the gallery, exercising his memory, and practising his discrimination by hearing and answering in his own mind the great geniuses of debate. It was no wonder, when he entered the arena in earnest, the general cry was that a champion had taken the field. His first triumph came with his first speech. A hundred eyes strove to trace in the features and the manner of the young orator the old familiar lineaments of the sire who slept in Westminster. A hundred memories recalled the tones which had more than once roused the chivalry of England to action. 'It is not a chip of the old block,' said Burke, enthusiastically, 'it is the old block himself.'

Pitt soon displayed qualities the very opposite to those of his rival, Fox. He was shy and formal. His manners were stiff and reserved. A great deal was due to the circumstances under which he entered life. He had passed from college to the cabinet, and he brought to the cabinet something of that self-complacency and formality which, somehow or other, is always contracted by certain natures in the precincts of the college. Even in his most relaxed moments his most indulgent companions were nettled to find in the friend, as in the minister, that academical starchness and that academical affection which dons and tutors love to see in their undergraduates. Among his enemies, or, properly speaking, among his opponents, it operated to his disadvantage. Men who were accustomed to the genial familiarity and hearty goodfellowship of Fox, mistook his shyness for cunning, and denounced his formality as hauteur. He was, they said, the man of ancient Carthage. He was the man of modern Italy. He was anything but an Englishman.* Both the eloquence and the lives of the two statesmen present a very marked contrast. Pitt was cold and artificial. In his oratory, as in his demeanour, everything bespoke a temperament well under command. There are no sallies of passion, no vehement apostrophes. When he attempted to be earnest, he generally ended in being dignified. When he attempted to be warm, his warmth never exceeded the bounds of the most careful good breeding. His simplicity was studied. His energy was an educated one. His style, like the style of Fox, verbose, but verbose rather by redundancy than by repetition, without pomp, with few flowers of rhetoric and few images, was exactly the style to suit the nature of the man, well regulated, firm, and reasonable. It was by the aid of this style, we suspect, that be was enabled to excel in two very distinct and even opposite qualifications, in the art of amplification and the art of suppression. When he would be explicit, he unfolded his statements with perfect lucidness and distinctness. When he wished to be reserved, he did not suppress

his language, indeed, but he concealed his meaning under the semblance of candour, and gratified the curiosity of his hearers under the semblance of satisfying it. He certainly had not the commanding brilliancy of his father, but his language was more correct, and his reasoning more methodical. It is denied that he is argumentative. There is no doubt Fox, in the gross, is superior to him in the art of reply. But in Pitt it was not so much inability as disinclination. His measured style was not accommodated to the colloquial manner of Fox. But that he could be argumentative, could take his opponent's objections, arrange them in formal order, and reply to them one by one with masterly succinctness, is manifest to any one who will take the pains to read his speech on the discussion of the Preliminary Articles of Peace with France, Spain, and Austria, February 21, 1783; his speech on the abolition of slavery, April 2, 1792; and his speech on Fox's resolution about the pacification with France, May 30, 1794. He indulged in none of the fanciful imagery of Burke, and evidently thought it unsuited to the business of debate. One of his bitterest and happiest castigations was extorted by the imaginative exuberance of Burke's speech on the King's address, December 6, 1782, and may be found in his own speech in reply. Sheridan's gay and lively manner was peculiarly distasteful to him. He had chastised Burke. He took occasion to offer a dignified rebuke to Sheridan. The theatre, he told him, was the fit place for the gay effusions of his fancy, his turns, and his epigrammatic points. Let him reserve them for the stage, and on the stage they would doubtless have the good fortune sui plausus gaudere theatri. The reproof was a happy one, but it is remembered, unfortunately, by the far happier counter-retort which it called up. Flattered and encouraged by the Right Honourable gentleman's encomiums on my talents,' said the wit, if ever I again engage them in the composition he alludes to, I may be led by an act of presumption to attempt an improvement upon one of Ben Jonson's best characters, the character of the Angry Boy in the Alchemist.' Sheridan himself was far superior to Pitt in what may be called the Comedy of Debate. Indeed, if the perfection of his oratory is to be estimated by the number of its several accomplishments, he might be pronounced superior to Pitt in the gross. No single rhetorical beauty is in one place or another absent from it. The ridiculous, the pathetic, and the sublime, each reached a climax in him. Yet Sheridan's reputation never was and never can be placed on a level with Pitt's. The truth is, he resembled an ancient Pentathlete. Skilled in all the five exercises, he was superior in all to mere amateurs, but inferior in each to professionals. His information was limited. His classical learning was below his general information. The powers of his mind were extensive, but they exceeded its acquisitions.

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He was accused of displaying too much wit. Yet those who knew him have since declared that no one came at their wit more laboriously. Whole mornings were secretly dedicated to it, apparently surrendered to the lazy sleep of fashion; and the happy epigram or lively repartee of to-day was probably manufactured a week, or even a month before its delivery. Some one has mentioned him in the same breath with the Grecian Hyperides. And perhaps it would be difficult to give his characteristics in fitter words than those applied to Hyperides by Longinus. There is an exhaustless fund of wit about him, a vein of piquant satire, a natural grace, a skilfulness of irony, jests not clumsy or loose, after the manner of the old Attic writers, but natural and easy; a ready talent for ridicule, a deal of comic point, conveyed in a style of well-managed pleasantry; and in all things a winning gracefulness that is almost inimitable. It is plain, too, that he has composed some of his discourses in a style more like poetry than prose.' 'Sheridan's,' said Burke, as if in imitation of Longinus, 'is a middle style between prose and poetry.'

In every way dissimilar to Pitt was his great antagonist Fox. Pitt was studious and abstemious. Fox loved dissipation, and hated application. Pitt was ambitious, and was industrious to realise his ambition. Fox was ambitious, but it was the only passion he took least pains in gratifying. He loved popularity, yet he did little to win it, and was perpetually doing much to risk it. He disguised no vice, though a little disguise might have saved him much obloquy. Void of design, and impatient of culture, his parts were natural, and his success was due only to his parts. As a statesman, in private virtues he was of the race of the Whartons and Rochesters, and the last of his race. Since his time no minister has left behind him such details of extravagance and dissoluteness. That he was the best-natured man alive must be placed, however, as a balance in his favour. Men who hated him as a politician, could not deny their heart to the man. As a politician, too, it was difficult to hate him. All that generosity and goodhumour which fascinated in his private life and among his private associates clung to him in politics. He had no spleen. He bore no ill-will; none that an evening with Don Quixote and Mrs. Armistead could not remove. It was emphatically true of him that the sun did not go down on his wrath. In the hearty enthusiasm of a moment of admiration he would more than once have carried off Pitt to Brookes'. When the philosophic labours of a lifetime had jangled the fine-strung sensibilities of Burke, the statesman wept, while the philosopher pouted. Outside the House his popularity, though sometimes endangered, was scarcely less. His vices, we suspect, operated upon his character among his cotemporaries as did those of his ancestor Charles II. They were

vices of the heart rather than of the head, originating in indolence rather than in malignancy. Hence his friends pardoned the man they had not courage to condemn. They overlooked the rake in the statesman; and while he disgraced the metroplis with scenes as vicious as any that were ever enacted on Tower-hill or Bartholomew Fair, they still clung to the champion, in whom they realised the cause that had bled with Hampden on the field, and with Sidney on the scaffold. They never found him wanting. His exertions were quite commensurate with his idleness. His activity equalled his sloth. If he gave his nights to champagne and ombre, he gave his days to the serfs of Africa and the Helots of America. He was not a successful man. His fondness for play was scarcely surpassed by his fondness for politics. Yet in play he ended as a beggar, and for his success in politics, it is enough to say that, with the exception of eleven months, he was never out of opposition.

If the exhibition of emotion be the test of sincerity, and the exhibition of sincerity the test of a great orator, Fox was one of the greatest orators that ever lived. The hurried sentence, the involuntary exclamation, the vehement gesture, the start, the agitation, everything was indicative of that kind of eloquence that comes from the heart, and goes to the heart. His tongue faltered, his voice grew stifled, and his face bathed with tears. Pitt lost by the contrast in his demeanour. Those who watched the motions of his great rival saw in the stiff unbending figure, the monotonous inflection, and the solemn posture, the formal grace of a passionless automaton. They matched the earnestness, the animation, the enthusiasm of the one, against the gravity, the smoothness, and the plausibility of the other, and they denied that there could be warmth where there was so little fire. In taking into consideration, however, the superiority of Fox in this respect, it must be remembered that his oratory was cradled and nursed in opposition. The effect of such a position on parliamentary oratory is by no means slight. His independence of situation imparts to the speaker an independence of tone. No official reserve is there to chill his animation or to curb his tongue. Horace Walpole has remarked, in one of his Memoirs, that Marchmont in opposition and Marchmont in place were two very different speakers. The warmth and fire of his elocution when out of office disappeared, and left him without a single redeeming grace in office. Something of the same test must be applied in a comparison of Fox with Pitt. In logic, in all the formalities of eloquence, in all those points, in fact, where his nature and habits would suggest an inferiority, he was inferior to Pitt.

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