expectations more completely answered.  They were, indeed, much more than answered; such were the fluency and accuracy of language, such the perspicuity of arrangement, and such the closeness of reasoning, and manly and dignified elocution,—­generally, even in a much less degree, the fruits of long habit and experience,—­that it could scarcely be believed to be the first speech of a young man not yet two-and-twenty.  On the following day, knowing my anxiety upon every subject which related to him, Mr. Pitt, with his accustomed kindness, wrote to me at Cambridge, to inform me that ’he had heard his own voice in the House of Commons,’ and modestly expressed his satisfaction at the manner in which his first attempt at parliamentary speaking had been received."-E.

(432) Henry Bankes, Esq. of Kingston Hall.  He represented Corfe-Castle from 1780 to 1826, and the county of Dorset from that time until 1831.  In 1818, he published “The Civil and Constitutional History of Rome, from the Foundation to the Age of Augustus,” in two volumes, 8vo; and died in 1834.-E.

(433) Mr. Wilberforce, in a letter to a friend, of the 9th of June, says—­“The papers will have informed you how Mr. William Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham has distinguished himself:  he comes out as his father did, a ready-made orator, and I doubt not but that I shall one day or other, see him the first man in the country.”  Life, vol. 1. p. 22.-E.

Letter 220 To The Earl Of Strafford.  Strawberry Hill, June 13, 1781. (PAGE 281)

It was very kind, my dear lord, to recollect me so soon:  I wish I Could return it by amusing you; but here I know nothing, and suppose it is owing to age that even in town I do not find the transactions of the world very entertaining.  One must sit up all night to see or hear any thing; and if the town intends to do any thing, they never begin to do it till next day.  Mr. Conway will certainly be here the end of this month, having thoroughly secured his island from surprise, and it is not liable to be taken any other way.  I wish he was governor of this bigger one too, which does not seem quite so well guaranteed.

Your lordship will wonder at a visit I had yesterday:  it was from Mr. Storer, who has passed a day and night here.  It was not from my being a fellow-scholar of Vestris, but from his being turned antiquary; the last passion I should have thought a macaroni would have taken.  I am as proud of such a disciple as of having converted Dicky Bateman from a Chinese to a Goth.  Though he was the founder of the Sharawadgi taste in England, I preached so effectually that his every pagoda took the veil.  The Methodists say, one must have been very wicked before one can be of the elect—­yet is that extreme more distant from the ton, which avows knowing and liking nothing but the fashion of the instant, to studying what were the modes of five hundred years ago?