alpole had sneered, seized a
power which the Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their
grasp. The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the
national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save from his
"popularity," but this popularity showed that the political torpor of
the nation was passing away, and that a new interest in public affairs
and a resolve to have weight in them was becoming felt in the nation at
large. It was by the sure instinct of a great people that this interest
and resolve gathered themselves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious,
his ambition had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he
took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand men
from France can shake her." His call was soon answered. He at once
breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he served, as he
communicated something of his own grandeur to the men who served him.
"No man," said a soldier of the time, "ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet
who did not feel himself braver when he came out than when he went in."
Ill-combined as were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his
failures, he roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate
defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labour," exclaimed
Frederick of Prussia as he recognised a greatness like his own, "but she
has at last brought forth a man."

It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we
look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out
in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society
critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of
simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and
of head, sceptical of virtue and enthusiasm, sceptical above all of
itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his
passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy,
his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his
haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more
puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he
appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of
politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the
grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. "I know that I
can save the count