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 PISAREV

PITT

Mazzini s army. When the Roman Republic fell, he fled to Switzerland, and then to England. He wrote in Mazzini s Italia del Popolo. In 1857 he led a small and desperate venture against the re actionary Neapolitan power ; but it failed, and Pisacane fell in the fight. He dis sented strongly from Mazzini s Theism, and was a complete Agnostic and scornful of all religion (Jessie White Mario s Birth of Modem Italy, 1909, pp. 197-98).&quot; D. 1857.

PISAREY, Dmitri Ivanovich, Russian critic. B. 1840. Ed. St. Petersburg Classical Gymnasium and University. Son of a wealthy landowner and very pre cocious, Pisarev was admitted to the uni versity at the age of fifteen and made brilliant progress. Ho was devoted to literature and philology, and in 1860 he translated Heine s Atta Troll and became assistant editor of the Eussian World. The authorities suppressed it, and Pisarev, though still a young man, republished the article of his which had offended. He was condemned to five years in the Schlussel- berg Fortress, and much of his finest literary criticism was written in jail. He was the idol of the &quot; young Russians,&quot; who particularly admired his Scholastics of the Nineteenth Century. Pisarev followed the English Utilitarians and had no place for religion, towards which he held a Nietz- chean attitude. He was released in 1867, but was drowned in the Black Sea many say with the connivance of the authorities in July, 1868. Although he died in his twenty-ninth year, his remarkable writings fill ten volumes (1870).

PITT, William, first Earl of Chatham, statesman. B. Nov. 15, 1708. Ed. Eton and Oxford (Trinity College). He obtained a cornetcy in Lord Cobham s Horse, and in 1735 entered Parliament. One of his earliest speeches (1736) was so offensive to the King that he was dismissed from the army, and he was appointed to the house hold of the Prince of Wales. In the 605

House of Commons his oratory soon made a mark, and it was frequently employed in the cause of reform. In 1746 he became joint Vice-Treasurer of Ireland. Paymaster General of the Forces, and Privy Councillor. In 1756 he was nominated a Secretary of State, and he led the House of Commons. By 1760 Pitt&quot; the Great Commoner,&quot; as he was called was the most powerful man in England ; and he had the honourable distinction, in a profoundly corrupt age, that he never took a single penny beyond his due salaries, although he was not a man of wealth. In 1766 he became Lord Privy Seal and Earl of Chatham. He eloquently opposed the American War, especially denouncing the use of Indians against the Colonists ; and his death was brought about by his insisting on delivering a last oration against what he regarded as a great crime. It has often been said that Pitt was the author of a more than Deistic Letter on Superstition, which appeared in the London Journal in 1733, and was re- published under his name by Austin Holyoake in 1873. It pleads for &quot;a religion of reason,&quot; and closes with the statement that &quot; the only true divinity is humanity.&quot; In his careful Life of William Pitt (2 vols., 1913) Mr. Basil Williams objects that a cornet in the army (as Pitt was in 1733) would hardly take that risk. But, beside that the article was not signed, it is recorded above that Pitt was actually dismissed from the army for a bold speech two years later. On the other hand, Mr. Williams proves that the Diary of Lord Egmont, at the year 1733, ascribes the article to a civil servant named &quot;Pit&quot; who then wrote in the Journal ; and it seems highly probable that it has been wrongly ascribed to William Pitt. Yet the biographer gives (i, 216-17) ample evidence that Pitt really was a Deist, and had only &quot; a simple faith in God.&quot; From an unpublished document he quotes Pitt writing a &quot; fierce denunciation &quot; of those who &quot; converted a reverential

awe into a superstitious fear of God

and ran into one of those extremes : 606