s an orator; and his passionate eloquence has rarely been equaled in
fervor and originality.

ON THE CHARACTER OF CHATHAM

The Secretary stood alone; modern degeneracy had not reached him.
Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the
hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his
sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired
to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No State
chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, sank him to the vulgar
level of the great; but overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his
object was England, his ambition was fame. Without dividing, he
destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous.

France sank beneath him. With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon,
and wielded with the other the democracy of England. The sight of his
mind was infinite; and his schemes were to affect, not England and the
present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by
which these schemes were accomplished; always seasonable, always
adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by order and
enlightened by prophecy.

The ordinary feelings which render life amiable and indolent were
unknown to him. No domestic difficulty, no domestic weakness reached
him; but aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its
intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to counsel and to
decide. A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, and so
authoritative astonished a corrupt age; and the treasury trembled at the
name of Pitt, through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined
indeed that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of
the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country and the
calamities of the enemy refuted her.

Nor were his political abilities his only talents: his eloquence was an
era in the Senate; peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing
gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of
Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully, it resembled
sometimes the thunder and sometimes the music of the spheres. He did
not, like Murray, conduct the understanding through the painful subtlety
of argumentation, nor was he, like Townshend, forever on the rack of
exertion; but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point
by flashings of the mind, which like those o