of saying nothing in language which left on his audience the impression that he had said a great deal.
The effect of oratory will always to a great extent depend on the character of the orator. There perhaps never were two speakers whose eloquence had more of what may be called the race, more of the flavour imparted by moral qualities, than Fox and Pitt. The speeches of Fox owe a great part of their charm to that warmth and softness of heart, that sympathy with human suffering, that admiration for everything great and beautiful, and that hatred of cruelty and injustice, which interest and delight us even in the most defective reports. No person, on the other hand, could hear Pitt without perceiving him to be a man of high, intrepid and commanding spirit, proudly conscious of his own rectitude and of his own intellectual superiority, incapable of the low vices of fear and envy, but too prone to feel and to show disdain. Pride, indeed, pervaded the whole man, was written in the harsh, rigid lines of his face, was marked by the way in which he walked, in which he sat, in which he stood, and above all, in which he bowed. Such pride, of course, inflicted many wounds. But his pride, though it made him bitterly disliked by individuals, inspired the great body of his followers in parliament and throughout the country with respect and confidence. It was that of the magnanimous man so finely described by Aristotle in the Ethics, of the man who thinks himself worthy of great things, being in truth worthy. It was closely connected, too, with an ambition which had no mixture of low cupidity. There was something noble in the cynical disdain with which the mighty minister scattered riches and titles to right and left among those who valued them, while he spurned them out of his way. Poor himself, he was surrounded by friends on whom he had bestowed three thousand, six thousand, ten thousand a year. Plain Mister himself, he had made more lords than any three ministers that had preceded him. The garter, for which the first dukes in the kingdom were contending, was repeatedly offered to him, and offered in vain.
The correctness of his private life added much to the dignity of his public character. In the relations of son, brother, uncle, master, friend, his conduct was exemplary. In the small circle of his intimate associates he was amiable, affectionate, even playful. He indulged, indeed, somewhat too freely in wine, which he had early been directed to take as a medicine, and which use had made a necessary of life to him. But it was very seldom that any indication of undue excess could be detected in his tones or gestures; and, in truth, two bottles of port were little more to him than two dishes of tea. He had, when he was first introduced into the clubs of St James's Street, shown a strong sense for play, but he had the prudence and the resolution to stop before this taste had acquired the strength of habit. From the passion which generally exercises the most tyrannical dominion over the young he possessed an immunity, which is probably to be ascribed partly to his temperament and partly to his situation. His constitution was feeble; he was very shy; and he was very busy. The strictness of his morals furnished such buffoons as Peter Pindar and Captain Morris with an inexhaustible theme for merriment of no very delicate kind. But the great body of the middle class of Englishmen could not see the joke. They warmly praised the young statesman for commanding his passions, and for covering his frailties, if he had frailties, with decorous obscurity.
The memory of Pitt has been assailed, times innumerable, often justly, often unjustly; but it has suffered much less from Estimates of Pitt. his assailants than from his eulogists. For, during many years, his name was the rallying cry of a class of men with whom, at one of those terrible conjunctures which confound all ordinary distinctions, he was accidentally and temporally connected, but to whom, on almost all great questions of principle, he was diametrically opposed. The haters of parliamentary reform called themselves Pittites, not choosing to remember that Pitt made three motions for parliamentary reform, and that, though he thought that such a reform could not safely be made while the passions excited by the French Revolution were raging, he never uttered a word indicating that he should not be prepared at a more convenient season to bring the question forward a fourth time. The toast of Protestant ascendancy was drunk on Pitt's birthday by a set of Pittites who could not but be aware that Pitt had resigned his office because he could not carry Catholic emancipation. The defenders of the Test Act called themselves Pittites, though they could not be ignorant that Pitt had laid before George III. unanswerable reasons for abolishing the Test Act. The enemies of free trade called themselves Pittites, though Pitt was far more deeply imbued with the doctrines of Adam Smith than either Fox or Grey. The very negro-drivers invoked the name of Pitt, whose eloquence was never more conspicuously displayed than when he spoke of the wrongs of the negro. This mythical Pitt, who resembles the genuine Pitt as little as the Charlemagne of Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne of Eginhard, has had his day. History will vindicate the real man from calumny disguised under the semblance of adulation, and will exhibit him as what he was—a minister of great talents, honest intentions and liberal opinions, pre-eminently qualified, intellectually and morally, for the part of a parliamentary leader, and capable of administering with prudence and moderation the government of a prosperous and tranquil country, but unequal to surprising and terrible emergencies, and liable in such emergencies to err grievously, both on the side of weakness and on the side of violence. (M.)
Authorities.—Lord Macaulay's article, a classic on its subject, written in 1859 for this Encyclopaedia and included in the 9th edition unaltered, is preserved above in its essentials, but has been shortened and readjusted. Among standard biographies are the 5th Earl Stanhope's important Life (4 vols., 2nd ed., 1862), and Lord Rosebery's masterly study in the “Twelve English Statesmen Series” (1891). See also the bibliographical note to the Rev. William Hunt's article on Pitt in the Dict. Nat. Biog., and also the same historian's app. i., pp. 461-462, to his vol. x. (for the years 1760-1801) of The Political History of England (1905), dealing with the authorities for the period.
PITTA, in ornithology, from the Telugu pitta, meaning a small bird, latinized by Vieillot in 1816 (Analyse, p. 42) as the name of a genus, and since adopted by English ornithologists as the general name for a group of birds, called by the French Brêves, and remarkable for their great beauty.[1] For a long while the pittas were commonly supposed to be allied to the Turdidae, and some English writers applied to them the name of “water-thrushes” and “ant-thrushes,” though there was no evidence of their having aquatic habits or predilections, or of their preying especially upon ants, but the fact that they formed a separate
Pitta elegans, male and female.
- ↑ In ornithology the word is first found as part of the native name, “Ponnunky pitta,” of a bird, given in 1713 by Petiver, in the “mantissa” to Ray's Synopsis (p. 195), on the authority of Buckley (see Ornithology). This bird is the Pitta bengalensis of modern ornithologists, and is said by Jerdon (Birds of India, i. 503) now to bear the Telugu name of Pona-inki.
