rows of country
gentlemen, reproached him with having been "taught by his dad on a
stool."

His education, indeed, was well adapted to form a great parliamentary
speaker. One argument often urged against those classical studies which
occupy so large apart 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 impossible 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 English 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 straightforward 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 time studied the art
of parliamentary fencing. When he was at home, he had frequent
opportunities of hearing important debates at Westminster; and he heard
them, not only with interest and enjoyment, but with a close scientific
attention resembling that with which a diligent pupil at Guy's Hospital
watches every turn of the hand of a great surgeon through a difficult
operation. On one of these occasions, Pitt, a youth whose abilities
were as yet known only to his own family and to a small knot of college
friends, was introduced on the steps of the throne in the House of Lords
to Fox, who was his senior by eleven years, and who was already the