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 critics, and Dryden the people; Pitt is quoted, and Dryden read.’ After the lapse of a century, Professor Conington remarks: ‘Besides Dryden's, Pitt's is the only version which can be said to be at present in existence: a dubious privilege which it owes to the fact of its having been included in the successive collections of English poetry, of which Johnson's was the first.’

Like more distinguished members of his family, Pitt suffered from an early age from a very severe form of gout, which undermined his constitution. He died at Pimperne on 15 April 1748, and was buried in Blandford church, where a mural inscription celebrates ‘his candour and primitive simplicity of manners,’ and states that ‘he lived innocent and died beloved.’ A portrait engraved by Cook is prefixed to the selection of his verses given in Bell's ‘Poets’ (1782, vol. xcix.). Selections, prefixed by memoirs, are also given in Anderson's ‘Poets’ (viii. 796), Chalmers's ‘Poets’ (vols. xii. xix.), Park's ‘British Poets’ (vol. iii.), and Sanford's ‘British Poets’ (vol. xxi.). Several letters from Pitt to Duncombe are printed in the correspondence of John Hughes.

[Hutchins's Dorset, i. 236; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714; Kirby's Winchester Scholars; Gardiner's Register of Wadham; Cibber's Lives of the Poets, v. 298; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. ii. 260; Johnson's Poets, ed. Cunningham, iii. 219; Chalmers's Biogr. Dict. xxiv. 593; Gent. Mag. 1813, i. 537; Pope's Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, passim; Julian's Dict. of Hymnology; Brit. Mus. Cat.] 

PITT, GEORGE, first (1722?–1803), eldest son of George Pitt of Stratfieldsaye, Hampshire, by his wife Mary Louisa, daughter of John Bernier, matriculated on 26 Sept. 1737 from Magdalen College, Oxford; he graduated M.A. on 13 March 1739, and D.C.L. on 21 Aug. 1745. At a by-election in June 1742 Pitt was returned to the House of Commons for Shaftesbury, and in December of that year voted against the payment of the Hanoverian troops (Parl. Hist. xii. 1057). At the general election in the summer of 1747 he was returned both for Shaftesbury and for Dorset. He elected to sit for the county, and continued to represent Dorset until the dissolution in September 1774. He was appointed colonel of the Dorset militia on its establishment in 1757, and from 1761 to 1768 he served as envoy-extraordinary and minister-plenipotentiary to Turin. On 19 Feb. 1770 he was appointed ambassador-extraordinary and minister-plenipotentiary to Madrid, but was succeeded in that post by Lord Grantham in January 1771. He was created Baron Rivers of Stratfieldsaye in the county of Southampton on 20 May 1776, and took his seat in the House of Lords on the following day (Journals of the House of Lords, xxxiv. 741). In May 1780 he was appointed lord lieutenant of Hampshire, but only held that post until 1782, when he became one of the lords of the bedchamber. In October 1793 he was appointed lord lieutenant of Dorset, and on 16 March 1802 he was created Baron Rivers of Sudeley Castle in the county of Gloucester, with remainder, in default of male issue, to his brother Sir William Augustus Pitt, K.B. (see below), with a subsequent remainder to the male issue of Lord Rivers's second daughter, Louisa. He died on 7 May 1802, and was buried in the family vault at Stratfieldsaye; there is a mural tablet by Flaxman to his memory in the church.

He married, on 4 Jan. 1746, Penelope, daughter of Sir Henry Atkins, bart., of Clapham, Surrey, by whom he had an only son—George, born at Angers in France on 8 Sept. 1751, whose estate of Stratfieldsaye was purchased in 1814 for the Duke of Wellington, under the provisions of 54 George III, c. 161, and who died, unmarried, on 20 July 1828, when the barony of Rivers of Stratfieldsaye became extinct—and three daughters, viz.: (1) Penelope, who married, first, in 1766, Lieutenant-colonel Edward Ligonier (afterwards Earl Ligonier) [see under ], from whom she was divorced by a decree of the London consistory court on 10 Dec. 1771, the marriage being dissolved by a private act of parliament in the following year (12 Geo. III, c. 43), and, secondly, on 4 May 1784, a trooper in the blues; (2) Louisa, who married, on 22 March 1773, Peter Beckford of Steepleton Iwerne, Dorset, and died at Florence on 30 April 1791, leaving an only son, Horace William, who became third Baron Rivers of Sudeley Castle upon the death of his uncle George in 1828; and (3) Marcia Lucy, who married, on 4 Aug. 1789, James Fox-Lane of Bramham Park, Yorkshire, and died on 5 Aug. 1822. Lady Rivers died at Milan on 8 Feb. 1795.

Rivers was a very handsome man, and when young was a great favourite with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (, Letters, 1857, i. 179, ii. 157). Walpole, who celebrated the charms of Lady Rivers in ‘The Beauties, an Epistle to Mr. Eckardt the painter’ (, Works, 1798, i. 23), never tires of praising ‘his lovely wife, all loveliness within and without’ (, Letters, iii. 460), while he describes Rivers as ‘her brutal, half-mad husband’ (ib. v. 422). A full-