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. This mythical Pitt, who resembles the genuine Pitt as little as
Charlemagne of Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne of Eginhard, has had
his day. History will vindicate the real man from calumny disguised
under the semblance of adulation, and will exhibit him as what he was,
a minister of great talents, honest intentions, and liberal opinions,
pre-eminently qualified, intellectually and morally, for the part of
a parliamentary leader, and capable of administering with prudence and
moderation the government of a prosperous and tranquil country, but
unequal to surprising and terrible emergencies, and liable, in such
emergencies, to err grievously, both on the side of weakness and on the
side of violence.

*****

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.

EPITAPH ON HENRY MARTYN. (1812.)

Here Martyn lies. In Manhood's early bloom