We are the shepherds sent to tend the flock,
Sent to protect from wrong, not to destroy.
Oh! Florus! When thou govern’st our domains,
Bear these thy father’s precepts in thy mind.
Thro’ love control thy subjects, not thro’ fear.
The people’s love the bulwark of thy throne.
Give not thy mind to passion or revenge,
But let fair Mercy ever sway thy soul.[53]
It is fairly certain that none of the children but William could have written these lines; and the fact that the mainspring of the action is political further stamps the play as his own. Some Spirit of the Future seems to have hovered over him, for the mental derangement of George III in 1788 brought to the front questions relating to a Regency not very unlike those sketched by the boy playwright. The sense of loyalty and devotion which informs the play was then also to guide Pitt’s footsteps through a bewildering maze. Indeed this effusion seems almost like a marionette’s version of the Regency affair: Laurentius is a more romantic George III, Pompilius quite startlingly foreshadows Pitt the Prime Minister, the Prince of Wales (an undutiful Florus) and Fox may pass for the conspirators; and the motif of the play twangs a mimic prelude to the intrigues of Carlton House. In the acting of the play the elder brother seems far to have surpassed William, who bore himself stiffly and awkwardly. Such was the testimony of young Addington, a lifelong friend, who saw the play acted on another occasion at Hayes.[54] The criticism is valuable as showing how ingrained in Pitt’s nature was the shyness and gaucherie in public which were ever to hamper his progress.
Juvenile authorship has its dangers for a delicate child; and we are not surprised to find from notes left by his first tutor to Bishop Tomline that the half of Pitt’s boyhood was beset by illnesses which precluded all attempt at study. But nothing stopped the growth of his mental powers, which Wilson summed up in the Platonic phrase, “Pitt seemed never to learn but merely to recollect.” At the age of fourteen and a half, then, he was ripe for Cambridge. It is true that youths then entered the English Universities at an age fully as early as the Scottish lads who went from the parish school, or manse, straight to Edinburgh or Aberdeen. Charles James Fox, Gibbon, and the lad who became Lord Eldon, entered Oxford at fifteen. Wilberforce, who at seventeen went up from Hull to St. John’s College, Cambridge, was probably the senior of most of the freshmen of his year; but the case of Pitt was even then exceptional.