As to Lady Hester's having a 'very common understanding' and being 'totally devoid of tenderness' we need not rest on tradition, though that is all the other way; for the superiority of her understanding and her tenderness are amply proved by the admirable letters published from the Pretyman Papers by Lord Ashbourne; and her devotion to her husband is attested by Camelford himself. How he became acquainted with the details of courtship, usually mysterious enough, and in those days more veiled than in these, we need not trouble to inquire. When it took place Pitt was taking time which he could ill spare to write letters of anxious and affectionate solicitude to Camelford at Cambridge, and receiving in return the most unbounded assurances of grateful devotion. Pitt's love letters, alas! survive; the treasures of his wife, but the despair of posterity. That a great genius presumably in love should send such stilted, pompous, artificial documents as tokens of his passion to the object of his affections is one of the mysteries of brain and heart. They are as wretched in their way as the letters of Burns to Clarinda, and shall not be quoted here. Having paid his betrothed a flying visit at Stowe, the blithe bridegroom had as usual to proceed to Bath, where he remained a fortnight inditing these execrable epistles of rhetorical affection. CHAPTER XVII. [Sidenote: 1754.] On November 14, the very day of the opening of Parliament, Pitt brought forward a bill for the relief of the Chelsea Pensioners, who, from receiving their pensions a year in arrear, fell inextricably into the hands of usurers. He was in haste to perform this useful duty, for on November 16 he was married by special licence to Lady Hester at Argyll Buildings, Dr. Ayscough officiating; and Solomon and Esther, as Lady Townshend called them, thence departed for the honeymoon to West's house of Wickham in Kent. That interval of seclusion did not last long, but it would seem to have effected a striking transformation. The marriage marks a new ascent in Pitt's career; love seemed to have transformed him; always powerful and eloquent, he became sublime. Into his former qualities there had passed an inspiration kindred to the divine passion which makes the poet. The timid warblers of the grove, as he was afterwards to call them, the politicians who sought quiet lives and safe places, the arch-jobber himself who had for years deluded him, were in an instant to realise that a new terror was added to life. For on November 25 he was once more in the House of Commons. At this time, just before or just after the meeting of Parliament, he had come to open words with Newcastle. The Duke had offered the usual palliatives. 'Fewer words, if you please, my Lord,' replied Pitt contemptuously, 'for your words have long lost all weight with me.' Fox had said much the same to Newcastle in March. The new Minister had therefore been grossly insulted by the two first men in the House of Commons.