CHAPTER XIII.

RALPH THICKNESSE.

RESPECTING this almost forgotten scholar, we have been able to glean but little information beyond a fact, probably already well known to the classical reader, that he gave to the world an edition of Phædrus with English notes. He was born in or about the year 1707. His father was the Rev. John Thicknesse, Rector of Farthinghoe, in Northamptonshire, who died in 1725, before his son had quitted Eton. His mother, Joyce Blencowe, was the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman, and niece of Sir John Blencowe, one of the justices of the Common Pleas. According to one of his sons, Philip Thicknesse, the author of a curious autobiography, from which the preceding details have been chiefly gleaned, -she brought her husband no other fortune but "her many virtues," and proved the "excellent mother" of eight children.

In 1727 Ralph Thicknesse was elected from the foundation at Eton to King's College, Cambridge; in 1730 he took his degree of B. A., and in 1736 as M. A. After having obtained his fellowship at King's, he passed ten years of his com

paratively short life as an assistant master at Eton. Besides being an accomplished scholar, he was a musician, a humourist, and apparently a man much beloved by his friends.

The fact is a remarkable one, that in one and the same year (1742) the subject of this brief memoir should have been an Eton master, should have published his edition of Phædrus, have narrowly missed the honour of being elected Provost of King's by his brother fellows, and have been appointed "lieutenant of an independent company at Jamaica." His commission was obtained for him by his friend, Sir Edward Walpole, its value being enhanced by his receiving a promise of leave of absence till such time as he might succeed to the command of a company, of which the emoluments are said to have been worth £1,000 a year. He immediately hurried up to London to

obtain his mandamus from the then Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Charles, famous as the "proud Duke of Somerset," to one of whose exclusive banquets he had the exceptional honour of being invited. One incident of the evening he related to his brother Philip. Dinner, he said, when served up, was announced to the company by one of his Grace's servants presenting himself, holding in his right hand a silver staff, somewhat resembling a bishop's crosier, and three times pronouncing the words, first of all forte, then piano, then pianissimo: "My Lord Duke of Somerset

My Lord Duke of Somerset- My Lord Duke of Somerset Your Grace's dinner is upon the table."

From London Ralph Thicknesse proceeded to Bath, where he survived his arrival only a few days. He was playing the first violin at the performance of a composition of his own, at a morning concert in that city, when his head suddenly dropped, and, almost as suddenly, life became extinct. The inscription placed on his monument in the Abbey Church at Bath was written by his former gifted schoolfellow, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams; besides which, a Doctor Oliver, who was at his side when he expired, composed some elegiac verses on his death; verses which - less on account of their literary merit, than as bearing testimony to the social virtues and accomplishments of the deadwe are induced to lay before the reader :

"Weep, O ye wits! who ever laughed before,
Thicknesse, your favourite Thicknesse, jokes no more.
No more his Attic salt, his Roman fire,
The social band delighted shall admire.
Hushed be all harmony except the strain

That's taught in mournful numbers to complain

How he, who sounds celestial could combine,

Was snatch'd from earth in heavenly choir to shine.

Ye poets, sweet companions of his youth,

Quit all your fables, and adorn the truth;

In elegiac plaints his story tell,

How loved he lived, and how lamented fell."

Ralph Thicknesse expired on the 11th of October, 1742, apparently at the age of thirty-five.

CHAPTER XIV.

WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM.

DURING the more than four centuries that Eton has been the prolific mother of the gifted and the illustrious, she has given birth to no nobler son than the elder William Pitt, "the Great Commoner," as he was affectionately styled by his contemporaries, "the great Earl of Chatham" of our own time. William Pitt was born on the 15th of November, 1708. According to his biographer, the Rev. F. Thackeray, he first saw the light in the parish of St. James, Westminster; while Seward, in his "Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons," no less confidently states that he was born at Stratford House, at the foot of the fortress of Old Sarum, in Wiltshire. The former statement we believe to comprise the truth. His father was Robert Pitt, Esq., of Boconnoc, in Cornwall, one of the clerks of the green cloth to George II. when Prince of Wales, and member of Parliament successively for Old Sarum and Okehampton. He died in 1727, apparently about two years after his son must have left Eton. Mr.

'An engraved view of Stratford House forms the frontispiece to Seward's second volume.

Pitt's mother, who survived her husband nine years, was Harriet Villiers, sister of John, Lord Grandison. Through her he was lineally descended from Sir George Villiers, father of the powerful favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; as likewise was his schoolfellow, Henry Fielding, through his ancestress, Susan, Countess of Denbigh, sister of the great duke. Mr. Pitt's paternal grandfather, it should be mentioned, was the well-known Governor Pitt, who purchased in the East Indies, for £20,400, the famous Pitt diamond, weighing 127 carats, which he afterward sold for £135,000 to the King of France.

Of William Pitt's Eton days we have little to record beyond the well-known legend of his having been once subjected to an unusually severe flogging, as the penalty of his having been caught out of bounds, to which we may add the further fact of his having, while still an Eton boy, suffered from the merciless enemy of his maturer years, the gout. On leaving Eton, where his progress in the classics is said to have been watched placido lumine by Doctor Bland, he studied for a short time at the University of Utrecht; a fact overlooked by his biographers, but which he has himself recorded in a letter to Lord Shelburne. His next removal was to Trinity College, Oxford, where he was admitted as a gentleman commoner on the 10th of January, 1726, and whence, without remaining long enough to take his degree, he departed