Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/145

Rh PITT 135 lured f;m- ne If, B- ri;e P tg L., pug of u eeiit tiies t un- to be a tolerably healthy one. It was probably on account of the delicacy of his frame that he was not educated like other boys of the same rank. Almost all the eminent English statesmen and orators to whom he was afterwards opposed or allied North, Fox, Shelburne, Windham, Grey, Wellesley, Grenville, Sheridan, Canning went through the training of great public schools. Lord Chatham had him self been a distinguished Etonian ; and it is seldom that a distinguished Etonian forgets his obligations to Eton. But William s infirmities required a vigilance and tenderness such as could be found only at home. He was therefore bred under the paternal roof. His studies were superin tended by a clergyman named Wilson ; and those studies, though often interrupted by illness, were prosecuted with extraordinary success. Before the lad had completed his fifteenth year his knowledge both of the ancient languages and of mathematics was such as very few men of eighteen then carried up to college. He v/as therefore sent, towards the close of the year 1773, to Pembroke Hall, in the uni versity of Cambridge. So young a student required much more than the ordinary care which a college tutor bestows on undergraduates. The governor to whom the direction of William s academical life was confided was a bachelor of arts named Pretyman, 1 who had been senior wrangler in the preceding year, and who, though not a man of prepos sessing appearance or brilliant parts, was eminently acute and laborious, a sound scholar, and an excellent geometri cian. At Cambridge Pretyman was, during more than two years, the inseparable companion, and indeed almost the only companion, of his pupil. A close and lasting friendship sprang up between the pair. The disciple was able, before he completed his twenty-eighth year, to make his preceptor bishop of Lincoln and dean of St Paul s ; and the preceptor showed his gratitude by writing a life of the disciple, which enjoys the distinction of being the worst biographical work of its size in the world. Pitt, till he graduated, had scarcely one acquaintance, attended chapel regularly morning and evening, dined every day in hall, and never went to a single evening party. At seventeen he was admitted, after the bad fashion of those times, by right of birth, without any examination, to the degree of master of arts. But he continued during some years to reside at college, and to apply himself vigorously, under Pretyman s direction, to the studies of the place, while mixing freely in the best academic society. The stock of learning which Pitt laid in during this part of his life was certainly very extraordinary. In fact, it was all that he ever possessed ; for he very early became too busy to have any spare time for books. The work in which he took the greatest delight was Newton s Principia, His liking for mathematics, indeed, amounted to a passion, which, in the opinion of his instructors, themselves distin guished mathematicians, required to be checked rather than encouraged. The acuteness and readiness with which he solved problems was pronounced by one of the ablest of the moderators, who in those days presided over the dis putations in the schools and conducted the examinations of the senate-house, to be unrivalled in the university. Nor was the youth s proficiency in classical learning less remark able. In one respect, indeed, he appeared to &quot;disadvantage when compared with even second-rate and third-rate men from public schools. He had never, while under Wilson s care, been in the habit of composing in the ancient lan guages ; and he therefore never acquired that knack of [ J George Pretyman (1750-1827) was senior wrangler in 1772. In 1803, on falling heir to a large estate, he assumed the name of Tomline. From Lincoln, to which see he had been elevated in 1787, he was translated to Winchester in 1820. Tomline, to whom Pitt &quot;when dying had bequeathed his papers, published his Memoirs of the Life of William PUt (down to the close of 1792) in 1821 (3 vols. 8vo).] versification which is sometimes possessed by clever boys whose knowledge of the language and literature of Greece and Kome is very superficial. It would have been utterly out of his power to produce such charming elegiac lines as those in which Wellesley bade farewell to Eton, or such Virgilian hexameters as those in which Canning described the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it may be doubted whether any scholar has ever, at twenty, had a more solid and pro found knowledge of the two great tongues of the old civilized world. The facility with which he penetrated the meaning of the most intricate sentences in the Attic writers astonished veteran critics. He had set his heart on being intimately acquainted with all the extant poetry of Greece, and was not satisfied till he had mastered Lycophron s Cassandra, the most obscure work in the whole range of ancient literature. This strange rhapsody, the difficulties of which have perplexed and repelled many excellent scholars, &quot;he read,&quot; says his preceptor, &quot; with an ease at first sight which, if I had not witnessed it, I should have thought beyond the compass of human intellect.&quot; To modern literature Pitt paid comparatively little atten tion. He knew no living language except French ; and French he knew very imperfectly. With a few of the best English writers he was intimate, particularly with Shakspeare and Milton. The debate in Pandemonium was, as it well deserved to be, one of his favourite passages ; and his early friends used to talk, long after his death, of the just emphasis and the melodious cadence with which they had heard him recite the incomparable speech of Belial. He had indeed been carefully trained from infancy in the art of managing his voice, a voice naturally clear and deep- toned. His father, whose oratory owed no small part of its effect to that art, had been a most skilful and judicious instructor. At a later period the wits of Brookes s, irri tated by observing, night after night, how powerfully Pitt s sonorous elocution fascinated the rows of country gentle men, reproached him with having been &quot; taught by his dad on a stool.&quot; His education, indeed, was well adapted to form a great parliamentary speaker. One argument often urged against those classical studies which occupy so large a part of the early life of every gentleman bred in the south of our island is, that they prevent him from acquiring a command of his mother tongue, and that it is not unusual to meet with a youth of excellent parts, who writes Ciceronian Latin prose and Horatian Latin alcaics, but who would find it impos sible to express his thoughts in pure, perspicuous, and forcible English. There may perhaps be some truth in this observation. But the classical studies of Pitt were carried on in a peculiar manner, and had the effect of enriching his English vocabulary, and of making him wonderfully expert in the art of constructing correct Eng lish sentences. His practice was to look over a page or two of a Greek or Latin author, to make himself master of the meaning, and then to read the passage straight forward into his own language. This practice, begun under his first teacher Wilson, was continued under Pretyman. It is not strange that a young man of great abilities, who had been exercised daily in this way during ten years, should have acquired an almost unrivalled power of putting his thoughts, without premeditation, into words well selected and well arranged. Of all the remains of antiquity, the orations were those on which he bestowed the most minute examination. His favourite employment was to compare harangues on opposite sides of the same question, to analyse them, and to observe which of the arguments of the first speaker were refuted by the second, which were evaded, and which were left untouched. Nor was it only in books that he at this i time studied the art of parliamentary fencing. When he