One, and one only, charged with deep regret,
That thy worst part, thy principles, live yet;
One sad epistle thence may cure mankind
Of the plague spread by bundles left behind.
-COWPER, WILLIAM, 1782, The Progress
of Error.

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.-SOUTHEY, ROBERT, 1831, Correspondence with Caroline Bowles, March 8, p. 219.

Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he would have done if his letters had never been published.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1833, Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, Edinburgh Review, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

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. MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGreports.-MACAULAY, TON, 1833, Selection from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, Letter, Oct. 14.

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.-CHANNING, E. T., 1840, Lord Chesterfield, North American Review, vol. 50, p. 427.

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 gracesthe opinion of Dr. Johnson, "Take out the immorality, and the book should be put into the hands of every young gentleman."

-STANHOPE, PHILIP HENRY EARL (LORD MAHON), 1845, ed., The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Preface, p. xviii.

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.-BROUGHAM, HENRY LORD, 1845, Collective Edition of Lord Chesterfield's Letters, Quarterly Review, vol. 76, p. 482.

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.-HAYWARD, A., 1845, Lord Chesterfield, Edinburgh Review, vol. 82, p. 422; Traveller's Library, vol. XVII.

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.-REED, HENRY, 1855, Lectures on English Literature from Chaucer to Tennyson, p. 405.

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.-TUCKERMAN, HENRY T., 1857, Essays Biographical and Critical, p. 36.

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.-THOMSON, KATHERINE (GRACE WHARTON), 1862, The Literature of Society, vol. II, p. 231.

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. OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W., 1869, Historical Sketches of the Reign of George Second, p. 120.

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. CAREY, CHARLES STOKES, 1872, ed., Letters Written by Lord Chesterfield to his Son, vol. I, p. xii.

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. -SCHERR, J., 1874, A History of English Literature, tr. M. V., p. 150,

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.-GRANT-DUFF, M. E., 1879, Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, Fortnightly Review, vol. 31, p. 824.

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.-CRAIK, HENRY, 1895, English Prose, vol. IV, pp. 80, 81.

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.-HILL, GEORGE BIRKBECK, 1898, Eighteenth Century Letters, Introduction, p. xxix.

And one takes up the "Letters," written by such a man, which are on dreadfully being tainted by that peculiarly unsavory twaddling subjects sometimes, as well as 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.-TALLENTYRE, S. G., 1899, Lord Chesterfield, Longman's Magazine.

GENERAL

Nor would th' enamour'd Muse neglect to pay

To Stanhope's worth the tributary lay,
The soul unstain'd, the sense sublime, to
paint

A people's patron, pride, and ornament,
Did not his virtues eterniz'd remain

The boasted theme of Pope's immortal strain.
-SMOLLETT, TOBIAS, 1747, The Reproof.

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.-CHESTERFIELD, LORD, 1748, Letter to Dr. Madden. Yet Chesterfield, whose polish'd pen inveighs Gainst laughter, fought for freedom to our plays;

Uncheck'd by megrims of patrician brains, And damning dulness of lord chamberlains.

-BYRON, LORD, 1811, Hints from Horace.

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. -SANTE-BEUVE, C. A., 1850, English Portraits.

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. LAWRENCE, FREDERICK, 1855, The Life of Henry Fielding, p. 97.

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.-SMITH, GEORGE BARNETT, 1890, A Philosopher in the Purple, Lippincott's Magazine, vol. 46, p. 700.

Had a gift amounting almost to genius in the discovery of bad writers.-LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1891, Studies in Chaucer, vol. 3, p. 201.

The name "Chesterfield" and his "Letters' are always associated together, but the "Chesterfield's Letters" known to our Grandfathers-to the men of last cen

tury 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.-BRADSHAW, JOHN, 1892, ed., The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, with the Characters, Introduction, p. xvii.

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.-BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1894, Essays about Men, Women and Books, p. 23.

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.-COLLINS, J., C.1895, Essays and Studies, pp. 196,262.

Not only our present manners but our present speech would have seemed vulgar. to Chesterfield.-TOVEY, DUNCAN C., 1897, Reviews and Essays in English Literature, p. 59.

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.' -SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 644.

PERSONAL

Hawkesworth was a man of fine parts, but no learning: his reading had been

irregular and desultory: the knowledge he had acquired, he, by the help of a good memory retained, so that it was ready at