ABSTRACT
The impressive study of the life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was first published in 1913 when it achieved instant recognition as a brilliant appraisal of Pitt's career. Financial troubles helped to sadden the latter end of Chatham's life. Always inclined to be lavish and pompous in his style of living, during his last illness he had squandered enormous sums in useless building and in repurchasing Hayes at a fancy price. Hollis and other friends with experience of farming were taken into counsel, and some of the worst extravagances of Chatham's own estate-management were cut down. Chatham himself read the Bible and Shakespeare regularly to the family, but, more than by all his reading or his set instructions, by unstudied talks about the kings and great men he had known, and the great affairs in which he had taken part, he implanted in them a practical sense of statecraft and a high ideal of duty.
