1694, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, born 22nd September. 1712, Chesterfield entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge (as Stanhope). 1715, Appointed Gentleman of the Bed-chamber to the Prince of Wales. 1715, Entered the House of Commons as M.P. for St. Germains. 1723, Appointed Captain of the Guard. 1726, Succeeds to the Earldom, on the death of his father. 1727, Chesterfield appointed Ambassador at the Hague. 1730, Appointed Lord Steward and invested with the Garter. 1732, His son, Philip Stanhope, born. 1733, Dismissed from office by the King, in consequence of his opposition to Walpole’s Excise Bill. 1733, Married Melosina de Schoulenberg, Countess of Walsingham (daughter, as supposed, of George I.). She died without issue in 1778. 1737, Speech against Bill for Licensing Theatres. 1739, Commencement of his “Letters to his Son;” continued to the death of the latter in 1768. 1744, Appointed Envoy to the Hague. 1745 and 1746, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, from May, 1745, to Nov. 18, 1746—residing the last six months in England. 1746, Secretary of State, Offered a Dukedom. 1748, Resigns 6th February, owing to his opposition to the War. 1751, Proposed and carried the Reformation of the Calendar. 1752, His deafness commences. 1755, His Godson and successor, Philip Stanhope, son of Arthur Charles Stanhope, born 28th November. 1761, Commencement of his “Letters to his Godson.” 1768, Death of his Son. 1773, Died 24th March.

Personal

  Lord Chesterfield was allowed by everybody to have more conversable entertaining table-wit than any man of his time; his propensity to ridicule, in which he indulged himself with infinite humour and no distinction, and with inexhaustible spirits and no discretion, made him sought and feared, liked and not loved, by most of his acquaintance; no sex, no relation, no rank, no power, no profession, no friendship, no obligation, was a shield from those pointed, glittering weapons, that seemed to shine only to a stander-by, but cut deep in those they touched…. With a person as disagreeable as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following many women of the first beauty and most in fashion; and, if you would have taken his word for it, not without success; whilst in fact and in truth, he never gained any one above the venal rank of those whom an Adonis or a Vulcan might be equally well with, for an equal sum of money. He was very short, disproportioned, thick and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus. One Ben Ashurst,… told Lord Chesterfield once that he was like a stunted giant which was a humorous idea and really apposite.

  Chesterfield is a little, tea-table scoundrel, that tells little womanish lies to make quarrels in families; and tries to make women lose their reputations, and make their husbands beat them, without any object but to give himself airs; as if anybody could believe a woman could like a dwarf baboon.

  He had early in his life announced his claim to wit, and the women believed in it. He had besides given himself out for a man of great intrigue, with as slender pretensions; yet the women believed in that too—one should have thought they had been more competent judges of merit in that particular! It was not his fault if he had not wit; nothing exceeded his efforts in that point; and though they were far from producing the wit, they at least amply yielded the applause he aimed at. He was so accustomed to see people laugh at the most trifling things he said, that he would be disappointed at finding nobody smile before they knew what he was going to say. His speeches were fine, but as much laboured as his extempore sayings. His writings were—everybody’s: that is, whatever came out good was given to him, and he was too humble ever to refuse the gift…. In short, my Lord Chesterfield’s being the instrument to introduce this new era into our computation of time will probably preserve his name in almanacs and chronologies, when the wit that he had but laboured too much, and the gallantry that he could scarce ever execute, will be no more remembered.

  There was besides these two, another person of great rank, who came to have a considerable share in the design of ruining sir Robert Walpole, I mean the earl of Chesterfield: he was esteemed the wittiest man of the time, and of a sort that has scarcely been known since the reign of king Charles the second, and revived the memory of the great wits of that age, to the liveliest of whom he was thought not to be unequal. He was besides this, a very graceful speaker in publick, had some knowledge of affairs, having been ambassador in Holland, and when he was engaged in debates, always took pains to be well informed of the subject, so that no man’s speaking, was ever more admired, or drew more audience to it, than his did, but chiefly from those, who either relished his wit, or were pleased with feeling the ministry exposed by his talent of ridicule, and the bitterness of jest, he was so much master of, and never spared. And this made him so very terrible to the ministers who were of the house of lords, that they dreading his wit upon them there, and his writings too, for he sometimes, as it was thought, furnished the weekly paper of the opposition, with the most poignant pieces it had.

  When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre;—that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little. Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before. The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation.

  Lord Chesterfield however by his perpetual attention to propriety, decorum, bienséance, &c., had so veneered his manners, that though he lived on good terms with all the world he had not a single friend. The fact was I believe that he had no warm affections. His excessive and unreasonable attention to decorum and studied manner attended him almost to his last hour.

  Nature, it must be owned, had endowed him with fine parts, and these he cultivated with all the industry usually practised by such as prefer the semblance of what is really fit, just, lovely, honourable, to the qualities themselves; thus he had eloquence without learning, complaisance without friendship, and gallantry without love…. In addition to his character of an orator and a statesman, he was emulous of that of a poet, his pretensions to which were founded on sundry little compositions in verse that from time to time appeared in collections of that kind; elegant it must be confessed; but generally immoral and ofttimes profane.

  That Lord Chesterfield must have been mortified by the lofty contempt, and polite, yet keen satire with which Johnson exhibited him to himself in this letter, it is impossible to doubt. He, however, with that glossy duplicity which was his constant study, affected to be quite unconcerned. Dr. Adams mentioned to Mr. Robert Dodsley that he was sorry Johnson had written his letter to Lord Chesterfield. Dodsley, with the true feelings of trade, said “he was very sorry too; for that he had a property in the ‘Dictionary,’ to which his Lordship’s patronage might have been of consequence.”… Johnson having now explicitly avowed his opinion of Lord Chesterfield, did not refrain from expressing himself concerning that nobleman with pointed freedom: “This man (said he) I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords!” And when his “Letters” to his natural son were published, he observed, that “they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.”

  Lord Chatham:—Never since the conquest has Ireland passed so long a time in tranquility and contentment. In this, my lord, you stand high above the highest of our kings: and by those who are right minded, and who judge of men by the good they do and the difficulty of doing it, you will be placed by future historians in an elevated rank among the rulers of mankind. Pardon me: for to praise a great man in his presence is no slight presumption.

  Chesterfield was, what no person in our time has been or can be, a great political leader, and at the same time the acknowledged chief of the fashionable world; at the head of the House of Lords and at the head of ton; Mr. Canning and the Duke of Devonshire in one. In our time the division of labour is carried so far that such a man could not exist. Politics require the whole of energy, bodily and mental, during half the year; and leave very little time for the bow window at White’s in the day, or for the crush-room of the Opera at night. A century ago the case was different. Chesterfield was at once the most distinguished orator in the Upper House, and the undisputed sovereign of wit and fashion. He held this eminence for about forty years. At last it became the regular custom of the higher circles to laugh whenever he opened his mouth, without waiting for his bon mot. He used to sit at White’s with a circle of young men of rank round him, applauding every syllable that he uttered. If you wish for a proof of the kind of position which Chesterfield held among his contemporaries, look at the prospectus of Johnson’s Dictionary. Look even at Johnson’s angry letter. It contains the strongest admission of the boundless influence which Chesterfield exercised over society.

  Lord Chesterfield’s eloquence, the fruit of much study, was less characterized by force and compass than by elegance and perspicuity, and especially by good taste and urbanity, and a vein of delicate irony which, while it sometimes inflicted severe strokes, never passed the limits of decency and propriety. It was that of a man, who in the union of wit and good sense with politeness, had not a competitor. These qualities were matured by the advantage which he assiduously sought and obtained, of a familiar acquaintance with almost all the eminent wits and writers of his time, many of whom had been the ornaments of a preceding age of literature, while others were destined to become those of a later period.

  Although one of the genuine aristocracy, owing his title to no modern creation, he made himself a reputation which few of his countrymen equalled in his own day; and, which is perhaps more remarkable, he left his mark upon the mind and manners of the English race so deep, that it will be long before it is entirely effaced. No man ever put into more attractive shape the maxims of a worldly Epicurean philosophy. No man ever furnished, in his own person, a more dazzling specimen of the theory which he recommended. If Cicero came more nearly than any person ever did to the image of the perfect orator which he described, Chesterfield is universally considered as having equally sustained his own idea of the perfect gentleman.

  Having once satisfied himself that there was no insurrectionary movement in the country [Ireland] and none likely to be, he was not to be moved from his tolerant course by any complaints or remonstrances. Far from yielding to the feigned alarm of those who solicited him to raise new regiments, he sent four battalions of the soldiers then in Ireland to reinforce the Duke of Cumberland. He discouraged jobs, kept down expenses…. When some savage Ascendency Protestant would come to him with tales of alarm, he usually turned conversation into a tone of light badinage, which perplexed and baffled the man. One came to seriously put his lordship on his guard by acquainting him with the fact that his own coachman was in the habit of going to mass. “Is it possible?” cried Chesterfield—“Then I will take care the fellow shall not drive me there.” A courtier burst into his apartment one morning, while he was sipping his chocolate in bed, with the startling intelligence that “the Papists were rising in Connaught.” “Ah,” he said, looking at his watch—“’tis nine o’clock—time for them to rise.” There was evidently no dealing with such a viceroy as this who showed such insensibility to the perils of Protestantism and the evil designs of the dangerous Papist. Indeed, he was seen to distinguish by his peculiar admiration a Papist beauty, Miss Ambrose, whom he declared to be the only “dangerous Papist” he had met in Ireland.

  But perhaps the most interesting apartment in the whole house (Chesterfield House) is the library; there, where Lord Chesterfield used to sit and write, still stand the books which it is only fair to suppose that he read,—books of wide-world and enduring interest, and which stand in goodly array, one row above another, by hundreds. High above them, in separate panels, are “Kit Kat” sized portraits of all the great English poets and dramatists, down to the time of Chesterfield…. In another room not far from the library, one seems to gain an idea of the noble letter-writer’s daily life; for it is a room which has not only its antechamber, in which the aspirants for his lordship’s favor were sometimes kept waiting, but on its garden side a stone or marble terrace overlooking the large garden, stretching out in lawn and flower-beds, behind the house. Upon this terrace Chesterfield doubtless often walked, snuff-box in hand, and in company with some choice friend.

  Lord Chesterfield was a man of extraordinary talents, for his own day the veritable king among men of the world, of whom life is built up with an infinity of care and skill upon well-organized, though worldly, self-love and consummate enjoyment of the world; with no negation of religion, but with no interest in it; with a toleration of it, conditional upon its abiding peaceably in its own place, as a hat abides in the hall until it is wanted for going out of doors.

  Chesterfield incurred the dislike of three of the most influential writers of his day—Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, and Lord Hervey (Queen Caroline’s friend). Their hostile estimates have injured his posthumous reputation, and inspired Dickens’s ruthless caricature of him as Sir John Chester in “Barnaby Rudge.” Chesterfield’s achievements betray a brilliance of intellectual gifts and graces which discourages in the critic any desire to exaggerate his deficiency in moral principle. In matter and manner—in delicate raillery and in refinement of gesture—his speeches in parliament were admitted to be admirable by his foes…. Chesterfield’s worldliness was in point of fact tempered by native common-sense, by genuine parental affections, and by keen appreciation of, and capacity for, literature. Even in his unedifying treatment of the relations of the sexes his solemn warnings against acts which forfeit self-respect or provoke scandal destroyed most of the deleterious effect of the cynical principles on which he took his stand. Nowhere did Chesterfield inculcate an inconsiderate gratification of selfish desires. Very sternly did he rebuke pride of birth or insolence in the treatment of servants and dependents. His habitual text was the necessity from prudential motives of self-control and of respect for the feelings of others. As a writer he reached the highest levels of grace and perspicuity, and as a connoisseur of literature he was nearly always admirable. His critical taste was seen to best advantage in his notices of classical writers.

Letters to His Son

  I have declined the publication of Lord C’s letters. The public will see them, and upon the whole, I think with pleasure; but the whole family were strongly bent against it; and especially on d’Eyverdun’s account, I deemed it more prudent to avoid making them my personal enemies.

  I hope your Lordship’s approbation of a work, written by the late Earl of Chesterfield, on so important a subject as Education, will not fail to secure that of the Public: and I shall then feel myself happy in the assured merit of ushering into the world so useful a performance.

  I shall go to town to-morrow and send for my Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, though I know all I wish to see is suppressed. The Stanhopes applied to the Chancellor for an injunction, and it was granted. At last his Lordship permitted the publication on two conditions that I own were reasonable, though I am sorry for them. The first, that the family might expunge what passage they pleased: the second, that Mrs. Stanhope should give up to them, without reserving a copy, Lord Chesterfield’s Portraits [Characters] of his contemporaries, which he had sent to his son, and re-demanded of the widow, who gave them up, but had copied them. He burnt the originals himself, just before he died, on disgust with Sir John Dalrymple’s book, a new crime in that sycophant’s libel.

  His diction is unaffected, and unlaboured. His wit is natural, and without effort, nay, even his most profound remarks upon human nature, of which he has many, seem rather to spring spontaneously from his subject, and to have risen from the conception of the moment, than to be the consequence of preconsideration or of study. Our author’s education, his rank and consequent associates, his peculiar talent for conversation, the very best ingredient which can possibly enter into the epistolary style, and indeed the whole colour of his life, seem to have formed him expressly for this sort of composition, and, as this is perhaps the only species of writing in which it may be confessed that we are surpassed by our neighbors the French, it is not improbable that his predilection to the manners of that superficially ingenious people may have contributed not a little to his success.

  No modern work has perhaps been received with such avidity by the public as “Lord Chesterfield’s Letters.” The subject, the education of a man of the world; and the author, the most accomplished gentleman of his time, naturally engaged the public attention; and the elegance of composition has, we may say, justified the great expectations that were raised: we have not here simply the speculative opinions of a theorist in his closet, but the conduct and practice of a great master carrying his work into execution.

  My good old new friend, Mr. Hutton, made me two visits while my mother was at Chesington. We had a good deal of conversation upon Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters,” which I have just read. I had the satisfaction to find, that our opinions exactly coincided; that they were extremely well written, contained some excellent hints for education; but were written with a tendency to make his son a man wholly unprincipled; inculcating immorality, countenancing all gentleman-like vices, advising deceit and exhorting to inconstancy. “It pleased me much,” said Mr. Hutton, “in speaking to the King about these ‘Letters,’ to hear him say, ‘For my part, I like more straight-forward work.’”

  I have been reading for the first time Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters,” with more disgust than pleasure, and more pity than disgust. Such letters must have defeated their own main purpose, and made the poor youth awkward, by impressing him with a continual dread of appearing so. But it is painful to see what the father himself was—not, as it appears, from any want of good qualities, but because there was one grace a thought of which never entered his mind.

  Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he would have done if his letters had never been published.

  When I said that Chesterfield had lost by the publication of his letters, I of course considered that he had much to lose; that he has left an immense reputation, founded on the testimony of all his contemporaries of all parties, for wit, taste, and eloquence; that what remains of his Parliamentary oratory is superior to anything of that time that has come down to us, except a little of Pitt’s. The utmost that can be said of the letters is that they are the letters of a cleverish man; and there are not many which are entitled even to that praise. I think he would have stood higher if we had been left to judge of his powers—as we judge of those of Chatham, Mansfield, Charles Townshend, and many others—only by tradition and by fragments of speeches preserved in Parliamentary reports.

  It is probable, that Chesterfield has been judged by the world, on all points, by the moral unsoundness exhibited in the “Letters to his Son.” He has been held as responsible for the work as if he had published it. He came into our houses with his system, and sought the confidence of our boys and young men, and gave a pungency and authority to his instructions by offering them as the real communications of a parent to a cherished son. A vicious romance, or unsound theories and speculations upon life and character, conveyed in a didactic treatise, might not have so armed the world against him. We have here one of the cases, in which an able man excites more alarm, and does more mischief, by direct appeals to consciousness and experience, than by presenting glowing pictures to the imagination. It is not surprising, then, that he has been condemned in the mass. But the reader, who has forbearance enough to discriminate, will not deny, that these “Letters” contain a great amount of practical good sense; that the sketches of character and defects are in the first style of diverting and instructive satire; and that the composition has the animation and grace which we should expect from a highly cultivated mind, occupied with delightful visions of a young man rising into brilliant fame under its guidance.

  It is by these letters that Chesterfield’s character as an author must stand or fall. Viewed as compositions, they appear almost unrivalled as models for a serious epistolary style; clear, elegant, and terse, never straining at effect, and yet never hurried into carelessness. While constantly urging the same topics, so great is their variety of argument and illustration, that, in one sense, they appear always different, in another sense, always the same. They have, however, incurred strong reprehension on two separate grounds: first, because some of their maxims are repugnant to good morals; and, secondly, as insisting too much on manners and graces, instead of more solid acquirements. On the first charge I have no defence to offer; but the second is certainly erroneous, and arises only from the idea and expectation of finding a general system of education in letters that were intended solely for the improvement of one man. Young Stanhope was sufficiently inclined to study, and imbued with knowledge; the difficulty lay in his awkward address and indifference to pleasing. It is against these faults, therefore, and these faults only, that Chesterfield points his battery of eloquence. Had he found his son, on the contrary, a graceful but superficial trifler, his letters would no doubt have urged with equal zeal how vain are all accomplishments when not supported by sterling information. In one word, he intended to write for Mr. Philip Stanhope, and not for any other person. And yet, even after this great deduction from general utility, it was still the opinion of a most eminent man, no friend of Chesterfield, and not proficient in the graces—the opinion of Dr. Johnson, “Take out the immorality, and the book should be put into the hands of every young gentleman.”

  These letters were addressed to a natural son—and that circumstance should be constantly kept in mind; it is needful to explain many things that are said, and the only apology for many omissions; but at the same time we must say that if any circumstance could aggravate the culpability of a father’s calmly and strenuously inculcating on his son the duties of seduction and intrigue, it is the fact of that son’s unfortunate position in the world being the result of that father’s own transgression. And when one reflects on the mature age and latterly enfeebled health of the careful unwearied preacher of such a code, the effect is truly most disgusting.

  Nescia mens hominum fati, sortisque futuræ: what would be the feelings of the all-accomplished, eloquent, and lettered Earl himself, were he to wake from the dead and find his reputation resting on his confidential letters to his son! He would be little less astonished than Petrarch, were he to wake up and find his Africa forgotten, and his Sonnets the key-stone of his fame.

  The letters of Lord Chesterfield are a remarkable instance of celebrity gained unintentionally, and superseding, in a great measure, other grounds of reputation. For one person acquainted with his character as a statesman, at home and in diplomacy, the rare ability displayed as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the administration of that most unmanageable section of the British empire, and the tradition of his oratory, twenty know of his letters to his son, written in perfect parental confidence, and published years afterwards surreptitiously. I cannot better or more briefly characterize the letters, than by saying that they make a book of the minor moralities and the major immoralities of life. They profess to deal with nothing higher than those secondary motives which, though poor and even dangerous substitutes for moral principle, are yet not to be despised in the formation of character—considerations of expediency, reputation, personal advantage; and being addressed to a youth of uncouth manners, they laid that stress upon grace of deportment which has given to the name of Chesterfield a proverbial use. The letters embody a great deal of sound advice, the result of the large worldly experience of an acute and cultivated nobleman, too acute not to know at least the impolicy of much of the world’s wickedness.

  Chesterfield, like all votaries of detail, repeats himself continually; he announces, with oracular emphasis, in almost every letter, proverbs of worldly wisdom and economical shrewdness, with an entire confidence in their sufficiency worthy of old Polonius, of which character he is but a refined prototype. The essence of these precepts is only a timid foresight utterly alien to a noble spirit.

  Chesterfield’s “Letters” are excellent; and could we wring out of the choice web which he has woven, certain impurities, we should still think it, as it was in old times, the book for a Christmas present to a son or nephew. But this is impracticable. You cannot remodel Chesterfield: throughout almost every page, some trivial selfishness of character, some violation of sincerity, some entire ignoring of any high principle of religion, or even of honour, appears.

  Of all depravity in the world there can be none so great as that of the father who would corrupt his boy. And yet this devil’s counsellor, with his wicked words on his lips, looked out over sea and land after his nursling with a yearning love that is almost divine. Such problems are beyond human power to solve. They can be cleared up only by One who knows and sees, not in part, but all.

  The Letters were not designed for the press, but were published by the son’s widow after Chesterfield’s death. No doubt on their first appearance they were highly prized in the fashionable world, but their morality has from the first called forth the severest censures. Not only Johnson the Christian moralist, and Cowper the evangelical poet, but our own Dickens, have joined in its condemnation. Sir John Chester in “Barnaby Rudge” is a sort of later Chesterfield, who reads with delight the letters of his great exemplar, but finds in them a depth of worldliness he had never fathomed. Yet, perhaps, no work, to those who read them aright, enforces more effectually than these Letters the lesson, Vanitas vanitatum.

  The moral of Chesterfield’s instructions how to get on in the world is shortly this: almost everything is allowable, but it must be done in a becoming manner.

  I am anxious, by recalling to the attention of some readers of this Review what really was the essential part of the teaching of Chesterfield, to do something towards making the study of his “Letters to his Son” what I think they ought to be, a regular portion of the education of every Englishman who is likely to enter public life tolerably early.

  For us, he is interesting chiefly, if not solely, as the author of the “Letters to his Son,” which were published after his death. Other letters have been published by the late Lord Carnarvon; but although they show different moods, they do not materially alter the impression made by the unique letters to his son, where we have Chesterfield’s theory of life set forth with reiterated detail…. It is a work of supererogation to point out the defects of Chesterfield’s philosophy. It is, of course, profoundly immoral, profoundly selfish, profoundly cynical. In literary taste he is almost as open to criticism. Shakespeare had scarcely any existence for him; Milton, he avows, is no favourite; and in Dante he finds nothing but laborious and misty obscurity. These are failures of taste that lie on the very surface. The real defect, and that of which Chesterfield would most have resented the imputation, is the absolute weight of conventionality under which he is borne down. His chief aim was the attainment of a sort of cynical independence of life: as a fact he tied himself hand and foot in a very neat network of conventionality and routine.

  Though as a letter-writer he never equals Johnson at his best, yet in his general level he surpasses him. There is, indeed, more variety in Johnson’s letters from the great variety of subjects on which he writes. Nevertheless, in the very uniformity of Chesterfield’s there is a certain counter-balancing advantage. Not only are our attention and interest never distracted by sudden transitions, but, moreover, there is a real pleasure in seeing the wonderful dexterity with which, though playing on so few strings, he so rarely repeats the same tune.

  And one takes up the “Letters,” written by such a man, which are on dreadfully twaddling subjects sometimes, as well as being tainted by that peculiarly unsavory morality, which contain very little information about the age in which they were written, which have scarcely any of the brilliant social wit of Horace Walpole, and none of the broad humor of Mary Montagu, and is fascinated by them. There is here and there indeed a maxim which is better than any of Rochefaucauld’s; there is worldly wisdom; there is endless parental advice; but it is for none of these things one reads My Lord. That infinite dignity and grace of expression, that careful ease, charm, finish, polish, which are as far from the stiffness of Mr. Pope as from the colloquialism of the vulgar, that delicate suggestion of intimacy with all the great literatures of the world and that perfect air of good breeding, make his familiar correspondence into a classic.

General

  The few light, trifling things that I have accidentally scribbled in my youth, in the cheerfulness of company, or sometimes, it may be, inspired by wine, do by no means entitle me to the compliments which you make me as an author; and my own vanity is so far from deceiving me upon that subject, that I repent of what I have shown, and only value myself upon what I have had the prudence to burn.

  The Chesterfield whom we chiefly love to study is therefore a man of wit and of experience, who had devoted himself to business and essayed all the parts of political life only in order to learn their smallest details, and to tell us the result; it is he who, from his youth, was the friend of Pope and of Bolingbroke, the introducer of Montesquieu and of Voltaire into England, the correspondent of Fontenelle and of Madam de Tencin; he whom the Academy of Inscriptions admitted among its members, who combined the spirit of the two nations, and who, in more than one sparkling Essay, but especially in the Letters to his son, exhibits himself to us as a moralist alike amiable and consummate, and one of the masters of life. It is the Rochefoucauld of England whom we are studying.

  A nobleman who, whatever were his faults and shortcomings as a man, may be properly described as a jealous and enlightened friend of freedom, and one of the first and most intrepid of parliamentary orators. This speech of Lord Chesterfield’s against the Licensing Bill is one of the few specimens of the parliamentary eloquence of the period that has come down to us in a perfect form.

  In spite of his faults and eccentricities, it is pleasant to discover something more of good to Chesterfield’s credit than the world was hitherto aware of. He was neither altogether a cynic nor merely worldly-wise. That he could ever win our affection, like a Fox in politics or a Goldsmith in literature, is out of the question, but that there was a strain of human tenderness in him which has been too frequently ignored is abundantly demonstrated by these charming Letters to his Godson.

  Had a gift amounting almost to genius in the discovery of bad writers.

  The name “Chesterfield” and his “Letters” are always associated together, but the “Chesterfield’s Letters” known to our Grandfathers—to the men of last century and of the first half of this—are the “Letters to his Son,” and it is as the author of these and with the character he bears as such, generally condensed into the epigrammatic but far from true and now unquotable saying of Dr. Johnson’s that he is still thought of. Judging him from these famous Letters, the world long since saw in him merely “his delicate but fastidious taste, his low moral principle, and his hard, keen, and worldly wisdom;” and this is still the popular verdict, though recent criticism and the publication of the “Letters to his Godson” should go far to modify it.

  No shrewder men ever sat upon a throne, or on anything else, than the first two Georges, monarchs of this realm. The second George hated Chesterfield, and called him “a tea-table scoundrel.” The phrase sticks. There is something petty about this great Lord Chesterfield.

  With the exception of Machiavelli, we know of no other writer whose opinions and precepts have been so ridiculously misrepresented, and that, unfortunately for Chesterfield’s fame, not merely by the multitude, but by men who are among the classics of our literature…. In times like the present we shall do well to turn occasionally to the writings of Chesterfield, and for other purposes than the acquisition of style. In an age distinguished beyond all precedent by recklessness, charlatanry, and vulgarity, nothing can be more salutary than communion with a mind and genius of the temper of his. We need the corrective—the educational corrective—of his refined good sense, his measure, his sobriety, his sincerity, his truthfulness, his instinctive application of aristocratic standards in attainment, of aristocratic touchstones in criticism. We need more, and he has more to teach us. We need reminding that life is success or failure, not in proportion to the extent of what it achieves in part, and in accidents, but in proportion to what it becomes in essence, and in proportion to its symmetry.

  Not only our present manners but our present speech would have seemed vulgar to Chesterfield.

  As a letter-writer, in his few excursions into the essay, and in such other literary amusements as he permitted himself, he stands very high, and the somewhat artificial character of his etiquette, the wholly artificial character of his standards of literary, æsthetic, and other judgment, ought not to obscure his excellence. Devoted as he was to French, speaking and writing it as easily as he did English, he never Gallicised his style as Horace Walpole did, nor fell into incorrectnesses as did sometimes Lady Mary. The singular ease with which, not in the least ostentatiously condescending to them, he adjusts his writing to his boy correspondents is only one function of his literary adaptability. Nor is it by any means to be forgotten that Chesterfield’s subjects are extremely various, and are handled with equal information and mother wit. He was not exactly a scholar, but he was a man widely and well read, and the shrewdness of his judgment on men and things was only conditioned by that obstinate refusal even to entertain any enthusiasm, anything high-strung in ethics, æsthetics, religion, and other things, which was characteristic of his age. Had it not been for Chesterfield we should have wanted many lively pictures of society, manner, and travel; but we should also have wanted our best English illustration of a saying of his time, though not of his—“If there were no God, it would be necessary to create one.”