He was born in November, 1708.  About the early part of his life little more is known than that he was educated at Eton, and that at seventeen he was entered at Trinity College, Oxford.  During the second year of his residence at the University, George the First died; and the event was, after the fashion of that generation, celebrated by the Oxonians in many middling copies of verses.  On this occasion Pitt published some Latin lines, which Mr. Thackeray has preserved.  They prove that the young student had but a very limited knowledge even of the mechanical part of his art.  All true Etonians will hear with concern that their illustrious schoolfellow is guilty of making the first syllable in labenti short. [So Mr. Thackeray has printed the poem.  But it may be charitably hoped that Pitt wrote labanti.] The matter of the poem is as worthless as that of any college exercise that was ever written before or since.  There is, of course, much about Mars, Themis, Neptune, and Cocytus.  The Muses are earnestly entreated to weep over the urn of Caesar; for Caesar, says the Poet, loved the Muses; Caesar, who could not read a line of Pope, and who loved nothing but punch and fat women.

Pitt had been, from his school-days, cruelly tormented by the gout, and was advised to travel for his health.  He accordingly left Oxford without taking a degree, and visited France and Italy.  He returned, however, without having received much benefit from his excursion, and continued, till the close of his life, to suffer most severely from his constitutional malady.

His father was now dead, and had left very little to the younger children.  It was necessary that William should choose a profession.  He decided for the army, and a cornet’s commission was procured for him in the Blues.

But, small as his fortune was, his family had both the power and the inclination to serve him.  At the general election of 1734, his elder brother Thomas was chosen both for Old Sarum and for Oakhampton.  When Parliament met in 1735, Thomas made his election to serve for Oakhampton, and William was returned for Old Sarum.

Walpole had now been, during fourteen years, at the head of affairs.  He had risen to power under the most favourable circumstances.  The whole of the Whig party, of that party which professed peculiar attachment to the principles of the Revolution, and which exclusively enjoyed the confidence of the reigning house, had been united in support of his administration.  Happily for him, he had been out of office when the South-Sea Act was passed; and, though he does not appear to have foreseen all the consequences of that measure, he had strenuously opposed it, as he had opposed all the measures, good and bad, of Sutherland’s administration.  When the South-Sea Company were voting dividends of fifty per cent, when a hundred pounds of their stock were selling for eleven hundred pounds, when Threadneedle Street was daily crowded with the coaches of dukes and prelates, when divines