athed in flannel and his
crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing
into the House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage." But
the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by
faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was
borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of the gout, or carried into
the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest against national
dishonour.

[Sidenote: His eloquence.]

Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power
of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the Long
Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by the legal and
theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of
the Revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see
ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression,
precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of
business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of
statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole,
no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were
always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect,
his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of
his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the
earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must sit still," he
whispered once to a friend, "for when once I am up everything that is in
my mind comes out." But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by
a large and poetic imagination, an imagination so strong that--as he
said himself--"most things returned to him with stronger force the
second time than the first," and by a glow of passion which not only
raised him high above the men of his own day but set him in the front
rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the
common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy
with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a
command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an
effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the
keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by
the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one
having authority. He was in fact the first Eng