And thro’ the world shall spread his ceaseless praise.
Their hands alone can match the Heav’nly strain
And with due fire his wond’rous glories sing.
The poem, which is in William’s handwriting, shows that by the age of twelve he had acquired the trick—it was no more—of writing in the style of Pope and Johnson. The lines remind us of the felicitous phrase in which Cowper characterized the output of that school:
The click-clock tintinnabulum of rhyme.
But they show neatness of thought and phrase. In a word, they are good Johnsonese.
The same quality of sonorous ponderosity is observable in Pitt’s letters of 3rd June 1771 to his uncle the statesman, Earl Temple, thanking him for a present, in which the names of Lyttelton and Coke are invoked. In the following sentences the trend of the boy’s thoughts is very marked: “I revere this gift the more, as I have heard Lyttelton and Coke were props of the Constitution, which is a synonimous [sic] term for just Liberty.” The “marvellous boy” ends by quoting part of a line of Virgil, which still more powerfully inspired him:
avunculus excitat Hector.
The next year saw the production of a play, which he and his brothers and sisters acted at Burton Pynsent on 30th May 1772. Here again the motive is solely political: a King, Laurentius, on his way homeward, after a successful war, suffers shipwreck, and is mourned as dead. The news leads an ambitious counsellor, Gordinus, to plot the overthrow of the regency of the Queen; but his advances are repelled by a faithful minister, Pompilius—the character played by William Pitt—in the following lines:
Our honoured Master’s steps may guide her on,