There was another weighty consideration which pointed to prompt acceptance. Pitt had no time to spare. He was no longer in his first youth, he was approaching middle age. When he accepted this subordinate post he was thirty-eight; and thirty-eight, it may be said, when the lives of statesmen were comparatively short, was a more mature period in a career than it would be considered now. At the age when Pitt became Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, North was already Prime Minister. Pitt was now seven years older than Grafton when he became Prime Minister, and fifteen years older than his own son when he first led the House of Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer; both, of course, under circumstances abnormally propitious. These figures show sufficiently not merely that Pitt's career was, so to speak, in arrear, but that the youthfulness of ministers in those days, under the favouring breezes of birth and connection, affords no standard of comparison for the possibilities of a poor country gentleman with no such advantages. Pitt was, indeed, rather old than young of his age. His sickly youth and his habitual infirmities had aged him beyond his years. But it must be noted in passing that, in spite of the dire impetuosity of his character, all his steps in life, except his entry into Parliament, were tardy and delayed. He was forty-six when he married, and forty-eight when he first entered the Cabinet; he was thirty-eight when he first obtained office. He moved slowly, but not patiently. His glowing nature, thrown back on itself, exacerbated by rebuffs and neglect, all fused into a fierce scorn, the _sæva indignatio_ of Swift, gathered strength and intensity in its restrained progress, until it developed into a spirit not indeed amiable or attractive, but of indomitable and superhuman force. That was the process which was at work in the shade of subordinate office.