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A legacy coming to Pretyman, he changed his name to Tomline, as women change their names when they marry or enter a convent.

Religion to Pitt was quite a perfunctory affair, necessary, of course; but a bishop in England was one who could do little good and, fortunately, not much harm. With an irony too subtle to be seen by but very few, Pitt when twenty-seven years of age made his old tutor Bishop of Winchester. Tomline proved an excellent and praiseworthy bishop; and his obsequious loyalty to Pitt led to the promise that if the Primacy should become vacant, Tomline was to be made Archbishop of Canterbury.

This promise was told by the unthinking Tomline, and reached the ears of George the Third, a man who at times was very much alert.

There came a day when the Primacy was vacant, and to head off the nomination by Pitt, the King one morning at eight o’clock walked over to the residence of Bishop Manners Somers and plied the knocker.

The servant who answered the summons explained that the Bishop was taking his bath and could not be seen until he had had breakfast.

But the visitor was importunate.

The servant went back to his master and explained that the stout man at the door would neither go away nor tell his name, but must see his lordship at once.

When the Bishop appeared in his dressing-gown and saw the King, he nearly had apoplexy. But the King quickly told his errand and made his friend Primate on the doorstep, with the butler and the housemaid for witnesses.

Later in the day when Pitt appeared at the palace he was told that a Primate had been appointed–the King was very sorry, but the present incumbent could not be removed unless charges were preferred. Pitt smilingly congratulated the King on the wisdom of his choice, but afterward referred to the transaction as “a rather scurvy trick.”

At twenty-three years of age, William Pitt entered the House of Commons from the same borough that his father had represented at twenty-seven. His elder brother made way, just as had the elder brother of his father.

The first speech he made in Parliament fixed his place in that body. His fame had preceded him, and when he arose every seat was taken to hear the favorite son of the Earl of Chatham, the greatest orator England had ever seen.

The subject was simply a plan of finance, and lacked all excuse for fine phrasing or flavor of sentiment. And what should a boy of twenty-three know about a nation’s financial policy?

Yet this boy knew all about it. Figures, statistics, results, conclusions, were shown in a steady, flowing, accurate, lucid manner. The young man knew his theme–every byway, highway and tracing of it. By that speech he proved his mathematical genius, and blazed the way straight to the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Not only did he know his theme, but he had the ability to explain it. He spoke without hesitation or embarrassment, and revealed the same splendid dignity that his father had shown, all flavored by the same dash of indifference for the auditor. But the discerning ones saw that he surpassed his father, in that he carried more reserve and showed a suavity that was not the habit of Chatham.

And the man was there–mighty and self-reliant.

The voice is the index of the soul. The voice of the two Pitts was the same voice, we have been told–a deep, rich, cultivated lyric-barytone. It was a trained voice, a voice that came from a full column of air, that never broke into a screech, rasping the throat of the speaker and the ear of the listener. It was the natural voice carefully developed by right use. The power of Pitt lay in his cold, calculating intellect, but the instrument that made manifest this intellect was his deep, resonant, perfectly controlled voice.

Pitt never married, and according to the biting phrase of Fox, all he knew of love was a description of it he got from the Iliad. That is to say, he was separated from it about three thousand years. This is a trifle too severe, for when twenty-one years of age he met the daughter of Necker at Paris–she who was to give the world of society a thrill as Madame de Stael. And if the gossips are right it was not the fault of Pitt that a love-match did not follow. But the woman gauged the man, and she saw that love to him would be merely an incident, not a consuming passion, and she was not the woman to write a book on Farthest North. She dallied with the young man a day, and then sent him about his business, exasperated and perplexed. He could strike fire with men as flint strikes on steel, but women were outside his realm.