British Prime Ministers: The Younger Pitt

“He has patronized no science, he has raised no man of genius from obscurity; he counts no one prime work of God among his friends. From the same source he has no attachment to female society, no fondness for children, no perceptions of beauty in natural scenery; but he is fond of convivial indulgences, of that stimulation which, keeping up the glow of self-importance and the sense of internal power, gives feelings without the mediation of ideas."

Thus, in the year 1800, one man of genius at the age of twenty-eight wrote of another man of genius who was forty-one. Coleridge’s Character of Mr. Pitt appeared in The Morning Post, and it struck the note that was to resound at the mention of “Pitt-and-port” for a hundred years, whenever a Whig or a Radical writer took pen in hand to do injustice to the subject.