d suffered seriously from
financial irregularities.[606] Pitt's affection for Dundas and Grenville
had also cooled; but on the whole his friendships stood the test of time
better, perhaps, than those of any statesman of the eighteenth century.
Certainly in this respect he compares favourably with his awe-inspiring
father. Not that Pitt possessed the charm of affability. On most persons
his austere self-concentration produced a repellent effect; and it must
be confessed that the Grenville strain in his nature dowered him with a
fund of more than ordinary English coldness. Such was the opinion not
only of the French _emigres_, whom he designedly kept at arm's length,
but even of his followers, to whom his aloofness seemed a violation of
the rules of the parliamentary game. But it was not in his nature to
expand except in the heat of debate or in congenial society. In general
his stiffness was insular, his pre-occupation profound. Lady Hester
Stanhope, who saw much of him in the closing years, pictures his thin,
tall, rather ungainly figure, stalking through Hyde Park, oblivious of
all surroundings, with head uptilted, "as if his ideas were _en air_, so
that you would have taken him for a poet."[607]

The comparison is as flighty as Lady Hester's remarks usually were,
though the passage may depict with truth the air that Pitt assumed when
walking with her. No one else accused him of having affinities to poets.
In truth, so angular was his nature, so restricted his sympathies, that
he never came in touch with literary men, artists, or original thinkers.
His life was the poorer for it. A statesman should know more than a part
of human life; and Pitt never realized the full extent of his powers
because he spent his time almost entirely amongst politicians of the
same school. His mind, though by no means closed against new ideas,
lacked the eager inquisitiveness of that of Napoleon, who, before the
process of imperial fossilization set in, welcomed discussions with men
of all shades of opinion, and encouraged in them that frankness of
utterance which at once widens and clarifies the views of the
disputants. It is true that Pitt's private conversations are almost
unknown. They appear to have ranged within political grooves, with
frequent excursions into the loved domains of classical and English
literature; but he seems never to have explored the new realms of
speculation and poetry then opened up by Bentham and the Lake Poets.