e was at length placed in situations in which
neither his talents for administration nor his talents for debate
appeared to the best advantage. The energy and decision which had
eminently fitted him for the direction of war were not needed in time
of peace. The lofty and spirit-stirring eloquence which had made him
supreme in the House of Commons often fell dead on the House of Lords. A
cruel malady racked his joints, and left his joints only to fall on his
nerves and on his brain. During the closing years of his life, he was
odious to the court, and yet was not on cordial terms with the great
body of the opposition. Chatham was only the ruin of Pitt, but an
awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man of sense
and feeling without emotions resembling those which are excited by the
remains of the Parthenon and of the Coliseum. In one respect the old
statesman was eminently happy. Whatever might be the vicissitudes of his
public life, he never failed to find peace and love by his own hearth.
He loved all his children, and was loved by them; and, of all his
children, the one of whom he was fondest and proudest was his second
son.

The child's genius and ambition displayed themselves with a rare and
almost unnatural precocity. At seven, the interest which he took in
grave subjects, the ardour with which he pursued his studies, and the
sense and vivacity of his remarks on books and on events, amazed his
parents and instructors. One of his sayings of this date was reported to
his mother by his tutor. In August 1766, when the world was agitated
by the news that Mr Pitt had become Earl of Chatham, little William
exclaimed, "I am glad that I am not the eldest son. I want to speak
in the House of Commons like papa." A letter is extant in which Lady
Chatham, a woman of considerable abilities, remarked to her lord, that
their younger son at twelve had left far behind him his elder brother,
who was fifteen. "The fineness," she wrote, "of William's mind makes him
enjoy with the greatest pleasure what would be above the reach of any
other creature of his small age." At fourteen the lad was in intellect a
man. Hayley, who met him at Lyme in the summer of 1773, was astonished,
delighted, and somewhat overawed, by hearing wit and wisdom from so
young a mouth. The poet, indeed, was afterwards sorry that his shyness
had prevented him from submitting the plan of an extensive literary
work, which he was then meditating, to the