en wretchedly
mismanaged, a remark which Malmesbury treated with quiet contempt.
Grenville, who was about to move a vote of censure on the Ministry,
burst into an agony of tears on hearing that Pitt was at death's door.
His distress of mind probably arose from a belated perception of the
factiousness of his own conduct and from grief at the unrelieved gloom
of the end of a career whose meridian splendour had shed lustre upon
him.

The House of Commons did not whole-heartedly accord to the deceased
statesman a burial in Westminster Abbey in the tomb of Chatham. A motion
to that effect, moved by Lascelles and seconded by the Marquis of
Titchfield, was strongly opposed by Fox, George Ponsonby, Windham, and
three other speakers. It passed by 258 votes to 59. Still more painful
was the discussion in the Common Council of the City of London, where a
proposal to erect a monument to Pitt was carried only by 77 votes to 71.
It is safe to say that, if the fortune of war had gone against France at
Ulm and Austerlitz, Pitt would have been ecstatically hailed as the
saviour of Europe, as indeed he was at the Guildhall after Trafalgar.
How long was it before it dawned on Auckland, Windham, and the
seventy-one councillors of the City of London, that the censures cast on
the memory of Pitt ought to have been levelled at the defender of Ulm,
the Czar Alexander and his equally presumptuous advisers at Austerlitz,
and most of all at the cringing politicians of Berlin?

It is now abundantly clear that Pitt fell a victim to his confidence in
the rulers of three great monarchies, whose means were vast, whose
promises were lofty, and whose surrender after the first reverses
baffled all forecasts. The descendants of Maria Theresa and Catharine
tamely retired from the fray after a single adverse blow; and the
successor of the great Frederick sheathed his sword after the
unpardonable insult at Anspach.

In truth, the career of Pitt came to a climax at a time of unexampled
decadence of the ancient dynasties. The destinies of the allied Houses
of Bourbon rested upon Louis XVI of France and Charles IV of Spain. To
the ineptitude of the former the French Revolution was in large measure
due. To the weakness and falsity of the latter we may ascribe the
desertion of the royalist cause by Spain in 1795-6, with the train of
disastrous results in the Mediterranean and the West Indies. In Central
Europe Francis of Austria was scarcely more than a tool i