Note 474 — Chapter XV
Reading edition
The hero is probably Robert Adair, the Whig "envoy" to St. Petersburg in 1791,
"the youth whose daring soul With half a mission sought the frozen pole."
Pitt's authorship of the lines quoted above is denied by Mr. Lloyd Sanders in his Introduction to the "Anti-Jacobin" (Methuen, 1904); but his arguments are not conclusive. Lines 370–80 of "New Morality" are also said to be by Pitt.