"Men praise or blame in Pitt the iron will. It was by bending that it never broke." LORD LYTTON, "St. Stephen's." X. WILLIAM PITT (continued.) T was the singular good fortune of Pitt to rescue his royal master from unpopularity. During the former part of his reign, the pertinacity with which the King had clung to Lord Bute, whom the people despised, the faithlessness he had shown towards his own ministers, and the plots he had laid against them and carried into effect by means of the private body-guard composed of his "friends," had lessened him in the eyes of his subjects, and neutralised to a great extent the influence of those virtues in him the reality of which no one denied.* But with Pitt's accession to power secret influence ended. He appealed from cabal and faction to the heart of the people.† He was too independent and haughty to tolerate any rivalry or mutiny. He cleared the palace of plotters, and the King became dearer to his people in proportion as the minister of his choice rose in their esteem. Morality and wisdom seemed for the time to be the special attributes of VOL. II. * Jesse's "George III.," vol. i. p. 126. † Goldwin Smith's "Lectures on Pitt." D royalty and Pitt, while dissipation and folly fell no less to the score of the Whig leaders and the Prince of Wales. It cannot be denied that the indiscretion of these gentlemen in the regency question gave a great advantage to their more prudent adversary. They contended that the heir-apparent had, now that his father had become insane, a right to be Regent and to exercise all the prerogatives of a king; while Pitt, on the contrary, maintained that no such right existed independently of parliament, and that if the Prince of Wales were appointed Regent, his powers ought to be limited and determined by the estates of the realm. The parts taken by the two statesmen in this matter were precisely the opposite to those which they would have been supposed likely to take. Fox leaned to the side of absolutism and hereditary right, Pitt to the more popular doctrine of parliamentary authority. His conduct did not fail to procure him praise on all hands. There was thought to be something chivalrous in his thus defending an afflicted sovereign, particularly as he had everything to gain by courting the favour of the Regent. Had he been dismissed from office by his Royal Highness, nothing but poverty stared him in the face, and his disinterestedness on the occasion made his friends compare his loyalty to that of Sully and William Bentinck. There was the more reason in his resistance to the Whigs because George III.'s insanity was not likely to be permanent, or to disqualify him always for the affairs of state. He therefore proposed that the appointments in the royal household should rest with the Queen, so that if the King were happily restored, he might not be grieved and humiliated by finding the palace, which had been remarkable for decorum and morality, filled by the favourites of his dissolute son. There was something in Pitt's private life and character which harmonised perfectly with this concern for the excellent Queen and for the reputation of her court. Though he quaffed port as freely as Robert Hall drank tea, though in his youth he evinced great fondness for play, though he lived a bachelor all his days, and vice had not at that period ceased to be fashionable, yet his habits were highly decorous,* and it is recorded to his honour that he was not driven from them by the ridicule of less upright men. Dr. Laurence, in the "Rolliad," Captain Morris, and Peter Pindar, made his innocence a theme of mirth; but their verses served only to raise him in public esteem. He is thought to have been sincerely attached to the Hon. Eleanor Eden, but from causes now difficult to ascertain he never made her an actual proposal. Necker's daughter, it is said, and a fortune of £14,000 per annum, were placed within his reach in his twenty-fourth year, but he answered the proposal by saying, "I am already married to my country." His niece, the famous Hester Stanhope, did the honours of his house, and enlivened its guests by the * Goldwin Smith's "Lectures on Pitt," p. 53. See "Political Miscellanies." "Life of Wilberforce," vol. i. pp. 39-40. brightness of her talents. "How can Pitt have such a spoon as this?" asked Lord Musgrave, when he was breakfasting there one day and was treated to a broken egg-spoon. "Don't you know," replied Lady Hester Stanhope, "that my uncle sometimes uses very slight and weak instruments to effect his ends ?" The poets who lampooned Pitt were but few compared with those who praised him. Seldom has a minister been more loudly hymned, and seldom has "A health to the pilot who weathered the storm" been sung with heartier enthusiasm to brimming goblets than when Pitt was toasted at Tory dinners and carousals. Yet, strange to say, he was by no means a patron of learning. He carried to excess the wise rule of leaving public opinion to decide on the merits and rewards of literary works. He withheld from men of letters those distinctions and occasional pensions which it is as honourable to the State to offer as to the receivers to have earned. He suffered Porson to become a newspaper drudge, and Gibbon a poor exile. He stretched out no hand to Johnson when expiring in Fleet Street for want of purer and softer air; and if Cowper obtained at last the solace of a pension, it was not owing to Pitt's exertion in his behalf. The Church of England has certainly some reason to be proud of Paley, but Pitt did not think him worthy of promotion. Painters, sculptors, and architects, who emerged from obscurity owed nothing to Pitt for the improvement of their fortune. With boundless means at |