members who had never heard him. It was known that on this
occasion he would be in his place; and curiosity was wound up to the
highest point. Unfortunately the short-hand writers were, in consequence
of some mistake, shut out on that day from the gallery, so that the
newspapers contained only a very meagre report of the proceedings. But
several accounts of what passed are extant; and of those accounts the
most interesting is contained in an unpublished letter, written by a
very young member, John William Ward, afterwards Earl of Dudley. When
Pitt rose, he was received with loud cheering. At every pause in his
speech there was a burst of applause. The peroration is said to have
been one of the most animated and magnificent ever heard in Parliament.
"Pitt's speech," Fox wrote a few days later, "was admired very much, and
very justly. I think it was the best he ever made in that style." The
debate was adjourned; and on the second night Fox replied in an oration
which, as the most zealous Pittites were forced to acknowledge, left the
palm of eloquence doubtful. Addington made a pitiable appearance between
the two great rivals; and it was observed that Pitt, while exhorting the
Commons to stand resolutely by the executive government against France,
said not a word indicating esteem or friendship for the Prime Minister.

War was speedily declared. The first consul threatened to invade England
at the head of the conquerors of Belgium and Italy, and formed a great
camp near the Straits of Dover. On the other side of those Straits
the whole population of our island was ready to rise up as one man
in defence of the soil. At this conjuncture, as at some other great
conjunctures in our history, the conjuncture of 1660, for example, and
the conjuncture of 1688, there was a general disposition among honest
and patriotic men to forget old quarrels, and to regard as a friend
every person who was ready, in the existing emergency, to do his part
towards the saving of the state. A coalition of all the first men in the
country would, at that moment, have been as popular as the coalition
of 1783 had been unpopular. Alone in the kingdom the King looked with
perfect complacency on a cabinet in which no man superior to himself in
genius was to be found, and was so far from being willing to admit all
his ablest subjects to office that he was bent on excluding them all.

A few months passed before the different parties which agreed
in regarding