ible disease, its fortitude in the face of
catastrophes so unexpected and so cruel; in its pensive isolation, in
the richness of those early successes that seemed as if in anticipation
to offer compensation for the early death, his life seems to have been
adorned with certain ornaments and ordered by certain laws that make it
strangely comely, curiously symmetrical. In that youth of his which
was never quite young, and which was never allowed to grow old, in his
austere attitude to so much that youth holds most dear, in the high
passion of his patriotism with its eager desire, so often and so
sternly thwarted, to add to England's glory, he stands apart from {216}
many greater and many wiser men, in a melancholy, lonely dignity. It
has been given to few men to inspire more passionate attachment in the
minds of his contemporaries; it has been given to few statesmen to be
regarded abroad, by eyes for the most part envious or hostile, as
pre-eminently representative of the qualities that made his country at
once disliked and feared. His political instincts were for the most
part admirable, and if it had been his fortune to serve a sovereign
more reasonable, more temperate, and more intelligent than George the
Third his name might have been written among the great reformers of the
world. At home an unhappy deference to the dictates of a rash and
incapable king, abroad an enforced opposition to one of the greatest
forces and one of the greatest conquerors that European civilization
has seen, prevented Pitt from gaining that position to which his
genius, under conditions less persistently unhappy, would have entitled
him. To have gained what he did gain under such conditions was in
itself a triumph.

The new-comer who entered Parliament at the same period as William Pitt
was as curiously unlike him as even Fox himself. If few knew anything
of Pitt every one knew something of Sheridan, who had already made fame
in one career and was now about to make fame in another. It may afford
consolation to the unappreciated to reflect that the most famous
English dramatist since Shakespeare's day, the brightest wit of an age
which piqued itself into being considered witty, the most brilliant
orator of an age which regarded oratory as one of the greatest of the
arts, and whose roll is studded with the names of illustrious orators,
the most unrivalled humorist of a century which in all parts of the
world distinguished itself by its l