Letters, Sentences and Maxims, by Lord Chesterfield
(Philip Dormer Stanhope).
“Viewed as compositions, they appear almost unrivalled fora serious epistolary style; clear, elegant, and terse,never straining at effect, and yet never hurried intocarelessness.”—Lord Mahon, 1845.
“In point of style, a finished classical work; they containinstructions for the conduct of life that will never beobsolete. Instinct with the most consummate good sense andknowledge of life and business, and certainly nothing can bemore attractive than the style in which they are set beforetheir readers.”—Quarterly Review, vol. lxxvi., 1845.
“Lord Chesterfield’s letters are, I will venture tosay, masterpieces of good taste, good writing, and goodsense.”—John Wilson Croker, 1846.
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PREFATORY NOTE.
BY CHARLES SAYLE.
It is a singular fate that has overtaken Lord Chesterfield. One of themore important figures in the political world of his time; one of thefew Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland whose name was afterward respectedand admired; the first man to introduce Voltaire and Montesquieu toEngland; 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’sgreatest emperor; yet the record of his actions has passed away, and heis remembered now only by an accident.
Lord Chesterfield lives by that which he never intended forpublication, while that which he published has already passed from thethoughts of men. It is one more example of the fact that our best workis that which is our heart’s production. We have Lord Chesterfield’ssecret, and it bears witness to the strength of that part of him inwhich an intellectual anatomist has declared him to be deficient—a[Pg 6]criticism which is but another proof of that which has been somewheresaid of him, that he has had the fate to be generally misunderstood.Yet nothing is more certain than that Lord Chesterfield did not meanto be anything but inscrutable. “Dissimilation is a shield,” he usedto say, “as secrecy is armor.” “A young fellow ought to be wiser thanhe should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether hereally be so or not.” It is still worth while attempting to solve theproblem which is offered to us by his inscrutability, not only on itsown account, but because Lord Chesterfield is a representative spiritof the eighteenth century.1
I.
Philip Dormer Stanhope did not experience in his youth either of thoseinfluences which are so important in the lives of most of us. Hismother died before he could know her, and his father was one of thoseliving nonentities whom his biographer sums up in saying that “We knowlittle more o