Pitt was in the army for a few months in time of peace.  Mr. Thackeray accordingly insists on our confessing that, if the young cornet had remained in the service, he would have been one of the ablest commanders that ever lived.  But this is not all.  Pitt, it seems, was not merely a great poet, in esse, and a great general in posse, but a finished example of moral excellence, the just man made perfect.  He was in the right when he attempted to establish an inquisition, and to give bounties for perjury, in order to get Walpole’s head.  He was in the right when he declared Walpole to have been an excellent minister.  He was in the right when, being in opposition, he maintained that no peace ought to be made with Spain, till she should formally renounce the right of search.  He was in the right when, being in office, he silently acquiesced in a treaty by which Spain did not renounce the right of search.  When he left the Duke of Newcastle, when he coalesced with the Duke of Newcastle, when he thundered against subsidies, when he lavished subsidies with unexampled profusion, when he execrated the Hanoverian connection, when he declared that Hanover ought to be as dear to us as Hampshire, he was still invariably speaking the language of a virtuous and enlightened statesman.

The truth is that there scarcely ever lived a person who had so little claim to this sort of praise as Pitt.  He was undoubtedly a great man.  But his was not a complete and well-proportioned greatness.  The public life of Hampden or of Somers resembles a regular drama, which can be criticised as a whole, and every scene of which is to be viewed in connection with the main action.  The public life of Pitt, on the other hand, is a rude though striking piece, a piece abounding in incongruities, a piece without any unity of plan, but redeemed by some noble passages, the effect of which is increased by the tameness or extravagance of what precedes and of what follows.  His opinions were unfixed.  His conduct at some of the most important conjunctures of his life was evidently determined by pride and resentment.  He had one fault, which of all human faults is most rarely found in company with true greatness.  He was extremely affected.  He was an almost solitary instance of a man of real genius, and of a brave, lofty, and commanding spirit, without simplicity of character.  He was an actor in the Closet, an actor at Council, an actor in Parliament; and even in private society he could not lay aside his theatrical tones and attitudes.  We know that one of the most distinguished of his partisans often complained that he could never obtain admittance to Lord Chatham’s room till everything was ready for the representation, till the dresses and properties were all correctly disposed, till the light was thrown with Rembrandt-like effect on the head of the illustrious performer, till the flannels had been arranged with the air of a Grecian drapery, and the crutch placed as gracefully as that of Belisarius or Lear.