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The Eloquence of the British Senate expands Hazlitt’s critique of William Pitt the Younger's "mechanical" rhetoric in Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806) by showing the historical

factors that allowed Pitt to flourish by the turn of the nineteenth century. Although Hazlitt admires Parliamentary speeches that argue and persuade, he identifies Pitt with the epideictic bullying that characterizes the classical education of elite MPs in the eighteenth century. Pitt uses his orations to bolster existing conditions such as England’s prolonged continental wars. He typifies "the mechanical exercise of [a politician's] profession" through a reliance on superficial commonplaces (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2. 206).

Hazlitt sets the stage for Pitt’s ascendancy during the decline of Parliamentary oratory in the 1730s. 105 According to Hazlitt, Robert Walpole “turned Parliament into a regular debating society” (The Eloquence of the British Senate 1. 382). After a period in which Parliament’s desire to limit the monarchy’s power endued orators with “a manly tone, a solidity, and a fervor which could hardly be produced in any other circumstances,” the Hanoverian kings ushered in a period of factional infighting that reduced parliamentary discourse to declamatory games (The Eloquence of the British Senate 1. 363). In the sketch of Walpole, Hazlitt contends that

legislating has become a school exercise in which participants hurl commonplaces at one another: “The house of commons instead of being the representative and depository of the collective sense of the nation, has become a theatre for wrangling disputants to declaim in the scene of noisy impertinence and pedantic folly” (The Eloquence of the British Senate 1. 383). The words “disputants,” “declaim,” "wrangling," and “pedantic” recall the OxBridge practices familiar to MPs, while the images of a “theatre” and a “scene” turn the House of Commons into a farcical performance. (1. 383). Political discourse has become "a set of words…substituted for the silent operation of general feeling and good sense”(The Eloquence of the British Senate 1. 383). These “empty shews of reason” pervert Parliament’s mission to serve as the “collective” voice of the people and simply reinforce the interests of the aristocracy. The same sort of

discourse that sounds like a flaw of eighteenth-century poetry to Wordsworth has deleterious effects for political decision making and the nation as a whole.106

Hazlitt also anticipates Pitt’s mechanical rhetoric in his sketch of Earl Chatham, the elder William Pitt. For Hazlitt, both Pitts represent the disastrous effects of a reduced classicism that pervades elite education in the eighteenth century. Chatham was a staunch defender of

Parliament’s power and a "high priest of the British Constitution," but Hazlitt faults his reliance on "the habitual prejudices of mankind" or empty patriotic appeals. In this sketch, he further quips that “the business of an orator is not to convince but persuade; not to inform, but to rouse the mind; to build upon the habitual prejudices of mankind…and [add] action to feeling” (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2.4). Hazlitt’s riff on the “business of an orator” not only recalls Aristotle but also the eighteenth-century neoclassical rhetorician Lord Chesterfield, as quoted in The British Cicero: ”the business of Oratory...is to persuade people" (Browne 1. 29).

Chesterfield opts for a softer approach to rhetoric in which “pleasing people” is the “first step towards persuasion,” but Hazlitt suggest that pleasing an audience is bullying an audience with emotional appeals and “big words” that reinforce the dominant beliefs.

Chatham’s son, William Pitt, represents the nadir of this problematic rhetoric in the early nineteenth century. In a passage reprinted from Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, Hazlitt

criticizes Pitt's "monotonous and artificial" style:

If he could pretend to any excellence in an eminent degree it was to taste in composition. There is certainly nothing low, nothing puerile, nothing far-fetched or abrupt in his speeches; there is a kind of faultless regularity pervading them throughout; but in the confined, mechanical and passive mode of eloquence which

he adopted, it seemed rather more difficult to commit errors than to avoid them (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2. 497).

Like Coleridge, Hazlitt participates in an early nineteenth-century repudiation of Samuel Johnson’s balanced style, or the “faultless regularity” of sentences that defined eighteenth- century taste, by scorning Pitt’s “mechanical” and “passive” sentences. Hazlitt connects Pitt’s style to his investment in the status quo. Pitt thinks like “a man who is determined never to go off of the beaten road,” and balanced sentences and flawless grammar attest to his reliance on the dominant political institutions and protocols (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2. 497).

Although it is difficult to trace Pitt’s balanced sentences in the transcripts that Hazlitt employs, Pitt’s 1796 reply to Fox’s demand for peace with France shows his investment in the status quo.107 Pitt “vindicates the first proposition contained in his Majesty’s speech” (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2. 533). He goes on to uphold the king’s command to continue the war with France: “allowing for the victories and advantages obtained by the enemy, and for all the calamities which had befallen this country…, the house, from looking at the present principles of the war, must observe the grounds of his [King’s] satisfaction and the state of our improvement.” In this paraphrase of the speech's introduction, Pitt equates the “calamities” of losing the wars with “improvement”! Through Hazlitt’s commentary and prior reporters’

transcriptions, Pitt appears as the pawn of monarchical interests spouting contradictory assertions about Britain’s (lack of) progress in the French war.

As this speech transcript illustrates, Pitt offers the tautologies and stilted emotional appeals that exemplify the reduced rhetorical practices in the classical curriculum. Hazlitt describes Pitt’s grammatically exact speeches in terms of these exercises: “You would not suppose him to be agitating a serious question which had real grounds to go upon but to be

declaiming upon an imaginary thesis, proposed as an exercise in the schools” (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2. 495). As in the Walpole sketch, Hazlitt paints declamation as a superficial discourse that reduces political issues to “commonplaces” (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2. 496). However, Pitt’s rhetoric is powerful precisely because it is so flimsy: "the total

indistinctness and uncertainty of his own ideas tended to confound the perceptions of his hearers more effectually than the most ingenuous misrepresentation could have done." Pitt appeals to members of opposing political parties who take his vapid speeches to mean what they want, which enables the Commons to expedite his agenda. Hazlitt stresses that this “mechanical” style is a product of classical education and Parliamentary procedures because Pitt's speeches “were exactly fitted for the situation in which he was placed” (The Eloquence of the British Senate 2. 498).

The mechanical William Pitt anticipates Hazlitt’s satire on the “Political Automaton,” or the politician who spouts empty phrases to advance the ruling faction. In a December 1813 editorial for The Morning Chronicle, Hazlitt introduces the automaton in language that resembles his sketch of Pitt in Eloquence: "It strains hard to reconcile contradictions, and redoubles the loudness of its vaunts...to hide the extravagance of its pretensions” (The Complete Works of William Hazlitt 19. 117). Like Pitt, the automaton elaborates on commonplaces to "treat the interests of the state as the playthings of its pen" and serve "the will of its employer," the

monarchy. In an allusion to Macbeth, Hazlitt compares the automaton's manipulative speech to a "poor player...[who] struts and frets itself into the notion of the reality of the part it is acting," an image that also recalls the parliamentary "theatre… of noisy impertinence" in Eloquence. Like the poet laureate who composes trite “birthday odes” for the king, the "political automaton" transforms serious issues into superficial epideictic displays that reaffirm the existing political

conditions and values. Unfortunately for Hazlitt, this "mechanical" rhetoric becomes a fixture of early nineteenth-century British parliamentary discourse, as I discuss in the next chapter on The Spirit of the Age.