But words cost little, and Pitt did not disdain profusion in them any more than in what cost more. In a letter to Lyttelton written immediately after Pelham's death, when he recommended an attitude of armed and hostile vigilance towards the new powers, he says: 'Professions of personal regard cannot be made too strongly,' and this line of conduct explains his professions to Newcastle. For how could he fail under existing circumstances to be suspicious? Had Newcastle lifted a finger to procure him the succession to Bedford? Yet no one could compete in Parliamentary authority with Pitt; and, though Murray's claims to oratorical pre-eminence might vie with his, Murray's aspirations were confined to the law. At this time, Chesterfield, the best living judge of such matters, was writing to his son, and expressing therefore his real convictions: 'Mr. Pitt and Mr. Murray are beyond comparison ... the best orators. They alone can inflame or quiet the House; they alone are so attended to, in that numerous and noisy assembly, that you might hear a pin fall while either was speaking.'[211] It is true that Chesterfield depreciates Pitt's matter. But the fact remains that he mentions Pitt as one of the two supreme masters of the House of Commons, the other, indeed, not having much heart in politics. The ignoring, the slighting of this great power, could not be forgiven by so aspiring a nature as Pitt's. He brooded and watched.
CHAPTER XIV.
How did he pass these three years? It is not easy to say, for we have so little light on his private life. No prescient Boswell marked his words and habits, or indeed had much opportunity of doing so. Few men of the same eminence have lived in such retirement as he did; we only catch glimpses. In the first place, it may be said without extravagance that his principal occupation was the gout. His gout became part of the history of England. To him it was a cruel fact. It kept him constantly disabled, and constantly away from London, ever trying new waters, principally the historical springs of Bath. Bath, indeed, was his second home. He seems to be almost always there till his marriage, and very frequently afterwards. Half his letters seem to be dated thence. At last he definitely recognised it as a home by building a house there in the Circus, which cost him 1200l.[212] This was in 1753. But in 1763 he disposed of this particular house, probably under some financial stress.[213] Whether he thus established himself from love of the place or from love of his friend Ralph Allen, who was Fielding's Squire Allworthy and Bath's Man of Ross, or whether he had already an ambition to represent the City in Parliament, we cannot tell. His cousin, Lord Stanhope soon joined him and bought the houses next to his.[214] As time went on, and Pitt's fame and seclusion increased, it became more and more a political centre. There men collected who were anxious to get a word with the statesman, or at least obtain news of his health, which at times became the problem and mystery of a crisis.
But his own uneasy quest of health made him seek a variety of other resorts, Astrop Wells, at the spring of St. Rumbald, Tunbridge Wells, Sunninghill, and what not. He thus became a constant participator in the tepid diversions of these sickly haunts. Gilbert West, a minor poet, whose mother was Cobham's sister, and who was one of Pitt's dearest and most intimate friends, accompanied him to Tunbridge Wells in May 1753, and writes accounts thence of his life and condition.[215] They lived together at the Stone House, which perhaps may still be identified, and which was chosen as their residence for its absolute quiet. Actual gout he seems to have welcomed as a relief from other disorders. He was at one time unable to sleep without opiates. Insomnia produced its usual effects, deep dejection, nay, complete prostration. Like all sufferers under that supreme disability, he was ready to try any remedies; musk was one of these. When the open appearance of gout relieved the sufferer of its more insidious effects, he began a course of mild dissipation. We find him giving a dinner at the New Vauxhall, enriched perhaps by the bounty of Newcastle, who was sending him choice dainties at this time; then a rural entertainment of tea in a tent, where he bade 'his French horn breathe music like the unseen genius of the wood;'[216] a diversion which seems all the more pastoral, when we remember that at the same moment Fox and Hardwicke, the Chancellor, were at each other's throats in St. Stephen's over the Marriage Act. He made excursions to view the fine parks and seats of the neighbourhood, to Penshurst, Buckhurst, and, we may presume, Eridge; we are told that he considered these expeditions as good for the mind as well as the body. Then when he got stronger he went further afield. 'I have made a tour,' he writes, 'of four or five days in Sussex, as far as Hastings; Battel Abbey is very fine, as to situation and lying of ground, together with a great command of water on one side, within an airing; Ashburnham Park most beautiful; Hurtmonceux (sic) very fine, curiously and dismally ugly. On the other side of Battel: Crowhurst, Colonel Pelham's, the sweetest thing in the world; more taste than anywhere, land and sea views exquisite. Beach of four or five miles to Hastings, enchanting Hastings, unique; Fairly Farm, Sir Whistler Webster's, just above it; perfect in its kind, cum multis aliis, &c. I long to be with you' (he is writing to John Pitt, his Dorsetshire kinsman), 'kicking my heels upon your cliffs and looking like a shepherd in Theocritus.'[217] For the sake of his mind, too, he attended 'Mr. King's lectures on philosophy, &c.,' when 'Mr. Pitt, who is desirous of attaining some knowledge in this way, makes him explain things very precisely.' In August, we must note in passing, he begged Newcastle to give him an opportunity of an interview as the duke passed near Tunbridge on the way to Sussex. Even in this amiable note he allows his pique to be visible for a moment. He entirely agrees with the policy of the brothers, but 'What I think concerning publick affairs can import nothing to any one but myself.'[218] On his recovery he went off on a round of country visits to Stowe, Hagley and Hayes; Hayes, then occupied by Mrs. Montagu, which was destined to be the shrine of his passionate affection. Stowe was a second home to him; there we have seen him play cricket, there he entered with zest into the sumptuous plans of landscape gardening, and even advised on architecture. His delight in Hagley, the seat of his friend Lyttelton, was scarcely less keen. 'My dear Billy,' he writes to William Lyttelton, then travelling in Germany, 'I am going in a few days to follow your brother to Hagley, and with all the respect due to the oaks of Germany, I would not quit the Dryads of your father's woods for all the charms of Westphalia. Io già coi campi Elisi fortunato giardin dei Semidei, la vostra ombra gentil non cangerei. You see, the idea of the Germanick body and the heroes and demigods who compose it have made me very poetical.'[219] He had, we may note, when this letter was written (August 1748), just returned from Tunbridge, and had greatly benefited by his stay there. What, we may ask in passing, has become of the efficacious nymphs of all these wells? Have they lost their virtue, or is it only the necessary faith which has disappeared?
From Hagley, Pitt would visit Shenstone at his petty paradise of the Leasowes, and the grateful poet would apostrophise him:
'Ev'n Pitt, whose fervent periods roll
Resistless o'er the kindling soul
Of Senates, Councils, Kings;
Tho' formed for Courts, vouchsafed to move
Inglorious thro' the shepherd's grove,
And ope his bashful springs.'
But Pitt, debarred from the sports of the field, had always taken a lively interest in the laying out of land, in planting, in landscape gardening. He had, to use his own felicitous expression, 'the prophetic eye of taste.' At the Leasowes, at Hagley, at Radway, the Warwickshire seat of Mr. Saunderson Miller,[220] at Wickham, the home of Gilbert West, and at Chevening, the delightful residence of his friend and cousin Lord Stanhope, he freely exercised his gift. He utilised it still more freely and indeed extravagantly at his own homes, for in the pursuit of this hobby he disdained all limitations. Once, when Secretary of State, he was staying with a friend near London whose grounds he had undertaken to adorn and in the evening was summoned suddenly to London. He at once collected all the servants with lanterns, and sallied forth to plant stakes in the different places that he wished to mark for plantations. In later life he ran to still greater extremes. At Burton Pynsent a bleak hill bounded his views and offended his eye. He ordered it to be instantly planted with cedars and cypresses. 'Bless me, my Lord,' said the gardener, 'all the nurseries in the county would not furnish the hundredth part required.' 'No matter; send for them from London. And from London they were sent down by land carriage, at a vast expense. These two familiar anecdotes cannot well be omitted.