living Brie subject is ortant than England are hing to that good or ill aracter. Pitt the empire altogether :the calcula wisdom of , the statesn whom is to the empire which the yond calcu vere, and the rful, wider, Pitt saw the olution in its ution enough he statesman d in the high -ustaining the rough all her kingdom the ; the solitary forgotten and -al hostuity to Jopular passion ss frenzy; and n one reckless fusion of war, delity. To the e study of the and of the years ed the triumph 1st be the most luctive employ

No. CCXXX.

THE memory of great men is the noblest inheritance of their country. All other distinctions are perishable. A few centuries have covered the most intellectual regions of the world with the deepest barbarism. National valour, the spirit of national sacrifice, the noble and natural pride of public supremacy, all that was great in the nature, the ambition, and the power of a nation, is exchanged for debility and decay, or survives but in the form of some faint memorial, mutilated sculptures round the tomb where the dead glory of the people slumbers. But the character of her eminent minds is unassailable by the process that humiliates the strength and dignity of the nation. Their ordeal is past; they have reached the point at which fame is inevitably their own. In passing to the grave, they have secured the honours, which to all the living must be still liable to the common chances of things. The nation may go down, and be submerged in the common tide of human casualty. But their fame stands up, like the mountain tops in the deluge, the last retreat of the national hope and virtue, the first point from which they reissue to possess and restore the land.

William Pitt was one of those men whose mind shaped his time. For tunate for the vigour and purity of our own time, if that mind were to

VOL. XXXVII. NO. CCXXX.

be taken as the model of living British statesmanship. The subject is at this hour, more important than ever. The destinies of England are more and more approaching to that crisis, in which their good or ill depends on personal character. Pitt was formed to carry the empire through a convulsion altogether new, fierce, and beyond the calculation of the old public wisdom of Europe. At this hour, the statesman may be forming, on whom is to depend the pilotage of the empire through a tempest, of which the fury will be equally beyond calculation, the trial more severe, and the elements more powerful, wilder, and more unknown. Pitt saw the Continent with one revolution in its centre, and that revolution enough to shake Europe. The statesman who is yet to succeed in the high and solemn task of sustaining the name of England through all her trials, may see every kingdom the centre of a revolution; the solitary Jacobinism of France forgotten and eclipsed by a universal hostility to throne and temple; popular passion inflamed into boundless frenzy; and the earth involved in one reckless and measureless confusion of war, conspiracy, and infidelity. To the man and his age, the study of the life of William Pitt, and of the years in which he achieved the triumph of his principles, must be the most essential and productive employ

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