14 JANUARY 1949, Page 18

WHICH PITT' ?

Sta,—In the answers to your Christmas CoMpetition questions you attribute " The atrocious crime of being a young man I shall attempt neither to palliate nor deny " to William Pitt the Younger (which seems eminently sensible to me, and is what I thought I learned at school), but the Oxford Book of English Quotations (page 297) attribUtes it to a speech made by William Pitt the Elder in 1741. Who, now, has nodded?