SAMUEL WHITBREAD, a conspicuous member of the house of commons, was the son and successor in business, of the eminent brewer of the same name. He was born in the year 1758, and at a proper age was sent to Eton, whence, after having matriculated at Christchurch, Oxford, he was removed to St. John's college, Cambridge, where he concluded his studies, and obtained his degree of bachelor of arts. He remained at college until 1785, when he was sent abroad for improvement; and soon after his return he married the daughter of Sir Charles Grey, who subsequently became Lady Elizabeth Whitbread, on account of the elevation of her father to an earldom.

In 1790, Whitbread offered himself as a candidate for the representation of Bedford. The election was contested, but he obtained a majority of twentyseven over his opponent, and for many succeeding parliaments, was returned for the same place without opposition. On entering the house of commons, he found two very powerful parties dividing the attention and the applause of the public: the one headed by Fox, the ranks of which had lately in some degree been thinned, by a schism, with regard to the French revolution; and the other, which was in power, governed by Pitt. Whitbread joined the opposition, to whom he soon became a valuable ally. He opposed the attack projected by Pitt on the Russians; and on the 29th of February, 1792, in a remarkably bold and manly speech, moved for a committee of the whole house to make inquiry into the subject. He opposed the French war in 1793; and when Buonaparte addressed a letter to the King of England, expressing an inclination to make peace, Whitbread strenuously contended that England ought not to reject the over

tures.

On the resignation of the Addington cabinet, Whitbread was selected, by his party, as the most proper person to bring forward the accusations against Lord Melville, for his alleged malversations, while treasurer of the navy. At

this period, Whitbread was highly esteemed by the leading members of opposition, but he had not previously attained sufficient consequence to be entrusted with the conduct of any very important measure. On this occasion he was, however, deemed more efficient than either Fox, Sheridan, or Grey: because the first might not have appeared a sufficiently impartial accuser; the second might have been too witty and brilliant for so grave an office; and the third too precipitate for successfully carrying the charge to maturity. Whitbread, on the contrary, was scarcely obnoxious to the suspicion of partiality; he was not likely to be led away from the point-blank accusation, by the temptations of wit, because it was a quality which he did not possess; and his habits were too sedate, and too business-like, to be entrapped by his feelings into any rash proceeding that might endanger the success of the accusation. For these reasons, therefore, the opposition members, who however blind they may have been to their individual faults, were feelingly alive to each other's deficiencies or frailties, resolved on putting Whitbread forward as the supporter of the charges; and accordingly, on the 6th of April, 1805, he moved a series of resolutions, all tending to criminate Lord Melville, while treasurer of the navy. To this motion Pitt moved an unsuccessful amendment, it being negatived by the casting vote of the speaker; and Lord Melville was afterwards impeached, but obtained an acquittal. Whitbread, however, incurred no obloquy during the trial, or in consequence of the accusation.

While his brother-in-law (Grey,) was in power, Whitbread generally supported the administration; but on occasion, he appears to have honestly and honourably differed from and opposed it, so as to have, at length, acquired the character of an intractable man. continued to take an active part in the parliamentary debates for a considerable period. He endeavoured to effect an alteration in the poor laws; and,

He

WILLIAM, the second son of William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, was born at Hayes, in the county of Kent, on the 28th of May, 1759. He received the

rudiments of education under the parental roof; and, notwithstanding his delicate health prevented him from devoting more than half the usual time to study, his progress was so rapid, that Lord Chatham, who assisted the Rev. Edward Wilson in instructing him, frequently expressed his firm conviction, that the boy would one day increase the glory of the name of Pitt; for that he would be the first man in the senate, whether in administration or not, and if a minister at all, that he would be premier. One evening, a member of parliament proposed taking the earl's sons to hear an important debate in the house of commons; but Lord Chatham would only suffer the elder, John, to go; "for," said he, "if William hears any arguments of which he does not approve, he will rise to controvert them; and young as he is, he has not, even in that able assembly, many equals in knowledge, reasoning, and eloquence!"

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At the early age of fourteen, he was sent to Pembroke hall, Cambridge. Even at this time his acquirements are stated to have been extraordinary: in Latin authors he rarely met with an obstacle, and he was capable of translating six or seven pages of Thucidydes, which he had never before seen, without making more than two or three mistakes. He had also read Euclid, and was familiar with the elementary parts of algebra, and plane trigonometry. Though a boy in years and appearance, his manners, his thoughts, and conversation were those of a man. He delivered his sentiments with ease and vivacity, but was, at the same time, neither flippant nor obtrusive.

It had been the intention of Lord Chatham, that his son should have become a candidate for academical honours; but young Pitt was incapacitated by illness from keeping his terms, and, in the spring of 1776, he consented to take the degree of M. A.

in compliment to his rank, without any public examination as to his acquirements. His collegiate cotemporaries bore an honourable testimony to his merits, on this occasion, by interrupting the public orator, while setting forth his claims to a degree, on the score of illustrious parentage, with vehement acclamations. He appears, indeed, to have been as much beloved for his vivacity and amiable disposition, and admired for his great talents by his fellow-students, as he was respected for his diligence, regularity, and decorum, by his tutors. By the time he left college there was scarcely a Latin or Greek author which he had not properly read, and with whose beauties and defects he was not intimately acquainted. He had even gone through the obscure work of Lycophron, "and with an ease, at first sight," says Tomline," which, if I had not witnessed it, I should have thought beyond the compass of human intellect." The same writer declares young Pitt's knowledge of Greek to have been so correct and extensive, that "if a play of Menander or Eschylus, or an ode of Pindar, had been suddenly found, he would have understood it as soon as any professed scholar." He retained such an inclination for the classics, even amid the bustle of politics, in after life, that he was seldom without having a Virgil or a Horace, a Homer or a Demosthenes at hand. He had been rather addicted, from his boyhood, to poetry, having, before he quitted home, been concerned with his brothers and sisters in composing a play in rhyme, which they afterwards performed before their parents and a few friends. At college he wrote a tragedy, which, while he was at the head of public affairs, he calmly consigned to the flames, in the presence of a friend, who had just read and warmly admired it.

In May, 1778, Pitt lost his father, by whom he was ever most ardently beloved. The letters of Lord Chatham to his son were alike honourable to both to the father, for his strong

parental affection, his nice discrimination and judicious advice, as to the younger Pitt, for the intense application with which, as they prove, he devoted himself to the acquirement of knowledge. "How happy the task," said the earl, in one of them, "my noble, amiable boy, to caution you only against pursuing too much all those liberal and praiseworthy things, to which less happy natures are perpetually to be spurred and driven. I will not teaze you with too long a lecture in favour of inaction, and a competent stupidity,-your two best tutors and companions at present." Pitt, at this time, had just recovered from a severe illness. "You have time to spare," continued the earl: "consider there is but the encyclopedia; and when you have mastered all that, what will remain ? You will want, like Alexander, another world to conquer!" Having kept the usual number of terms at Lincoln's-inn, Pitt was called to the bar in June, 1780, and attended, on the western circuit, the summer assizes of that year. He received his maiden brief in a cause which arose out of some mercantile transaction, and displayed such abilities on the trial, that the presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, declared, that if he continued in the profession, he would soon become one of its chief ornaments. But the senate had stronger attractions for his aspiring mind than the bar; in which eminence is only to be achieved by long suffering and excessive drudgery. Accordingly, in January, 1781, after having been an unsuccessful candidate in the preceding year, to represent the university of Cambridge, he procured his return for Appleby, a borough of which Sir James Lowther was patron, who very honourably gave his youthful appointee a written absolution from adhering to any particular party or political opinions.

He delivered his maiden speech on the 26th of February, in support of Burke's bill for reforming the civil list; and evinced an ease and fluency in expressing his sentiments, an accuracy of language, and a perspicuity of arrangement, that would have done honour to the most accomplished debater in the house. The next day, he wrote to inform his tutor at Cambridge, "that

he had heard his own voice in the house of commons, and had reason to be satisfied with the success of his first attempt at parliamentary speaking." On the 31st of May, he spoke again on a motion relative to the commissioners of public accounts; and, for the third and last time during the session, on the 12th of June, in a debate respecting the American war. His speech, on the last-mentioned occasion, elicited the following encomium from Dundas, afterwards Viscount Melville: "I cannot say to Mr. Pitt's face, what truth would extort from me, were he absent; yet even now I must declare, that I rejoice in the good fortune of my country, and my fellow-subjects. who are destined to derive the most important services from so happy an union of first-rate abilities, high integrity, bold and honest independency of conduct, and the most persuasive eloquence." At the close of the session, some one having observed that Pitt promised to be one of the first speakers ever heard in the house of commons, Fox instantly replied, "He is so already."

Notwithstanding his success in parliament, Pitt still continued at the bar: on the following circuit he held briefs in several election causes of considerable importance at Salisbury; and had the satisfaction of being spoken of in high terms, as well by Mr. Justice Buller, as the famous Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton. In the ensuing session he voted with Fox and the opposition; strongly censuring the conduct of ministers, Lord North and his friends, particularly with regard to the American war. At the conclusion of one of his speeches on this subject, the applause was so vehement and protracted, as actually for some time to stop the debate. On another occasion, while inveighing vehemently against the administration, he suddenly suspended his Phillipics, on perceiving the premier whispering with Lord George Germaine and Wellbore Ellis, and observed in a colloquial tone, and with peculiar felicity of allusion, "I will wait until the Nestor of the treasury bench has composed the differences between its Agamemnon and Achilles."

He displayed such abilities in this debate, that Rigby declared him a

greater orator than his admired father; and Fox eulogised his commanding eloquence as being irresistible, even by the effrontery of ministers. Some time afterwards, in allusion to a speech delivered by Pitt in support of a motion against the lords of the Admiralty, Dunning confessed, "that nearly all the sentiments, which he had collected in his own mind on the subject, had vanished like a dream, on the bursting forth of a torrent of eloquence from the greatest prodigy that ever perhaps was seen, in this or in any other country-a gentleman, possessing the full vigour of youth, united with the wisdom and experience of the maturest age."

Lord North and his friends were at length compelled to resign; but Pitt, as he was not offered a seat in the cabinet, declined taking office under Lord Rockingham, who succeeded to the premiership. On the 7th of May, in the same year (1782), he made an

unsuccessful motion for a committee to inquire into the state of the representative system. It appears that he was desirous of transferring the elective franchise of rotten boroughs to populous manufacturing towns, and of thus depriving the aristocracy of their influence in the commons. His opinions on this important subject never altered: but in the zenith of his power, he advocated them rather as an individual than a minister; and the motions brought forward on the subject were invariably lost, the premier merely supporting them by his arguments and vote, instead of backing them with his political authority.

On the 1st of July Lord Rockingham died: Lord Shelburne was appointed prime minister; Fox retired in disgust; and Pitt, then only twentythree years of age, was called to the important office of chancellor of the exchequer. Soon afterwards it was deemed expedient to strengthen the cabinet from the ranks of opposition; and Pitt having declared, that he would never become the colleague of Lord North, he was deputed to procure the co-operation of Fox; who, however, declined joining the administration while Lord Shelburne remained at its head. "If that be your resolution then," observed Pitt, "our discussion

must be at an end; for I do not come here to betray his lordship." The young statesman then terminated the last private interview that ever took place between Fox and himself.

The Shelburne cabinet was weak from its formation, and it soon fell before the stupendous efforts of the coalesced opposition, under Fox and Lord North; which, although it achieved a triumph over its adversaries, was in danger of being debarred from enjoying the fruits of victory; the premiership being tendered to Pitt, with unlimited power to select his colleagues. But the young statesman was so conscious of the weakness of his party, that he declined his majesty's proposals; and the coalition, in default of a more acceptable set of politicians, went into office. Pitt was earnestly solicited to resume his office of chancellor of the exchequer in the new administration; but he declined to lend it his valuable support. He now repeated his attempt to become member for the university at which he had been educated: but was again unsuccessful. Some of the heads of the college treated him, on this occasion, with mortifying contempt. While on his canvass, one of them almost shut the door in his face, and expressed great astonishment "at the young man's impudence in daring so to disturb the peace of the university!"

Immediately after his defeat, Pitt went to France, where he spent two or three months, and on his return, determined to resume his professional pursuits; but events soon occurred which induced him to abandon the resolution. The coalition ministry being wrecked on the decision of the house of lords with regard to the India bill, Pitt was again solicited to accept the premiership; and he boldly, or rather, rashly, consented. He was now only in the twenty-fifth year of his age; his opponents were powerful in connexion, as well as talent; the state of public affairs was appalling; and he had not a single cabinet coadjutor in the house of commons, where the coalition party were absolutely paramount. The motion for a new writ for Appleby, on his appointment to the premiership, was received with loud and general laughter by the members of opposition, who confidently foretold his immediate downfal;