PREFATORY NOTE.
IT is a singular fate that has overtaken Lord Chesterfield. One of the more important figures in the political world of his time; one of the few Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland whose name was afterwards respected and admired; the first man to introduce Voltaire and Montesquieu to England; and the personal acquaintance of men like Addison and Swift, Pope and Bolingbroke; the ally of Pitt, and the enemy of three Georges ; though he married a king's daughter and took up the task of the world's greatest emperor: yet the record of his actions has passed away, and he is remembered now only by an accident.
Lord Chesterfield lives by that which he never intended for publication, while that which he published has already passed from the thoughts of men. It is one more example of the fact that our best work is that which is our heart's production. We have Lord Chesterfield's secret, and it bears witness to the strength of that part of him in which an intellectual anatomist has declared him to be deficient —a criticism which is but another proof of that which has been somewhere said of him, that he has had the fate to be generally misunderstood. Yet nothing is more certain than that Lord Chesterfield did not mean to be anything but inscrutable. " Dissimilation is a shield," he used to say, "as secrecy is armour." "A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to
seem wise whether he really be so or not." It is still worth while attempting to solve the problem which is offered to us by his inscrutability, not only on its own account, but because Lord Chesterfield is a representative spirit of the eighteenth century. *
Philip Dormer Stanhope did not experience in his youth either of those influences which are so important in the lives of most of us. His mother died before he could know her, and his father was one of those living nonentities whom his biographer sums up in saying that ' We know little more of him than that he was an Earl of Chesterfield.' Indeed, what influence there may have been was of a negative kind, for he had, if anything, an avowed dislike for his son. Naturally under these conditions he had to endure the slings and arrows of fortune alone and uncounselled. One domestic influence was allowed him in the mother of his mother, whose face still looks out at us from the pages of Dr. Maty, engraved by Bartolozzi from the original of Sir Peter Lely—a face sweet, intellectual, open—over the title of Gertrude Savile, Marchioness of Halifax. She it was who undertook, at any rate to some small degree, the rearing of her daughter's child Lord Chesterfield is rather a Savile than a Stanhope.
He heard French from a Normandy nurse in his cradle, and he received, when he grew a little older, "such a
* The greatest English writer of the present day thus sums up the eighteenth century :—" An age of which Hoadly was the bishop, and Walpole the minister, and Pope the poet, and Chesterfield the wit, and Tillotson the ruling doctor."—Newman, Essays Critical and Historical^ i. 388.
general idea of the sciences as it is a disgrace to a gentleman not to possess." But it is not till he gets to Cambridge at the age of eighteen that we hear anything definite. He writes to his tutor of former days, whom he seems to have made a real friend, from Trinity Hall:—
"I find the college where I am infinitely the best in the University; for it is the smallest, and filled with lawyers who have lived in the world, and know how to behave. Whatever may be said to the contrary, there is certainly very little debauchery in the university, especially amongst people of fashion, for a man must have the inclinations of a porter to endure it here."
Thirty-six years later he draws for his son this picture of his college-life:—
'* As I make no difficulty of confessing my past errors, where I think the confession may be of use to you, I will own that, when I first went to the university, I drank and smoked, ..
IT is a singular fate that has overtaken Lord Chesterfield. One of the more important figures in the political world of his time; one of the few Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland whose name was afterwards respected and admired; the first man to introduce Voltaire and Montesquieu to England; and the personal acquaintance of men like Addison and Swift, Pope and Bolingbroke; the ally of Pitt, and the enemy of three Georges ; though he married a king's daughter and took up the task of the world's greatest emperor: yet the record of his actions has passed away, and he is remembered now only by an accident.
Lord Chesterfield lives by that which he never intended for publication, while that which he published has already passed from the thoughts of men. It is one more example of the fact that our best work is that which is our heart's production. We have Lord Chesterfield's secret, and it bears witness to the strength of that part of him in which an intellectual anatomist has declared him to be deficient —a criticism which is but another proof of that which has been somewhere said of him, that he has had the fate to be generally misunderstood. Yet nothing is more certain than that Lord Chesterfield did not mean to be anything but inscrutable. " Dissimilation is a shield," he used to say, "as secrecy is armour." "A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to
seem wise whether he really be so or not." It is still worth while attempting to solve the problem which is offered to us by his inscrutability, not only on its own account, but because Lord Chesterfield is a representative spirit of the eighteenth century. *
Philip Dormer Stanhope did not experience in his youth either of those influences which are so important in the lives of most of us. His mother died before he could know her, and his father was one of those living nonentities whom his biographer sums up in saying that ' We know little more of him than that he was an Earl of Chesterfield.' Indeed, what influence there may have been was of a negative kind, for he had, if anything, an avowed dislike for his son. Naturally under these conditions he had to endure the slings and arrows of fortune alone and uncounselled. One domestic influence was allowed him in the mother of his mother, whose face still looks out at us from the pages of Dr. Maty, engraved by Bartolozzi from the original of Sir Peter Lely—a face sweet, intellectual, open—over the title of Gertrude Savile, Marchioness of Halifax. She it was who undertook, at any rate to some small degree, the rearing of her daughter's child Lord Chesterfield is rather a Savile than a Stanhope.
He heard French from a Normandy nurse in his cradle, and he received, when he grew a little older, "such a
* The greatest English writer of the present day thus sums up the eighteenth century :—" An age of which Hoadly was the bishop, and Walpole the minister, and Pope the poet, and Chesterfield the wit, and Tillotson the ruling doctor."—Newman, Essays Critical and Historical^ i. 388.
general idea of the sciences as it is a disgrace to a gentleman not to possess." But it is not till he gets to Cambridge at the age of eighteen that we hear anything definite. He writes to his tutor of former days, whom he seems to have made a real friend, from Trinity Hall:—
"I find the college where I am infinitely the best in the University; for it is the smallest, and filled with lawyers who have lived in the world, and know how to behave. Whatever may be said to the contrary, there is certainly very little debauchery in the university, especially amongst people of fashion, for a man must have the inclinations of a porter to endure it here."
Thirty-six years later he draws for his son this picture of his college-life:—
'* As I make no difficulty of confessing my past errors, where I think the confession may be of use to you, I will own that, when I first went to the university, I drank and smoked, ..
