could open a budget without notes, and the only man
who, as Windham said, could speak that most elaborately evasive and
unmeaning of human compositions, a King's speech, without premeditation.

The effect of oratory will always to a great extent depend on the
character of the orator. There perhaps never were two speakers whose
eloquence had more of what may be called the race, more of the flavour
imparted by moral qualities, than Fox and Pitt. The speeches of Fox owe
a great part of their charm to that warmth and softness of heart, that
sympathy with human suffering, that admiration for everything great and
beautiful, and that hatred of cruelty and injustice, which interest and
delight us even in the most defective reports. No person, on the other
hand, could hear Pitt without perceiving him to be a man of high,
intrepid, and commanding spirit, proudly conscious of his own rectitude
and of his own intellectual superiority, incapable of the low vices of
fear and envy, but too prone to feel and to show disdain. Pride, indeed,
pervaded the whole man, was written in the harsh, rigid lines of his
face, was marked by the way in which he walked, in which he sate,
in which he stood, and, above all, in which he bowed. Such pride, of
course, inflicted many wounds. It may confidently be affirmed that there
cannot be found, in all the ten thousand invectives written against Fox,
a word indicating that his demeanour had ever made a single personal
enemy. On the other hand, several men of note who had been partial to
Pitt, and who to the last continued to approve his public conduct and
to support his administration, Cumberland, for example, Boswell, and
Matthias, were so much irritated by the contempt with which he treated
them, that they complained in print of their wrongs. But his pride,
though it made him bitterly disliked by individuals, inspired the great
body of his followers in Parliament and throughout the country with
respect and confidence. They took him at his own valuation. They saw
that his self-esteem was not that of an upstart, who was drunk with
good luck and with applause, and who, if fortune turned, would sink from
arrogance into abject humility. It was that of the magnanimous man
so finely described by Aristotle in the Ethics, of the man who thinks
himself worthy of great things, being in truth worthy. It sprang from
a consciousness of great powers and great virtues, and was never so
conspicuously displayed as in th