In his fourteenth year, young Pitt was sent to the University of Cambridge, and entered at Pembroke Hall, where Dr. Prettyman, afterward Bishop of Lincoln, was his tutor. In age and appearance, indeed, he was a mere boy; but he was by no means boyish in mind or intellect. His acquirements were wonderful, and he could converse on various subjects with all the seriousness of manhood. He was much liked by his youthful compeers for his lively and amiable disposition; and at the same time esteemed by the tutors on account of his decorum in conduct and diligence in study. His manners in private life were then, as ever, frank, easy, agreeable, and utterly devoid of the cold arrogance and unbending demeanor he exhibited in his senatorial capacity. Lord Chatham had desired and intended that Pitt should become a candidate for academical honors, but the gifted youth was prevented by weak health from keeping the requisite terms. Nevertheless, he obtained the degree of A.M. in compliment to his illustrious parentage, without any public examination. His juvenile contemporaries on the occasion testified their approval of his being thus distinguished by interrupting the public orator with loud and vehement acclamations. One of his warmly-attached college friends was Wilberforce, who entered upon public life about the same date as himself. When Pitt left Cambridge, he was accomplished in no ordinary degree. In Latin authors he rarely encountered a difficulty; and he had, even at his entrance, been capable of translating pages of Thucydides with scarcely an error. He was intimately acquainted with the beauties and defects of the works he had perused. Indeed those who observed the ease with which at first sight he read obscure books, state, that his facility would have appeared beyond the compass of human intellect, if they had not actually witnessed it. During his residence at college his diligence in learning was exemplary, and his success remarkable. His education was conducted with a view to the struggles of the bar as well as the conflicts of the senate; his attention to study was of the strictest kind; and he displayed eminent qualifications for entering on either path of life. He made himself intimately acquainted with the legal history of the country, studied the policy of modern nations as well as their constitutions and forms of government, and acquired much knowledge of the origin, prosperity, and decline of states that had existed and been influential in remote times. His peculiar quickness of conception rendered his progress in these branches of information comparatively easy; and when he left college, after an unusually long residence, his mind was as perfectly formed as mere theory could make it. He long retained his love for ancient learning; and even amid the bustle of politics and the devising of budgets and subsidies, was seldom without some work from which to refresh his mind with classical lore.