Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.

On returning to town, which I did on the top of an Oxford coach, I was relating this story to the singular person who then drove it (Bobart, who had been a collegian), when a man who was sitting behind surprised us with the excess of his laughter. On asking him the reason, he touched his hat, and said, "Sir, I'm his footman." Such were the delicacies of the livery, and the glorifications of their masters with which they entertain the kitchen. —From the Autobiography of Leigh Hunt.

WILLIAM PITT

BY S. T. COLERIDGE

The following very graphic and very severe critical estimate of William Pitt, the great Prime Minister of England during the stormy era of the French Revolution, was written by Coleridge for the London Morning Post, with which he was then connected. It appeared in the number of that paper, dated Wednesday, March 19, 1800. We copy it from Coleridge's "Essays on His Own Times," just published in London.

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 co-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 connections, 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 up on a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practiced 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 speaking, but the praises to be gained by the speech, were present to his intuition; hence he associated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise excited by them.

But an inconceivably large portion of human knowledge and human power is involved in the science and management of words; and an education of words, though it destroys genius, will often create, and always foster, talent. The young Pitt was conspicuous far beyond his fellows, both at school and at college. He was always full grown: he had neither the promise nor the awkwardness of a growing intellect. Vanity, early satiated, formed and elevated itself into a love of power; and in losing this colloquial vanity he lost one of the prime links that connect the individual with the species, too early for the affections, though not too early for the understanding. At college he was a severe student; his mind was founded and elemented in words and generalities, and these too formed all the superstructure. That revelry and that debauchery, which are so often fatal to the powers of intellect, would probably have been serviceable to him; they would have given him a closer communion with realities, they would have induced a greater presentness to present objects. But Mr. Pitt's conduct was correct, unimpressibly correct. His after-discipline in the special pleader's office, and at the bar, carried on the scheme of his education with unbroken uniformity. His first political connections were with the Reformers, but those who accuse him of sympathizing or coalescing with their intemperate or visionary plans, misunderstand his character, and are ignorant of the historical facts. Imaginary situations in an imaginary state of things rise up in minds that possess a power and facility in combining images. Mr. Pitt's ambition was conversant with old situations in the old state of things, which furnish nothing to the imagination, though much to the wishes. In his endeavors to realize his father's plan of reform, he was probably as sincere as a being, who had derived so little knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his sincerity had no living root of affection; while it was propped up by his love of praise and immediate power, so long it stood erect and no longer. He became a member of the Parliament – supported the popular opinions, and in a few years, by the influence of the popular party, was placed in that high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of his country, we had almost said, the fates of the world, were placed in his wardship – we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, when we reflect in whose wardship the fates of the world were placed!

The influencer of his country and of his species was a young man, the creature of another's predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended from all the elements of experience; a young man, whose feet had never wandered; whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left; whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated reptile! It was a young man, whose heart was solitary, because he had existed always amidst objects of futurity, and whose imagination, too, was unpopulous, because those objects of hope, to which his habitual wishes had transferred, and as it were projected, his existence, were all familiar and long established objects! A plant sown and reared in a hot-house, for whom the very air that surrounded him, had been regulated by the thermometer of previous purpose; to whom the light of nature had penetrated only through glasses and covers; who had had the sun without the breeze; whom no storm had shaken; on whom no rain had pattered; on whom the dews of heaven had not fallen! A being, who had had no feelings connected with man or nature, no spontaneous impulses, no unbiased and desultory studies, no genuine science, nothing that constitutes individuality in intellect, nothing that teaches brotherhood in affection! Such was the man – such, and so denaturalized the spirit – on whose wisdom and philanthropy the lives and living enjoyments of so many millions of human beings were made unavoidably dependent. From this time a real enlargement of mind became almost impossible. Pre-occupations, intrigue, the undue passion and anxiety with which all facts must be surveyed; the crowd and confusion of those facts, none of them seen, but all communicated, and by that very circumstance, and by the necessity of perpetually classifying them, transmuted into words and generalities; pride, flattery, irritation, artificial power; these, and circumstances resembling these, necessarily render the heights of office barren heights, which command, indeed, a vast and extensive prospect, but attract so many clouds and vapors, that most often all prospect is precluded. Still, however, Mr. Pitt's situation, however inauspicious for his real being, was favorable to his fame. He heaped period on period; persuaded himself and the nation, that extemporaneous arrangement of sentences was eloquence; and that eloquence implied wisdom. His father's struggles for freedom, and his own attempts, gave him an almost unexampled popularity; and his office necessarily associated with his name all the great events, that happened during his administration. There were not, however, wanting men, who saw through this delusion; and refusing to attribute the industry, integrity, and enterprising spirit of our merchants, the agricultural improvements of our land-holders, the great inventions of our manufacturers, or the valor and skillfulness of our sailors to the merits of a minister, they have continued to decide on his character from those acts and those merits, which belong to him and to him alone. Judging him by this standard, they have been able to discover in him no one proof or symptom of a commanding genius. They have discovered him never controlling, never creating events, but always yielding to them with rapid change, and sheltering himself from inconsistency by perpetual indefiniteness. In the Russian war, they saw him abandoning meanly what he had planned weakly, and threatened insolently. In the debates on the Regency, they detected the laxity of his constitutional principles, and received proofs that his eloquence consisted not in the ready application of a general system to particular questions, but in the facility of arguing for or against any question by specious generalities, without reference to any system. In these debates, he combined what is most dangerous in democracy, with all that is most degrading in the old superstitions of monarchy; and taught an inherency of the office in the person, in order to make the office itself a nullity, and the Premiership, with its accompanying majority, the sole and permanent power of the State. And now came the French Revolution. This was a new event; the old routine of reasoning, the common trade of politics were to become obsolete. He appeared wholly unprepared for it: half favoring, half condemning, ignorant of what he favored, and why he condemned, he neither displayed the honest enthusiasm and fixed principle of Mr. Fox, nor the intimate acquaintance with the general nature of man, and the consequent. prescience of Mr. Burke.

After the declaration of war, long did he continue in the common cant of office, in declamation about the Scheldt and Holland, and all the vulgar causes of common contests! and when at last the immense genius of his new supporter had beat him out of these words (words signifying places and dead objects, and signifying nothing more), he adopted other words in their places, other generalities – Atheism and Jacobinism – phrases, which he learned from Mr. Burke, but without learning the philosophical definitions and involved consequences, with which that great man accompanied those words. Since the death of Mr. Burke, the forms and the sentiments, and the tone of the French have undergone many and important changes: how, indeed, is it possible that it should be otherwise, while man is the creature of experience! But still Mr. Pitt proceeds in an endless repetition of the same general phrases. This is his element; deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and you reduce him to silence. But you can not deprive him of them. Press him to specify an individual fact of advantage to be derived from a war, and he answers, Security! Call upon him to particularize a crime, and he exclaims, Jacobinism! Abstractions defined by abstractions! Generalities defined by generalities! As a minister of finance, he is still, as ever, the man of words and abstractions! Figures, custom-house reports, imports and exports, commerce and revenue – all flourishing, all splendid! Never was such a prosperous country, as England, under his administration! Let it be objected, that the agriculture of the country is, by the overbalance of commerce, and by various and complex causes, in such a state, that the country hangs as a pensioner for bread on its neighbors, and a bad season uniformly threatens us with famine. This (it is replied) is owing to our prosperity – all prosperous nations are in great distress for food! – still prosperity, still general phrases, uninforced by one single image, one single fact of real national amelioration; of any one comfort enjoyed, where it was not before enjoyed; of any one class of society becoming healthier, wiser, or happier. These are things, these are realities; and these Mr. Pitt has neither the imagination to body forth, nor the sensibility to feel for. Once, indeed, in an evil hour, intriguing for popularity, he suffered himself to be persuaded to evince a talent for the Real, the Individual; and he brought in his poor bill!! When we hear the minister's talent for finance so loudly trumpeted, we turn involuntarily to his poor bill – to that acknowledged abortion – that unanswerable evidence of his ignorance respecting all the fundamental relations and actions of property, and of the social union!

As his reasonings, even so is his eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent, that the whole bears the semblance of argument, and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favorite phrase of the day – a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation. But while he speaks, the effect varies according to the character of his auditor. The man of no talent is swallowed up in surprise; and when the speech is ended, he remembers his feelings, but nothing distinct of that which produced them – (how opposite an effect to that of nature and genius, from whose works the idea still remains, when the feeling is passed away – remains to connect itself with the other feelings, and combine with new impressions!) The mere man of talent hears him with admiration – the mere man of genius with contempt – the philosopher neither admires nor contemns, but listens to him with a deep and solemn interest, tracing in the effects of his eloquence the power of words and phrases, and that peculiar constitution of human affairs in their present state, which so eminently favors this power.

Such appears to us to be the prime minister of Great Britain, whether we consider him as a statesman or as an orator. The same character betrays itself in his private life; the same coldness to realities, and to all whose excellence relates to reality. He has patronized no science, he has raised no man of genius from obscurity; he counts no one prime work of God among his friends. From the same source he has no attachment to female society, no fondness for children, no perceptions of beauty in natural scenery; but he is fond of convivial indulgences, of that stimulation, which, keeping up the glow of self-importance and the sense of internal power, gives feelings without the mediation of ideas.

These are the elements of his mind; the accidents of his fortune, the circumstances that enabled such a mind to acquire and retain such a power, would form a subject of a philosophical history, and that, too, of no scanty size. We can scarcely furnish the chapter of contents to a work, which would comprise subjects so important and delicate, as the causes of the diffusion and intensity of secret influence; the machinery and state intrigue of marriages; the overbalance of the commercial interest; the panic of property struck by the late revolution; the short-sightedness of the careful; the carelessness of the fat-sighted; and all those many and various events which have given to a decorous profession of religion, and a seemliness of private morals, such an unwonted weight in the attainment and preservation of public power. We are unable to determine whether it be more consolatary or humiliating to human nature, that so many complexities of event, situation, character, age, and country, should be necessary in order to the production of a Mr. Pitt.

[From Household Words.]

IGNORANCE OF THE ENGLISH

The lamentable deficiency of the commonest rudiments of education, which still exists among the humbler classes of the nation, is never so darkly apparent as when we compare their condition with that of people of similar rank in other countries. When we do so, we find that England stands the lowest in the scale of what truly must be looked upon as Civilization; for she provides fewer means for promoting it than any of her neighbors. With us, education is a commodity to be trafficked in: abroad, it is a duty. Here, schoolmasters are perfectly irresponsible except to their paymasters; in other countries, teachers are appointed by the state, and a rigid supervision is maintained over the trainers of youth, both as regards competency and moral conduct. In England, whoever is too poor to buy the article education, can get none of it for himself or his offspring; in other parts of Europe, either the government (as in Germany), or public opinion (as in America), enforces it upon the youthful population.

What are the consequences? One is revealed by a comparison between the proportion of scholars in elementary schools to the entire population of other countries, and that in our own. Taking the whole of northern Europe – including Scotland, and France, and Belgium (where education is at a low ebb), we find that to every 2-1/4 of the population, there is one child acquiring the rudiments of knowledge; while in England there is only one such pupil to every fourteen inhabitants.

It has been calculated that there are, at the present day in England and Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who can neither read nor write – that is to say, nearly one quarter of the population. Also, that of all the children between five and fourteen, more than one half attend no place of instruction. These statements – compiled by Mr. Kay, from official and other authentic sources, for his work on the Social Condition and Education of the Poor in England and Europe, would be hard to believe, if we had not to encounter in our every-day life degrees of illiteracy which would be startling, if we were not thoroughly used to it. Wherever we turn, ignorance, not always allied to poverty, stares us in the face. If we look in the Gazette, at the list of partnerships dissolved, not a month passes but some unhappy man, rolling perhaps in wealth, but wallowing in ignorance, is put to the experimentum crucis of "his mark." The number of petty jurors – in rural districts especially – who can only sign with a cross is enormous. It is not unusual to see parish documents of great local importance defaced with the same humiliating symbol by persons whose office shows them to be not only "men of mark," but men of substance. We have printed already specimens of the partial ignorance which passes under the ken of the Post Office authorities, and we may venture to assert, that such specimens of penmanship and orthography are not to be matched in any other country in Europe. A housewife in humble life need only turn to the file of her tradesmen's bills to discover hieroglyphics which render them so many arithmetical puzzles. In short, the practical evidences of the low ebb to which the plainest rudiments of education in this country has fallen, are too common to bear repetition. We can not pass through the streets, we can not enter a place of public assembly, or ramble in the fields, without the gloomy shadow of Ignorance sweeping over us. The rural population is indeed in a worse plight than the other classes. We quote – with the attestation of our own experience – the following passage from one of a series of articles which have recently appeared in a morning newspaper: "Taking the adult class of agricultural laborers, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live and move and have their being. As they work in the fields, the external world has some hold upon them through the medium of their senses; but to all the higher exercises of intellect, they are perfect strangers. You can not address one of them without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him. There is in general neither speculation in his eyes, nor intelligence in his countenance. The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. He is wanting, too, in the erect and independent bearing of a man. When you, accost him, if he is not insolent – which he seldom is – he is timid and shrinking, his whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you, greater than should separate any two classes of men. He is often doubtful when you address, and suspicious when you question him; he is seemingly oppressed with the interview, while it lasts, and obviously relieved when it is over. These are the traits which I can affirm them to possess as a class, after having come in contact with many hundreds of farm laborers. They belong to a generation for whose intellectual culture little or nothing was done. As a class, they have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense. In nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality. I have frequently asked clergymen and others, if they often find the adult peasant reading for his own or others' amusement? The invariable answer is, that such a sight is seldom or never witnessed. In the first place, the great bulk of them can not read. In the next, a large proportion of those who can do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them to say, that many of those who can not read, have bitterly regretted, in my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would now be to her, could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours."

We now turn to the high lights of the picture as presented abroad, and which, from their very brightness, throw our own intellectual gloom into deeper shade. Mr. Kay observes in the work we have already cited:

"It is a great fact, however much, we may be inclined to doubt it, that throughout Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Bohemia, Wirtemberg, Baden, Hesse Darmstadt, Hesse Cassel, Gotha, Nassau, Hanover, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, and the Austrian Empire, ALL the children are actually at this present time attending school, and are receiving a careful, religious, moral, and intellectual education, from highly educated and efficient teachers. Over the vast tract of country which I have mentioned, as well as in Holland, and the greater part of France, all the children above six years of age are daily acquiring useful knowledge and good habits under the influence of moral, religious, and learned teachers. ALL the youth of the greater part of these countries, below the age of twenty-one years, can read, write, and cipher, and know the Bible History, and the history of their own country. No children are left idle and dirty in the streets of the towns – there is no class of children to be compared in any respect to the children who frequent our "ragged schools" – all the children, even of the poorest parents, are, in a great part of these countries, in dress, appearance, cleanliness, and manners, as polished and civilized as the children of our middle classes; the children of the poor in Germany are so civilized that the rich often send their children to the schools intended for the poor; and, lastly, in a great part of Germany and Switzerland, the children of the poor are receiving a better education than that given in England to the children of the greater part of our middle classes."

"I remember one day," says Mr. Kay in another page, "when walking near Berlin in the company of Herr Hintz, a professor in Dr. Diesterweg's Normal College, and of another teacher, we saw a poor woman cutting up, in the road, logs of wood for winter use. My companions pointed her out to me, and said, 'Perhaps you will scarcely believe it, but in the neighborhood of Berlin, poor women, like that one, read translations of Sir Walter Scott's Novels, and many of the interesting works of your language, besides those of the principal writers of Germany.' This account was afterward confirmed by the testimony of several other persons. Often and often have I seen the poor cab-drivers of Berlin, while waiting for a fare, amusing themselves by reading German books, which they had brought with them in the morning, expressly for the purpose of supplying amusement and occupation for their leisure hours. In many parts of these countries, the peasants and the workmen of the towns attend regular weekly lectures or weekly classes, where they practice singing or chanting, or learn mechanical drawing, history, or science. The intelligence of the poorer classes of these countries is shown by their manners. The whole appearance of a German peasant who has been brought up under this system, i. e., of any of the poor who have not attained the age of thirty-five years, is very different to that of our own peasantry. The German, Swiss, or Dutch peasant, who has grown up to manhood under the new system, and since the old feudal system was overthrown, is not nearly so often, as with us, distinguished by an uncouth dialect. On the contrary, they speak as their teachers speak, clearly, without hesitation, and grammatically. They answer questions politely, readily, and with the ease which shows they have been accustomed to mingle with men of greater wealth and of better education than themselves. They do not appear embarrased, still less do they appear gawkish or stupid, when addressed. If, in asking a peasant a question, a stranger, according to the polite custom of the country, raises his hat, the first words of reply are the quietly uttered ones, 'I pray you, sir, be covered.' A Prussian peasant is always polite and respectful to a stranger, but quite as much at his ease as when speaking to one of his own fellows."