[[3]] William Pitt, b. 1759; d. 1806. Younger son of the Earl of Chatham. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1773.
[[4]] Wraxall in his Memoirs (p. 344) cites special instance in the speech, where he deprecates new alliance between North and Fox—alluding to personal results to himself:—
"Fortuna sævo læta negotio et——"
(leaving out the mea virtute) then pounding on the table, and adding with oratorical vim
"——probamque
Pauperiem sine dole quæro."
Here (says Wraxall, who was an auditor) he cast his eyes down—passing his handkerchief across his lips—to recover breath only. Certainly he was grandly clear of anything like avarice; no great statesman of England (unless Gladstone) ever thought so little of money.
[[5]] See Francis Horner article in Edinburgh Review, October, 1843.
[[6]] Richard Brinsley Sheridan, b. 1751; d. 1816. Moore's Biography, interesting but not authoritative. Mrs. Oliphant's sketch in the Morley Lives, is one of that lady's most charming books.
[[7]] It was on February 7, 1787, that Sheridan made his first notable speech on the Begum charge in the House of Commons; the second, in the impeachment trial in Westminster Hall, in June, 1788. Others followed of less interest toward the close of the trial in 1794. The best reports are of the speeches made in 1788, published at the instigation of Sir Cornewall Lewis, in 1859. See Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox, by W. Fraser Rae. 1874.
[[8]] A fearful account of Sheridan's condition in his last days is to be found in the Croker Papers (1884), chap. x. It is embodied in what purports to be a literal transcript of a conversational narrative by George IV., J. Wilson Croker being interlocutor and listener.