The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Hayes, in Kent, 1759. Died 1806. Aged 47.] It has been well said that the life of William Pitt, the second and favourite son of the magnificent Earl of Chatham, had neither springtime nor autumn. It knew neither the fresh delights of boyhood, nor the tranquil happiness of age. His father had trained him from his very childhood, like an athlete, for the feverish arena of politics. Before he was twenty-one, he stood a gladiator armed; and from that age until his comparatively early death he knew no rest. He was twenty-four--a period at which our English youth are quitting college, and looking around them for a profession--when he became Prime Minister of England. For seventeen years, in the midst of broil and battle, of discontent at home and warfare abroad, this great man held the place which his eagle ambition had chosen for its eyrie on the rock, defying opposition by his commanding eloquence, by the fertility and grandeur of his resources, by his singular financial ability, and by his unquenchable energy. In 1801, he descended from his lofty seat in order to make way for a Minister of peace; but in 1804, all hope of peace being blasted, he was again summoned to direct the councils of the nation, and again he exercised all his varied powers for the development and consummation of the policy, which, right or wrong, he deemed essential to the safety of England, and to the tranquillity and freedom of the world. Two years after his return to office, he fell a victim to his life-long labours and to an hereditary gout, nourished by intemperate habits. It is somewhat curious that Pitt, the cherished head of the aristocratic and Tory party, had expressed himself in favour of nearly all the principles which the liberals of subsequent times have struggled, not fruitlessly, to uphold. He was friendly to Church Reform, to Financial Reform, to Parliamentary Reform, and to the removal of disabilities on account of religious belief. He died at the same age as Lord Nelson; and as to Lord Nelson, so to him, a public funeral was decreed. The sum of forty thousand pounds also was voted to pay his debts. Whatever had been the faults of Pitt, he was not avaricious. He had made no money by the State, for he had ever been the most unostentatious of men. The character of his eloquence was unlike that of his father. It was logical, dignified, equable: now rising into indignant invective, and now taking the shape of the keenest and most cutting sarcasm; but always self-possessed. It did not burst in torrent from an overflowing fount of wrath and passion like the submerging oratory of Chatham. The form of Pitt was gaunt, his countenance harsh, and his action ungraceful. He was, in many respects, one of the greatest Ministers our country has ever seen. His rapid comprehension was well described by his tutor, who said that he seemed to him to justify the doctrine of Plato, that the act of learning is reminiscence only, and not acquisition. He was the favourite of the nation: Fox of a party. [By J. Nollekens, R.A.]