Yet, with all his faults and affectations, Pitt had, in a very extraordinary degree, many of the elements of greatness.  He had genius, strong passions, quick sensibility, and vehement enthusiasm for the grand and the beautiful.  There was something about him which ennobled tergiversation itself.  He often went wrong, very wrong.  But, to quote the language of Wordsworth,

“He still retained,
’Mid such abasement, what he had received
From nature, an intense and glowing mind.”

In an age of low and dirty prostitution, in the age of Dodington and Sandys, it was something to have a man who might perhaps, under some strong excitement, have been tempted to ruin his country, but who never would have stooped to pilfer from her, a man whose errors arose, not from a sordid desire of gain, but from a fierce thirst for power, for glory, and for vengeance.  History owes to him this attestation, that at a time when anything short of direct embezzlement of the public money was considered as quite fair in public men, he showed the most scrupulous disinterestedness; that, at a time when it seemed to be generally taken for granted that Government could be upheld only by the basest and most immoral arts, he appealed to the better and nobler parts of human nature; that he made a brave and splendid attempt to do, by means of public opinion, what no other statesman of his day thought it possible to do, except by means of corruption; that he looked for support, not, like the Pelhams, to a strong aristocratical connection, not, like Bute, to the personal favour of the sovereign, but to the middle class of Englishmen; that he inspired that class with a firm confidence in his integrity and ability; that, backed by them, he forced an unwilling court and an unwilling oligarchy to admit him to an ample share of power; and that he used his power in such a manner as clearly proved him to have sought it, not for the sake of profit or patronage, but from a wish to establish for himself a great and durable reputation by means of eminent services rendered to the State.

The family of Pitt was wealthy and respectable.  His grandfather was Governor of Madras, and brought back from India that celebrated diamond which the Regent Orleans, by the advice of Saint Simon, purchased for upwards of two millions of livres, and which is still considered as the most precious of the crown jewels of France.  Governor Pitt bought estates and rotten boroughs, and sat in the House of Commons for Old Sarum.  His son Robert was at one time member for Old Sarum, and at another for Oakhampton.  Robert had two sons.  Thomas, the elder, inherited the estates and the parliamentary interest of his father.  The second was the celebrated William Pitt.