Amongst the first of Mr. Pitt’s performances which saw the light, were a panegyric on lord Stanhope, and a poem on the Plague of Marseilles:  But he had two large Folio’s of MS. Poems, very fairly written out, while he was a school-boy, which at the time of election were delivered to the examiners.  One of these volumes contained an entire translation of Lucan; and the other consisted of Miscellaneous pieces.  Mr. Pitt’s Lucan has never been published; perhaps from the consideration of its being the production of his early life, or from a consciousness of its not equalling the translation of that author by Rowe, who executed this talk in the meridian of his genius.  Several of his other pieces were published afterwards, in his volume of Miscellaneous Poems.

The ingenious writer of the Student hath obliged the world by inferring in that work several original pieces by Mr. Pitt; whose name is prefixed to them.

Next to his beautiful Translation of Virgil, Mr. Pitt gained the greatest reputation by rendering into English, Vida’s Art of Poetry, which he has executed with the strictest attention to the author’s sense, with the utmost elegance of versification, and without suffering the noble spirit of the original to be lost in his translation.

This amiable poet died in the year 1748, without leaving one enemy behind him.  On his tombstone were engraved these words,

  “He lived innocent, and died beloved.”

Mr. Auditor Benson, who in a pamphlet of his writing, has treated Dryden’s translation of Virgil with great contempt, was yet charmed with that by Mr. Pitt, and found in it some beauties, of which he was fond even to a degree of enthusiasm.  Alliteration is one of those beauties Mr. Benson so much admired, and in praise of which he has a long dissertation in his letters on translated verse.  He once took an opportunity, in conversation with Mr. Pitt, to magnify that beauty, and to compliment him upon it.  Mr. Pitt thought this article far less considerable than Mr. Benson did; but says he, ’since you are so fond of alliteration, the following couplet upon Cardinal Woolsey will not displease you,

  ’Begot by butchers, but by bishops bred,
  How high his honour holds his haughty head.

Benson was no doubt charmed to hear his favourite grace in poetry so beautifully exemplified, which it certainly is, without any affectation or stiffness.  Waller thought this a beauty; and Dryden was very fond of it.  Some late writers, under the notion of imitating these two great versifiers in this point, run into downright affectation, and are guilty of the most improper and ridiculous expressions, provided there be but an alliteration.  It is very remarkable, that an affectation of this beauty is ridiculed by Shakespear, in Love’s Labour Lost, Act II. where the Pedant Holofernes says,

  I will something affect the letter, for it argues facility.—­
  The praiseful princess pierced, and prickt.—­