The following very graphic and very severe critical estimate of WILLIAM PITT, the great Prime Minister of England during the stormy era of the French Revolution, was written by COLERIDGE for the London Morning Post, with which he was then connected. It appeared in the number of that paper, dated Wednesday, March 19, 1800. We copy it from COLERIDGE'S "Essays on His Own Times," just published in London. * * * * * PLUTARCH, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has generally chosen for each pair of lives the two contemporaries who most nearly resemble each other. His work would, perhaps have been more interesting, if he had adopted the contrary arrangement and selected those rather, who had attained to the possession of similar influence or similar fame, by means, actions, and talents, the most dissimilar. For power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature: and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it co-exist. In our days the two persons, who appear to have influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply and the most diffusively are beyond doubt the Chief Consul of France, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain; and in these two are presented to us similar situations with the greatest dissimilitude of characters. William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham; a fact of no ordinary importance in the solution of his character, of no mean significance in the heraldry of morals and intellect. His father's rank, fame, political connections, and parental ambition were his mould; he was cast, rather than grew. A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind; and that, which he _might have been_, was compelled into that, which he _was to be_. From his early childhood it was his father's custom to make him stand up on a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practiced so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words, which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings. Not the _thing_ on which he was speaking, but the praises to be gained by the speech, were present to his intuition; hence he associated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise excited by them.