The earl and his pupil remained that day and night at Kew, in company with Doddington and a few other friends, and the next morning rode up to St. James's, in London, to meet the great officers of state. At that interview, Pitt presented the young king with an address to be pronounced at a meeting of the Privy Council. The minister was informed that one had already been prepared. This announcement opened to the sagacious mind of Pitt a broad and gloomy view of the future. He perceived that Bute was to be the ruling spirit in the new cabinet; that he whom he despised for his weakness and illiberality, his pedantic assumption of superior scholarship, and his merited unpopularity with the people, was to be the bosom friend and adviser of the king. Pitt well knew his unfitness, and deplored the consequences. Unwilling to be held in the least responsible for errors which were certain to abound in the administration of affairs, he soon withdrew to his mansion at Hayes, and watched, with all the interest and anxiety of a statesman and patriot, the gradual weaving of the web of difficulty in which the impotent men who surrounded the king, were soon ensnared. By virtue of his office as groom of the stole, Bute was sworn in a Privy Councilor, and, by degrees he obtained the control of the cabinet. For nearly ten years his unwise advice and defective statesmanship, in the cabinet and in the parlor, led George the Third into many and grave errors, which finally resulted in the loss of the fairest portion of his American possessions. Had Pitt been allowed to guide the public policy and direct the honest but stubborn mind of the king at the beginning of his long reign of half a century, these United States might have remained a part of the British Empire fifty years longer. But that great man, whose genius as a statesman, eloquence and wisdom as a legislator, and whose thorough knowledge of human nature and the past history of the world, made him peerless, and whose administration of government during almost the entire progress of _The Seven Years' War_, had carried England to a height of prosperity and influence which she had never before approached, was superseded by a fop; his eminent worth was overlooked; his services were apparently forgotten, and he was allowed to retire from office and leave the young sovereign and his government in the hands of weak, crafty, and selfish men. The people venerated Pitt; they despised the very name of Stuart. They deprecated the influence of the king's mother as being unfavorable to popular freedom. A placard which appeared upon the Royal Exchange, bearing, in large letters, the significant expression of "No petticoat government--no Scotch minister--no Lord George Sackville," prefigured those popular tumults which soon afterward disturbed the metropolis and extended to the American colonies. That placard was the harbinger of that great DECLARATION, the adoption of which by a representative Congress of the