ABSTRACT
Governor William Pitt, the old buccaneer, is best known to history as the owner of the Pitt Diamond, which afterwards glittered in the sword of his great grandson’s mighty foe. He broke the ground for the achievements of his descendants, and formed a link in their succession from the bygone Baleighs and Drakes. While William Pitt was a boy at Eton, it is recorded that his grandfather Thomas, the great Governor of Madras, used occasionally to fetch him over to his house at Swallowfield, and took favourable notice of the boy’s capacity. In Governor Pitt seem to see the first riotous exuberance of a healthy but untutored growth; in Lord Chatham the glorious and ungrudging plenty of the fullest crop ; and in his son a fruitful return, but without that bounteous richness of savour that marks in men’s memories the noblest years of the land’s prosperity.
