For the more refined, the more cultivated, the more speculative intellects he had—­and has—­an almost supernatural charm.  His style is without any exception the richest, the most picturesque, the most inspired and inspiring in the language.  In its glories and its terrors it resembles the Apocalypse.  Mr. Morley, in the most striking of all his critical essays, has truly said that the natural ardour which impelled Burke to clothe his judgments in glowing and exaggerated phrases is one secret of his power over us, because it kindles in those who are capable of that generous infection a respondent interest and sympathy.  “He has the sacred gift of inspiring men to care for high things, and to make their lives at once rich and austere.  Such a gift is rare indeed.  We feel no emotion of revolt when Mackintosh speaks of Shakespeare and Burke in the same breath as being, both of them, above mere talent.  We do not dissent when Macaulay, after reading Burke’s works over again, exclaims:  ’How admirable!  The greatest man since Milton!’”

No sane critic would dream of comparing the genius of Pitt with that of Burke.  Yet where Burke failed Pitt succeeded.  Burke’s speeches, indeed, are a part of our national literature; Pitt was, in spite of grave and undeniable faults, the greatest Minister that ever governed England.  Foremost among the gifts by which he acquired his supreme ascendency must be placed his power of parliamentary speaking.  He was not, as his father was, an orator in that highest sense of oratory which implies something of inspiration, of genius, of passionate and poetic rapture; but he was a public speaker of extraordinary merit.  He had while still a youth what Coleridge aptly termed “a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words,” and this developed into “a power of pouring forth with endless facility perfectly modulated sentences of perfectly chosen language, which as far surpassed the reach of a normal intellect as the feats of an acrobat exceed the capacities of a normal body.”  It was eloquence particularly well calculated to sway a popular assembly which yet had none of the characteristics of a mob.  A sonorous voice; a figure and bearing which, though stiff and ungainly, were singularly dignified; an inexhaustible copiousness of grandiloquent phrase; a peculiar vein of sarcasm which froze like ice and cut like steel—­these were some of the characteristics of the oratory which from 1782 to 1806 at once awed and fascinated the House of Commons.

“I never want a word, but Mr. Pitt always has at command the right word.”  This was the generous tribute of Pitt’s most eminent rival, Charles James Fox.  Never were great opponents in public life more exactly designed by Nature to be contrasts to one another.  While every tone of Pitt’s voice and every muscle of his countenance expressed with unmistakable distinctness the cold and stately composure of his character, every particle of Fox’s mental and physical formation bore