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Biographies and Portraits of Some Celebrated People
Biographies and Portraits of Some Celebrated People Author:Alphonse de Lamartine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: long as nations are not irremediably condemned to die, Providence always gives birth to the necessary man. It was then that William Pitt came into the world. ... more »He was born at Westminster, on the 8th November, 1708. His family was illustrious through public employments and alliances with the noblest houses of the English aristocracy. His grandfather, Thomas Pitt, had governed some provinces in India. A diamond of immense size, which he had purchased of a Hindoo during his stay in India, and which he afterwards sold to the King of France at the price of two millions, had considerably augmented his fortune. That of the father of William Pitt was by no means in accordance with his birth. This father, who died when still young, left to his son only an annuity of one hundred guineas. The guardians of the child brought him up for the military profession, after he had studied for a short time at Eton; he entered the service with the commission of a cavalry officer. But the weakness of his constitution was an obstacle to his advancement in the army. Attacked from the age of sixteen by the gout, which was hereditary in his family, the young officer, often obliged to yield to the pain, deplored his precocious infirmity in solitude and in inaction. But his ardent spirit, which could ill brook the immobility of his body, avenged itself upon nature, by study and by the ceaseless perusal of books. He plunged especially into antiquity, that ceaseless source of ideas and examples; he there sought, amongst the poets, the philosophers, the statesmen, the orators, what was most applicable to his country and to his times. He conjured up, with the force of a powerful imagination, the parts and the words which the great characters of Athens or of Rome would have played or spoken under the circumstan...« less