n public with a
woman of the town. His one love story, strange and fruitless, neither
got nor gave happiness and remains an unsolved mystery.

There were only two tastes held in common by the two men, and those
were tastes shared by most of the gentlemen of their generation and
century, the taste for politics and the taste for wine. Men of the
class of Holland's son, of Chatham's son, if they were not soldiers and
sailors, and very often when they were soldiers and sailors, went into
political life as naturally as they went into a university or into the
hunting field. In the case of the younger Fox and of the younger Pitt
the political direction was conspicuously inevitable from the
beginning. The paths of both lay plain from the threshold of the
nursery to the threshold of St. Stephen's. The lad who was the chosen
companion of his father at an age when his contemporaries had only
abandoned a horn-book to grapple with Corderius, the boy who learned
the principles of elocution and the essence of debate from the lips of
the Great Commoner, were children very specially fostered in the arts
of {214} statesmanship and curiously favored in the knowledge that
enables men to guide and govern men. From the other taste there was no
escape, or little escape, possible for the men of that day. It would
have been strange indeed if Fox had been absolved from the love of
wine, which was held by every one he knew, from his father's old friend
and late enemy Rigby to the elderly place-holder, gambler, and
letter-writer Selwyn, who loved, slandered, and failed to ruin Fox's
brilliant youth. It would have been impossible for Pitt, floated
through a precarious childhood on floods of Oporto, to liberate his
blood and judgment from the generous liquor that promised him a
strength it sapped. It was no more disgrace to the austere Pitt than
to the profligate Fox to come to the House of Commons visibly under the
influence of much more wine than could possibly have been good for
Hercules. Sobriety was not unknown among statesmen even in those days
of many bottles, but intoxication was no shame, and Burke was no more
commended for his temperance than Fox, or Pitt, or Sheridan were blamed
for their intemperance.

[Sidenote: 1759-80--The youth of the younger Pitt]

William Pitt was born in 1759, when George the Second still seemed
stable on his throne, and when the world knew nothing of that grandson
and heir to whose service the child