“The Duchess of Devonshire,” writes Lord Cornwallis, on the 19th of April, “is indefatigable in her canvass for Fox. She was in the most blackguard houses in Long Acre by eight o’clock this morning.” The fact of the duchess having purchased the vote of an impracticable butcher by a kiss is said to be unquestionable. It was on one of these occasions that the well-known compliment is said to have been made her by an Irish mechanic, “_I could light my pipe at your eyes_.” Of great beauty and unconquerable spirit, she tried all her powers of persuasion on the shopkeepers of Westminster, as Earl Stanhope declares in his “Life of Pitt”:-- “Other ladies, who could not rival her beauty, might at least follow her example. Scarce a street or alley which they did not canvass on behalf of him whom they persisted in calling the ‘Man of the People,’ at the very moment when the popular voice was declaring against him.” Pitt and his royal patron were, however, exerting every method to secure the downfall of the redoubtable “Carlo Khan.” Up to the third day of the polling, “Fox was in a minority, notwithstanding the immense exertions that were made on his behalf. The Ministerial Party,” according to the statement of their own historians, “were sanguine in the hope of wresting from him the greatest and most enlightened, as it was then considered, of all the represented boroughs of England.” Pitt’s proud spirit was roused at the obstinacy of the contest, and, unlike his more magnanimous if not greater rival, he lost patience with his opponents; in a strain of acrimonious pleasantry he wrote to Wilberforce, “Westminster goes on well in spite of the Duchess of Devonshire and the other _Women of the People_, but when the poll will close is uncertain;” this was on the seventh day of the poll, and Pitt then little dreamt of its running for forty days uninterruptedly. By the 23rd of April, the premier was evidently losing temper, and the strain of electioneering was becoming tenser, as appears from a letter written to his cousin, James Grenville, afterwards Lord Glastonbury:-- “MY DEAR SIR,