ful, arrived in London after an absence | danger, and gave such religious advice of eight years. The friends saw each and consolation as a confused and obother once more. There was an affec- scured mind could receive. Stories tionate meeting, and a last parting. were told of devout sentiments fervently That it was a last parting Pitt did not uttered by the dying man. But these seem to be aware. He fancied him- stories found no credit with anybody self to be recovering, talked on various who knew him. Wilberforce prosubjects cheerfully, and with an un-nounced it impossible that they could clouded mind, and pronounced a warm and discerning eulogium on the Marquess's brother Arthur. "I never," he said, "met with any military man with whom it was so satisfactory to converse." The excitement and exertion of this interview were too much for the sick man. He fainted away; and Lord Wellesley left the house, convinced that the close was fast approaching. And now members of Parliament were fast coming up to London. The chiefs of the opposition met for the purpose of considering the course to be taken on the first day of the session. It was easy to guess what would be the language of the King's speech, and of the address which would be moved in answer to that speech. An amendment condemning the policy of the government had been prepared, and was to have been proposed in the House of Commons by Lord Henry Petty, a young nobleman who had already won for himself that place in the esteem of his country which, after the lapse of more than half a century, he still retains. He was unwilling, however, to come forward as the accuser of one who was incapable of defending himself. Lord Grenville, who had been informed of Pitt's state by Lord Wellesley, and had been deeply affected by it, earnestly recommended forbearance; and Fox, with characteristic generosity and good nature, gave his voice against attacking his now helpless rival. "Sunt lacrymæ rerum," he said, "et mentem mortalia tangunt." On the first day, therefore, there was no debate. It was rumoured that evening that Pitt was better. But on the following morning his physicians pronounced that there were no hopes. The commanding faculties of which he had been too proud were beginning to fail. His old tutor and friend, the Bishop of Lincoln, informed him of his be true. "Pitt," he added, "was a man who always said less than he thought on such topics." It was asserted in many after-dinner speeches, Grub Street elegies, and academic prize poems and prize declamations, that the great minister died exclaiming, "Oh my country!" This is a fable; but it is true that the last words which he uttered, while he knew what he said, were broken exclamations about the alarming state of public affairs. He ceased to breathe on the morning of the 23rd of January, 1806, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day on which he first took his seat in Parliament. He was in his forty-seventh year, and had been, during near nineteen years, First Lord of the Treasury, and undisputed chier of the administration. Since parliamentary government was established in England, no English statesman has held supreme power so long. Walpole, it is true, was First Lord of the Treasury during more than twenty years: but it was not till Walpole had been some time First Lord of the Treasury that he could be properly called Prime Minister. It was moved in the House of Commons that Pitt should be honoured with a public funeral and a monument. The motion was opposed by Fox in a speech which deserves to be studied as a model of good taste and good feeling. The task was the most invidious that ever an orator undertook: but it was performed with a humanity and delicacy which were warmly acknowledged by the mourning friends of him who was gone. The motion was carried by 288 votes to 89. The 22nd of February was fixed for the funeral. The corpse, having lain in state during two days in the Painted Chamber, was borne with great pomp to the northern transept of the Abbey. A splendid train of princes, nobles, bishops, and privy councillors followed. | have been proud to act as his stewards. The grave of Pitt had been made near to the spot where his great father lay, near also to the spot where his great rival was soon to lie. The sadness of the assistants was beyond that of ordinary mourners. For he whom they were committing to the dust had died of sorrows and anxieties of which none of the survivors could be altogether without a share. Wilberforce, who carried the banner before the hearse, described the awful ceremony with deep feeling. As the coffin descended into the earth, he said, the eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to look down with consternation into the dark house which was receiving all that remained of so much power and glory. All parties in the House of Commons readily concurred in voting forty thousand pounds to satisfy the demands of Pitt's creditors. Some of his admirers seemed to consider the magnitude of his embarrassments as a circumstance highly honourable to him; but men of sense will probably be of a different opinion. It is far better, no doubt, that a great minister should carry his contempt of money to excess than that he should contaminate his hands with unlawful gain. But it is neither right nor becoming in a man to whom the public has given an income more than sufficient for his comfort and dignity to bequeath to that public a great debt, the effect of mere negligence and profusion. As First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt never had less than six thousand a year, besides an excellent house. In 1792 he was forced by his royal master's friendly importunity to accept for life the office of Warden of the Cinque Ports, with near four thousand a year more. He had neither wife nor child he had no needy relations: he had no expensive tastes: he had no long election bills. Had he given but a quarter of an hour a week to the regulation of his household, he would have kept his expenditure within bounds. Or, if he could not spare even a quarter of an hour a week for that purpose, he had numerous friends, ..excellent men of business, who would One of those friends, the chief of a great commercial house in the city, made an attempt to put the establish ment in Downing Street to rights; but in vain. He found that the waste of the servant's hall was almost fabulous. The quantity of butcher's meat charged in the bills was nine hundred weight a week. The consumption of poultry, of fish, and of tea was in proportion. The character of Pitt would have stood higher if, with the disinterestedness of Pericles and of De Witt, he had united their dignified frugality. The memory of Pitt has been assailed, times innumerable, often justly, often unjustly; but it has suffered much less from his assailants than from his eulogists. For, during many years, his name was the rallying cry of a class of men with whom, at one of those terrible conjunctures which confound all ordinary distinctions, he was accidentally and temporarily connected, but to whom, on almost all great questions of principle, he was diametrically opposed. The haters of parliamentary reform called themselves Pittites, not choosing to remember that Pitt made three motions for parliamentary reform, and that, though he thought that such a reform could not safely be made while the passions excited by the French revolution were raging, he never uttered a word indicating that he should not be prepared at a more convenient season to bring the question forward a fourth time. The toast of protestant ascendency was drunk on Pitt's birthday by a set of Pittites who could not but be aware that Pitt had resigned his office because he could not carry Catholic emancipation. The defenders of the Test Act called themselves Pittites, though they could not be ignorant that Pitt had laid before George the Third unanswerable reasons for abolishing the Test Act. The enemies of free trade called themselves Pittites, though Pitt was far more deeply imbued with the doctrines of Adam Smith than either Fox or Grey. The very negro-drivers invoked the name of Pitt, whose eloquence was never more conspicuously displayed than when he spoke of the wrongs of the negro. | pre-eminently qualified, intellectually This mythical Pitt, who resembles the and morally, for the part of a parliagenuine Pitt as little as a Charlemagne mentary leader, and capable of adminof Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne istering, with prudence and moderation, of Eginhard, has had his day. History the government of a prosperous and will vindicate the real man from ca- tranquil country, but unequal to surlumny disguised under the semblance prising and terrible emergencies, and of adulation, and will exhibit him as liable, in such emergencies, to err what he was, a minister of great talents, grievously, both on the side of weakness honest intentions, and liberal opinions, and on the side of violence. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC. EPITAPH ON HENRY MARTYN. When the ocean, whose waves like a LINES TO THE MEMORY OF OH BRITAIN! dear Isle, when the annals of story Shall tell of the deeds that thy children have done, When the strains of each poet shall sing of their glory, And the triumphs their skill and their valour have won; When the olive and palm in thy chaplet are blended, When thy arts, and thy fame, and thy commerce increase, When thy arms through the uttermost coasts are extended, And thy war is triumphant, and happy thy peace; rampart flow round thee, Conveying thy mandates to every shore, And the empire of nature no longer can bound thee, And the world be the scene of thy conquests no more: Remember the man who in sorrow and danger, When thy glory was set, and thy When thy hopes were o'erturned by the spirit was low, arms of the stranger, And thy banners displayed in the halls of the foe, Stood forth in the tempest of doubt and disaster, Unaided, and single, the danger to brave. Asserted thy claims, and the rights of his master, Preserved thee to conquer, and saved thee to save. A RADICAL WAR SONG. AWAKE, arise, the hour is come, Desert your hearths and furrows, And throng in arms to seal the doom Of England's rotten boroughs. We'll stretch that tort'ring Castlereagh | Then, then beneath the nine-tailed cat On his own Dublin rack, sir; We'll drown the King in Eau de vie, The Laureate in his sack, sir, Old Eldon and his sordid hag In molten gold we'll smother, And stifle in his own green bag The Doctor and his brother. In chains we'll hang in fair Guildhall In vain our tyrants then shall try Copley to hang offends no text; A rat is not a man, sir: With schedules and with tax bills next We'll bury pious Van, sir. The slaves who loved the Income Tax, We'll crush by scores, like mites, sir, And him, the wretch who freed the blacks, And more enslaved the whites, sir. The peer shall dangle from his gate, One coat, one scrip, one pair of shoes We'll strap the bar's deluding train In their own darling halter, And with his big church bible brain The parson at the altar. Hail glorious hour, when fair Reform Shall bless our longing nation, And Hunt receive commands to form A new administration. Carlisle shall sit enthroned, where sat Our Cranmer and our Secker; And Watson show his snow-white hat In England's rich Exchequer. The breast of Thistlewood shall wear Our Wellesley's star and sash, man; And many a mausoleum fair Shall rise to honest Cashman. Shall they who used it writhe, sir; And curates lean, and rectors fat, Shall dig the ground they tithe, sir. Down with your Bayleys, and your Bests, Your Giffords, and your Gurneys: We'll clear the island of the pests, Which mortals name attorneys. Down with your sheriffs, and your mayors, Your registrars, and procters, We'll live without the lawyer's cares, And die without the doctor's. To see her spouse so stupid; Then, when the high-born and the great On all the wealth of Church and State, And wooing fair Poissardes, sir. When the children of darkness and evil had power, When the horsemen of Valois triumphantly trod On the bosoms that bled for their rights and their God. Oh, weep for Moncontour! Oh! weep for the slain, Who for faith and for freedom lay slaughtered in vain ; Oh, weep for the living, who linger to bear The renegade's shame, or the exile's despair. One look, one last look, to our cots and our towers, To the rows of our vines, and the beds of our flowers, To the church where the bones of our fathers decayed, Where we fondly had deemed that our own would be laid. |