He was no speaker of set speeches.  His few prepared discourses were complete failures.  The elaborate panegyric which he pronounced on General Wolfe was considered as the very worst of all his performances.  “No man,” says a critic who had often heard him, “ever knew so little what he was going to say.”  Indeed, his facility amounted to a vice.  He was not the master, but the slave of his own speech.  So little self-command had he when once he felt the impulse, that he did not like to take part in a debate when his mind was full of an important secret of state.  “I must sit still,” he once said to Lord Shelburne on such an occasion; “for, when once I am up, everything that is in my mind comes out.”

Yet he was not a great debater.  That he should not have been so when first he entered the House of Commons is not strange.  Scarcely any person has ever become so without long practice and many failures.  It was by slow degrees, as Burke said, that Charles Fox became the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever lived.  Charles Fox himself attributed his own success to the resolution which he formed when very young, of speaking, well or ill, at least once every night.  “During five whole sessions,” he used to say, “I spoke every night but one; and I regret only that I did not speak on that night too.”  Indeed, with the exception of Mr. Stanley, whose knowledge of the science of parliamentary defence resembles an instinct, it would be difficult to name any eminent debater who has not made himself a master of his art at the expense of his audience.

But, as this art is one which even the ablest men have seldom acquired without long practice, so it is one which men of respectable abilities, with assiduous and intrepid practice, seldom fail to acquire.  It is singular that, in such an art, Pitt, a man of great parts, of great fluency, of great boldness, a man whose whole life was passed in parliamentary conflict, a man who, during several years, was the leading minister of the Crown in the House of Commons, should never have attained to high excellence.  He spoke without premeditation; but his speech followed the course of his own thoughts, and not the course of the previous discussion.  He could, indeed, treasure up in his memory some detached expression of an opponent, and make it the text for lively ridicule or solemn reprehension.  Some of the most celebrated bursts of his eloquence were called forth by an unguarded word, a laugh, or a cheer.  But this was the only sort of reply in which he appears to have excelled.  He was perhaps the only great English orator who did not think it any advantage to have the last word, and who generally spoke by choice before his most formidable antagonists.  His merit was almost entirely rhetorical.  He did not succeed either in exposition or in refutation; but his speeches abounded with lively illustrations, striking apophthegms, well-told anecdotes, happy allusions, passionate appeals.  His invective and sarcasm were terrific.  Perhaps no English orator was ever so much feared.