUTH.

It may be accepted as a general truth that the statesman, like the poet, is born and not made. When Wolsey left Ipswich for Oxford, he had neither thought nor prospect of governing his country and his king. It was native genius, not training, which placed Oliver Cromwell at the head of affairs; and Chatham himself was a cornet of horse before he found his true career in politics. But But William Pitt the

A

Younger was made as well as born a Minister. From his earliest childhood

he was educated to achieve a certain end, to fulfil a definite purpose. His natural gifts for literature and politics were assiduously encouraged by his ambitious father, who was determined that his favourite son should be well fitted to hold the highest office, whenever the opportunity should arrive. Born in 1759, that year of stress and glory, which saw the triumph of our English arms in Canada, which boasted the victories of Clive and Coote in India, which witnessed the splendid achievement of Hawke in Quiberon Bay, William Pitt grew up an ardent, acquisitive boy, in an atmosphere of learning and patriotism. Not even ill-health availed to check his progress, and he gained so easy a mastery over Greek and Latin that, in the words of his

earliest tutor, "he never seemed to learn, but only to recollect."

The method which his father persuaded him to follow in his studies

was far in advance of his time. He read the classics, not as exercises in philology, but as examples of the greatest poetry and the loftiest eloquence; and the epics and histories of old were as real to him, from his youth upwards, as they were to Montaigne. But in his father's eyes it was not enough for the boy to understand Virgil and Thucydides; he must use their works as a means to acquire readiness of speech and a quick faculty of selection in his own tongue; and Lord Chatham would urge him to turn passages from whatever book he was studying into English, without premeditation. That he might learn to declaim, he was set to recite pages.