[471] "Parl. Hist.," xxxiii, 1434–54, 1481; "Mems. of Sir John Sinclair," i, 310, 311.
[472] Addington's description (Pellew, "Sidmouth," i, 206) fixes the spot. Mr. A. Hawkes, in an article in the "Wimbledon Annual" for 1904, places it in front of the house called "Scio," but it must be the deeper hollow towards Kingston Vale. Caricatures of the time wrongly place the duel on the high ground near the windmill. A wag chalked on Abershaw's gibbet a figure of the two duellers, Tierney saying: "As well fire at the devil's darning-needle."
[473] Pretyman MSS.; "Dropmore P.," iv, 222.
[474] The hero is probably Robert Adair, the Whig "envoy" to St. Petersburg in 1791,
"the youth whose daring soul
With half a mission sought the frozen pole."
Pitt's authorship of the lines quoted above is denied by Mr. Lloyd Sanders in his Introduction to the "Anti-Jacobin" (Methuen, 1904); but his arguments are not conclusive. Lines 370–80 of "New Morality" are also said to be by Pitt.
[475] In "Pitt and Napoleon Miscellanies" I shall describe Pitt's work in the national defence. See an excellent account of the popular literature of the time in "Napoleon and the Invasion of England," by H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley, i, ch. vii.
[476] Pitt MSS., 108. See "Pitt and Napoleon Miscellanies," for a fuller investigation of the Fitzwilliam affair in the light of new evidence.
[477] Lecky, vii, 41–4.
[478] "Dropmore P.," iii, 35–8.