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This is patriotism, concerning which Samuel Johnson, reporter in the House of Commons, once made a remark slightly touched with acerbity.

In the years Seventeen Hundred Fifty-eight and Seventeen Hundred Fifty-nine not a month passed but bonfires burned bright from Cornwall to Scotland in honor of English victories on land and sea. In Westphalia, British Infantry defeated the armies of Louis the Fifteenth; Boscawen had sunk a French fleet; Hawke put to flight another; Amherst took Ticonderoga; Clive destroyed a Dutch armament; Wolfe achieved victory and a glorious death at Quebec. English arms had marched triumphant through India and secured for the tight little island an empire, while another had been gained on the shores of Ontario.

For all this the Great Commoner received most of the glory; and that this tremendous popularity was too great to last is but a truism.

But in such a year it was that William Pitt was born. His father was fifty years old, his mother about thirty. This mother was a woman of rare grace, intellect and beauty, the only sister of two remarkable brothers–George Grenville, the obstinate adviser of George the Third, the man who did the most to make America free–unintentionally–and the other brother was Richard Earl Temple, almost equally potent for right or wrong.

That the child of a sensitive mother, born amid such a crash of excitement, should be feeble was to be expected. No one at first expected the baby to survive.

But tenderness and care brought him through, and he grew into a tall, spindling boy whose intellect far outmatched his body. He was too weak to be sent to take his place at a common school, and so his father and mother taught him.

Between the father and the son there grew up a fine bond of affection. Whenever the father made a public address the boy was there to admire and applaud.

The father’s declining fortunes drove him back to his family for repose, and all of his own ambitions became centered in his son. With a younger man this might not have been the case, but the baby boy of an old man means much more to him than a brood coming early.

Daily, this boy of twelve or fourteen would go to his father’s study to recite. Oratory was his aim, and the intent was that he should become the greatest parliamentarian of his time.

This little mutual-admiration society, composed of father and son, speaks volumes for both. Boys reaching out toward manhood, when they are neither men nor boys, often have little respect for their fathers–they consider the pater to be both old-fashioned and tyrannical. And the father, expecting too much of the son, often fails in faith and patience. But there was no such failure here. Chatham personally superintended the matter of offhand translation, and this practise was kept up daily from the time the boy was eight years old until he was nineteen, when his father died.

Then there was the tutor Pretyman who must not be left out. He was a combination valet and teacher, and the most pedantic and idolatrous person that ever moused through dusty tomes. With a trifle more adipose and a little less intellect, he would have made a most successful and awful butler. He seemed a type of the English waiter who by some chance had acquired a college education, and never said a wrong thing, nor did a right one, during his whole life.

Pretyman wrote a life of Pitt, and according to Macaulay it enjoys the distinction of being the worst biography ever written. Lord Rosebery, however, declares the book is not so bad as it might be. I believe there are two other biographies equally stupid: Weems’ “Life of Washington,” and the book on Gainsborough, by Thicknesse. Weems’ book was written to elevate his man into a demigod; Thicknesse was intent on lowering his subject and exalting himself; while Pretyman extols himself and his subject equally, revealing how William Pitt could never have been William Pitt were it not for his tutor. Pretyman emphasizes trifles, slights important matters, and waxes learned concerning the irrelevant.