6

Pitt was unable to muster a majority for the purpose of defending his early friend. Lord Melville was condemned by the Speaker's casting vote. It was a crushing blow to Pitt. Lord Fitzharris, who was sitting next him at the time the numbers were announced from the chair, relates how he failed, under the first shock of the disappointment, to repress emotions of which few living men had ever seen the signs. Pitt immediately put on the little cocked hat that he was in the habit of wearing when dressed for the evening, and jammed it deeply over his forehead; and I distinctly saw the tears trickling down his cheeks.' A few nights afterwards he acknowledged to the House that the punishment of Lord Melville had given him a deep and bitter pang.' Lord Macaulay had heard from several spectators an account of the scene when these words were uttered. As Pitt uttered the word "pang," his lip quivered, his voice shook, he paused, and his hearers thought that he was about to burst into tears. He suppressed his emotion, however, and proceeded with his usual majestic self-possession.'

Pitt, in spite of his cold manners, was a man of intense feelings; and the very restraint in which he usually held them gave to them, when they did escape from his control, a violence against which his physical strength was unequal to bear up. From this time forward we hear a good deal more of his failing health and of the necessity for repose. But yet there were no symptoms to alarm his friends or to inspire his enemies with hope. In August Fox speaks of an appearance of extreme uneasiness, and almost misery.' On Michaelmas Day, Lord Sidmouth writes that Pitt looked tolerably well, but had been otherwise.' The King himself never suspected the imminence of the calamity that was impending over him. Pitt visited him at Weymouth, and strongly urged a reconstruction of the Ministry on a comprehensive principle. He had felt the numerical weakness of the Government in the Melville debates, and dreaded the results to the national security of any passing clamour or panic. Mr. George Rose spoke still more plainly. He told the King, if Mr. Pitt should be confined by the gout for only two or three weeks 'there would be an end of us.' But the King refused to believe in the gout, and Mr. Rose found him more impracticable than ever. The gout, however, was all this time making formidable, though unobserved, progress. The physicians were constantly urging him again to try the waters of Bath; but the press of business and the urgency of the crisis were as severe as they had been the year before. The army of Boulogne was still threatening the shores of England, and Pitt could not venture to absent himself for any length of time from London. No one,

however, appears to have been even anxious except his physicians. In the end of October he paid a visit to his colleague Lord Camden, at the Wilderness, in Kent, and there he chanced to meet Sir Arthur Wellesley. In after years the Duke of Wellington gave to Lord Stanhope in conversation his reminiscences of that too brief acquaintance, and Lord Stanhope has printed the notes of the conversation, which he took down at the time. Considering who were the two individuals concerned, we shall make no apology for extracting these notes at length. It is to be observed that the Duke makes a mistake in speaking of the visit as having taken place in November. Pitt was in London the whole of November :

The Duke and I spoke of Mr. Pitt, lamenting his early death. "I did not think," said the Duke, "that he would have died so soon. He died in January, 1806; and I met him at Lord Camden's, in Kent, and I think that he did not seem ill, in the November previous. He was extremely lively, and in good spirits. It is true that he was by way of being an invalid at that time. A great deal was always said about his taking his rides-for he used then to ride eighteen or twenty miles every day-and great pains were taken to send forward his luncheon, bottled porter, I think, and getting him a beef-steak or mutton chop ready at some place fixed beforehand. That place was always mentioned to the party, so that those kept at home in the morning might join the ride there if they pleased. On coming home from these rides, they used to put on dry clothes, and to hold a Cabinet, for all the party were members of the Cabinet, except me and, I think, the Duke of Montrose. At dinner Mr. Pitt drank little wine; but it was at that time the fashion to sup, and he then took a great deal of port-wine and water.

"In the same month I also met Mr. Pitt at the Lord Mayor's dinner; he did not seem ill. On that occasion I remember he returned thanks in one of the best and neatest speeches I ever heard in my life. It was in very few words. The Lord Mayor had proposed his health as one who had been the Saviour of England, and would be the Saviour of the rest of Europe. Mr. Pitt then got up, disclaimed the compliment as applied to himself, and added, England has saved herself by her exertions, and the rest of Europe will be saved by her example!' That was all; he was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect.

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"I remember another curious thing at that dinner. Erskine was there. Now Mr. Pitt had always over Erskine a great ascendencythe ascendency of terror. Sometimes, in the House of Commons, he could keep Erskine in check by merely putting out his hand or making a note. At this dinner, Erskine's health having been drank, and Erskine rising to return thanks, Pitt held up his finger, and said to him across the table, Erskine! remember that they are drinking your health as a distinguished Colonel of Volunteers.' Erskine, who had intended, as we heard, to go off upon Rights of Juries, the State

Trials,

Trials, and other political points, was quite put out; he was awed like a school-boy at school, and in his speech kept strictly within the limits enjoined him."

It was not till the foreign news became disastrous that his disease began to take a dangerous turn. The first blow was Mack's capitulation at Ulm. It was an act of cowardice wholly beyond an Englishman's calculations to foresee, and it offered a gloomy omen of the approaching fate of the Coalition upon which Pitt had staked so much. It affected him as no other event had ever affected him before, except the public disgrace of his early friend. It at first reached England only in the form of a vague rumour. Pitt absolutely refused to credit it. 'Don't believe a word of it; it's all a fiction,' he said almost peevishly, loud enough to be heard by the whole company, at a dinner at which the report was being discussed. But the next day-the 3rd of November-which happened to be a Sunday, a Dutch newspaper came to the Foreign Office, containing an account of the capitulation. Pitt could not read Dutch, and none of the clerks who could were in the way. So they went off to Lord Malmesbury for an interpretation, and he read out to them the fatal news. 'I observed,' he writes in his journal, but too clearly the effect it had on Pitt, though he did his utmost to conceal it. This was the last time I saw him. The visit left an indelible impression on my mind, as his manner and look were not his own, and gave me, in spite of myself, a foreboding of the loss with which we were threatened.' This must have been the look which Wilberforce used, in after days, pathetically to call the 'Austerlitz look;' for, as Lord Stanhope drily observes, 'The expression was striking and well chosen, but not strictly accurate, since Wilberforce never once saw Pitt after the battle of Austerlitz was fought.'

No dangerous effect, however, followed from this shock: as we have seen, Sir Arthur Wellesley saw him a week later at the Lord Mayor's dinner, and did not think him looking ill. Early in December, he found time at last to go down to Bath. The object of his physicians was to bring out the gout, which had been flying about him for some time, in the form of a regular fit. The Bath waters did their duty; and a good fit of gout soon made its appearance in his foot. During this time his spirits were good, and his cure was visibly progressing. He seems to have amused himself in his unwonted leisure with the somewhat uncongenial task of criticising the poetical effusions of his friends. Canning sent him a poem inspired by Trafalgar, together with a string of critical questions for him to answer. Lord Mulgrave, his colleague in the Cabinet, was also staying at Bath; and he

was

was induced by Dr. Calcott to employ his leisure time in supplying the words for a patriotic song-the musician being wisely of opinion that a Cabinet Minister's name on the back of a song would make it sell, whatever the merit of the poetry might be. Upon this Ministerial performance, Pitt was called on to pass a critical judgment. He seems to have taken a purely political view of the subject; and accordingly, bearing in mind the precedent of despatches and votes of thanks, he pronounced that the second in command ought to be noticed as well as the chief. He is even said to have supplied the defect by the addition of a stanza of his own-which, if his reputation depended on his poetry, would certainly have justified the hypothesis that his intellect was giving way. The verses are execrably tame, and not altogether intelligible. The fact, however, only rests upon the bare assertion of one of Lord Mulgrave's sons, unsupported by any proof; and Lord Stanhope thinks it better, for the credit of his hero, to discredit the genuineness of this poetic effort altogether.

But this promise of recovery was speedily cut short. Just at the crisis of the malady, a report reached England that the Coalition had gained an overwhelming victory at some place in Moravia, For a time the rumour was generally believed. Even the Ministers did not suspect it, and reported it to the King as an undoubted fact. Close after it followed the melancholy truththat the overwhelming victory was upon Napoleon's side, and that the costly Coalition, from which so much had been expected, was at an end. The shock was too much for Mr. Pitt's critical condition. As soon as he had read the despatches, he asked for a map, and desired to be left alone. He was left for a long time to his reflections upon the disheartening news: and he rose up from them a doomed man. The malady under which he was suffering, and which is particularly susceptible to violent emotion, received an impetus which could never afterwards be checked. It left his extremities, and turned inwards upon some vital organ; and from that moment a growing debility set in, from which he never rallied. As Canning said some days later, 'It was the relapse of a single day that reduced Mr. Pitt to the wreck he now is.'

After this the end came rapidly. At first he did not see it himself, and talked as if he only doubted whether he should recover in time for the beginning of the Session. But he began to be aware of what was impending sooner than his friends, and apparently sooner than his physicians. The day before he left Bath-a fortnight before his death-he said to Lord Melville, 'I wish the King may not repent, and sooner than he thinks, the rejection of the advice I pressed on him at Weymouth.' But

by

:

by the time he had arrived at Putney it was too evident to all. The symptom which was most alarming to unprofessional observers was the total loss of those splendid tones which in public and in private had always fascinated his hearers. His voice had become weak and tremulous. His emaciation was so great that his countenance was utterly changed. For a day or two he still was supposed to be well enough to write letters, and to see some of his political friends. His last conversation upon public affairs was with Lord Wellesley, who had just returned from India and one of the last subjects of that conversation was his commendation of Sir Arthur Wellesley. 'I never met,' he said, any military officer with whom it was so satisfactory to converse. He states every difficulty before he undertakes any service, but none after he has undertaken it.' There was something almost prophetic in this his dying description of the combined caution and courage which ultimately carried on to victory the task that he was leaving incomplete. But this interview and these topics were more than his strength could bear. He fainted away before Lord Wellesley had left the room. Lord Wellesley saw that the hand of death was upon him, and warned Lord Grenville of what was coming. He received the fatal intelligence in an agony of tears, and immediately determined that all hostility in Parliament should be suspended.' Such is Lord Wellesley's account of the effect of the intelligence upon Pitt's former colleague. His ancient rival Fox received it, if his own account may be trusted, with more philosophy. 'He was not much for delicacies at any time,' he told the Speaker; 'but there were some he found who felt a difficulty while the reports were so very strong of Mr. Pitt's extreme state.'* It was but seven months more, and he was lying in the same state himself.

The closing scene is best described in the words of Lord Stanhope's uncle, who stood by the side of the death-bed :

“After this was concluded, Mr. Pitt begged to be left alone, and he remained composed and apparently asleep for two or three hours. Doctors Baillie and Reynolds arrived about three, and gave as their opinion that Mr. Pitt could not live above twenty-four hours. Our own feelings in losing our only protector, who had reared us with more than parental care, I need not attempt to describe.

"From Wednesday morning I did not leave his room except for a few minutes till the time of his death, though I did not allow him to see me, as I felt myself unequal to the dreadful scene of parting with him, and feared (although he was given over) that the exertion on his part might hasten the dreadful event which now appeared inevitable.

* Colch. Diaries, vol. ii. p. 28.

Hester