ded the one fair woman
whose heart Pitt had won and lost. But the anguish of his soul was
wrung into expression by the fall of Dundas. He had loved Dundas, who
was now Lord Melville, long and well. Lord Melville's conduct as
Treasurer to the Navy provoked from the Opposition a series of
condemnatory resolutions. In spite of all that Pitt could do, the
resolutions were supported by many of his followers, by many of his
friends, by one friend conspicuous among all, by Wilberforce. The
division was neck and neck, 216 to 216; the Speaker, "white as a
sheet," gave the casting vote against Dundas which stabbed Pitt to the
core. Whether it were or no, as Wilberforce maintained, a "false
principle of honor" which led the great minister to support Melville,
Pitt felt the blow as he had felt nothing before and was to feel but
one thing again. Pitt pulled his little cocked hat over his forehead
to hide his tears. One brutal adversary, Sir Thomas Mostyn, raised the
wild yell of triumph that denotes to huntsmen the death of the fox.
Another savage, Colonel Wardle, urged his friends to come and see "how
Billy looked after it." But the young Tory gentlemen rallied around
their hero. They made a circle of locked arms, and with looks and
words that meant swords they kept the aggressors off. In their midst
Pitt moved unconsciously out of the House--a broken-hearted man.

[Sidenote: 1806--Death of Pitt]

The heart of Pitt was allowed to feel one pulse of pride {339} and
pleasure before it ceased to beat. Pitt shared in the triumph of
Trafalgar; he made his best and noblest appearance in public; made his
last most splendid speech: "Europe is not to be saved by any single
man," he said to those who saluted him at the Guildhall as the savior
of Europe. "England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I
trust, save Europe by her example." A few weeks later, in the December
of 1805, Pitt was at Bath, when a courier brought him the news of the
battle of Austerlitz. The news practically killed him. He had long
been ailing grievously. Sir Walter Farquhar's account of Pitt's
health, lately made public by Lord Rosebery, proves that the body which
cased that great spirit was indeed a ruined body. Grief and anxiety
had stamped lines of care and sorrow upon his face, which gave it what
Wilberforce afterwards called "the Austerlitz look." The phrase is
famous and admirable, if not exactly accurate as used by Wilberforce,
for