PITT AND BUONAPARTE.
From the Morning Post, March 19, 1800.
"Plutarch, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has generally chosen for each pair of Lives the two contemporaries who most nearly resemble each other. His work would, perhaps, have been more interesting, if he had adopted the contrary arrangement, and selected those rather, who had attained to the possession of similar influence, or similar fame, by means, actions, and talents the most dissimilar. For power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it to exist. In our days, the two persons who appear to have influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply and the most diffusively, are, beyond doubt, the Chief Consul of France, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain: and in these two, are presented to us similar situations, with the greatest dissimilitude of characters.
William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham; a fact of no ordinary importance in the solution of his character, of no mean significance in the heraldry of morals and intellect. His father's rank, fame, political connexions, and parental ambition, were his mould: he was cast, rather than grew. A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind, and that, which he might have been, was compelled into that, which he was to be. From his early childhood it was his father's custom to make him stand upon a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practised so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words, which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings. Not the thing on which he was
