Earl of Chesterfield

“ Both in manner and person he is said to have greatly resembled the Earl of Chesterfield, and his diary as well as his portrait show him to have been at once sensitive and virile; quite the man, indeed, very effectually to fascinate the low-born beauty he had taught to love him. ”

“ The prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long been celebrated 188for the politeness of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the delicacy of his taste. He was acknowledged to be the finest speaker in the House of Lords. He had recently governed Ireland, at a momentous conjuncture, with eminent firmness, wisdom, and humanity ”

“ Teacher and preacher he assuredly is, and long will be, yet no thanks are his due from a posterity of the common people whom he so sublimely despised. His pious mission was not to raise the level of the multitude, but to lift a single individual upon a pedestal so high that his lowly origin should not betray itself. That individual was his, Lord Chesterfield's, illegitimate son, whose inferior blood should be given the true blue hue by concentrating upon him all the externals of aristocratic education. ”

“ A fine gentleman, has both wit and learning. I never observed a grain of either.
EARL OF ABINGDON.
A gentleman of fine parts, makes a good figure in the counties of Oxford and Buckingham, is very high for the monarchy and church, of a black complexion, past 40 years old. Very covetous.
EARL OF CHESTERFIELD.
He is very subtle and cunning, never entered into the measures of king William; nor ever will, in any probability, make any great appearance, in any other reign. He is above 60 years old. If it be old Chesterfield, I have heard he was the greatest knave in England. ”

“ The "ancient peer" may possibly be intended for the President of the Club, Philip Henry, fifth Earl of Chesterfield (1755-1815) , who was a member of the Privy Council, and had been Postmaster-General and Master of the Horse. ”

“ He did not pretend to regard with contempt or indifference men whom in his heart he believed to be formidable opponents. It was a tribute to the capacity of a public man to be disliked by Walpole; a still higher tribute to be dreaded by him. One of the men whom the great minister was now beginning to hold in serious dislike and dread was Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield. Born in 1694, Chesterfield was still what would be called in political life a young man; he was not quite forty. He had led a varied and somewhat eccentric career. His father, a morose man, had a coldness for him. ”

“ Lord Chesterfield depicts in the Duke of Newcastle an obsequious, industrious, and timorous man, whom the public put below his level, in not allowing him even mediocre talents, which Chesterfield graciously assigns to him; a minister who delighted in the insignia of office; in the hurry, and in the importance which that hurry gives, of business; as one jealous of power, and eager for display. “His levées,” says the Earl, “were his pleasure and his triumph;” ”

“ In London the preparations for a banquet and a general illumination of the city in his honour were immediately countermanded when it became known that he had deserted the House of Commons. 'The joke here is,' wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son, 'that he has had a fall upstairs, and has done himself so much hurt that he will never be able to stand upon his legs again' (Letters and Works of the Earl of Chesterfield, 1845-1853, iv. 427) . Chatham's many difficulties in managing his heterogeneous ministry were greatly increased by the despotic manner in which he treated his colleagues. ”

“ LORD CHESTERFIELD (1694-1773)
s the best representative of a creditable type among English noblemen in the reign of George II.,—an accomplished courtier, a diplomatic statesman worthy of reliance on occasions of emergency, a scholar, and a patron of literature,—Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield, occupied a prominent place in the history of his country for more than forty years. He was the eldest son of Philip, third earl, and was born at London in 1694. Most of his boyhood was spent under the care of his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax. ”

“ Hon. the Earl of Chesterfield,’ issued in 1750 and appended to subsequent editions of the ‘Apology.’ In this she assumes Chesterfield to be the author of the ‘Whole Duty of Man,’ and contrasts the moral therein conveyed with the practice of a ‘highborn debauchee.’ The letter elicited a satirical vindication by ‘a Lady.’ About this period Mrs. Muilman, as she still called herself, was deeply in debt, and was more than once imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Muilman seems to have done his best to bribe her out of the country, but he was not successful until 1754, when she finally removed to Jamaica. ”

“ And yet they had been wedded Earl and Countess not so many months but that their differences might have less divorced them. That those amounted to what they did was entirely the fault of the husband, who had chosen deliberately to provoke an estrangement in perverse spite of a certain felt premonition that his villainy was about to recoil on his own head. He really was a villain, this Lord Chesterfield; if only in one essential a greater than most of the young fire-eating profligates of his time. ”

“ The duke was for some time entirely taken up with the pleasures of the chase, and only now and then engaged in those of love; but his taste having undergone a change in this particular, and the remembrance of Lady Robarts wearing off by degrees, his eyes and wishes were turned towards Miss Brook; and it was in the height of this pursuit that Lady Chesterfield threw herself into his arms, as we shall see by resuming the sequel of her adventures.
The Earl of Bristol, ever restless and ambitious, had put in practice every art, to possess himself of the king’s favour. ”

“ Chesterfield pounced on the Duke—
“You hear? Kit or the devil, man—whichever you are, confess yourself.”
His Highness hesitated—it was an awkward moment for him—and succumbed, finally, to the tyranny of circumstance.
“I could claim my privilege, and refuse, sir,” said he, “were it not that by persisting in this disguise the fair fame of an innocent lady might appear to lack its vindication. I took her, if not for another, at least not for herself,” and he pulled off his vizard in his turn.
“The Duke of York!” muttered the Earl, falling back a little, with a stupefied look ”

“ I am very sorry for the Duchess of Newcastle's illness, full as much upon your as upon her account, as it has hindered you from being so much known to the Duke as I could have wished; use and habit going a great way with him, as indeed they do with most people. I have known many people patronized, pushed up, and preferred by those who could have given no other reason for it, than that they were used to them. We must never seek for motives by deep reasoning, but we must find them out by careful observation and attention, no matter what they should be, but the point is, what they are. ”

“ I think your attention to her Royal Highness may be of use to you here; and indeed all attentions, to all sorts, of people, are always repaid in some way or other; though real obligations are not. For instance, Lord Titchfield, who has been with you at Hamburg, has written an account to the Duke and Duchess of Portland, who are here, of the civilities you showed him, with which he is much pleased, and they delighted. At this rate, if you do not take care, you will get the unmanly reputation of a well-bred man ”

“ 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 armor.” “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.” ”

“ Adieu! my dear lord.
(796) In a letter to his son, of the 22d of April, Chesterfield says:—"Apropos of a minority: the King is to come to the House tomorrow, to recommend a bill to settle a regency, in case of his demise while his successor is a minor. Upon his late illness, which was no trifling one, the whole nation cried out aloud for such a bill, for reasons which will readily occur to you, who know situations, persons, and characters here. I do not know the provisions of this intended bill ”

“ All this little course of education by letters offers a sort of continuous dramatic interest; we follow the efforts of a fine distinguished, energetic nature as Lord Chesterfield’s was, engaged in a contest with a disposition honest but indolent, with an easy and dilatory temperament, from which it would, at any expense, form a masterpiece accomplished, amiable and original, and with which it only succeeded in making a sort of estimable copy. ”

“ Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and mouth mostly shut. When new or stale gossip is brought to you, never let on that you know it already, nor that it really interests you. The reading of these Letters is better than hearing the average comedy, in which the wit of a single sentence of Chesterfield suffices to carry an act. His man-of-the-world philosophy is as old as the Proverbs of Solomon, but will always be fresh and true, and enjoyable at any age, thanks to his pithy expression, his unfailing common sense, his sparkling wit and charming humor. ”

“ Chesterfield, the ablest man in the ministry, Lord-Steward of the Household, was somewhat rudely dismissed. Lord Clinton, the Earl of Burlington, the Duke of Montrose, the Earls of Marchmont and Stair, and by a questionable exercise of prerogative the Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham, were deprived of their commission in the army,—an arbitrary act not lost sight of by the Opposition. ”

“ It will be remembered that the earl sent his son abroad at the age of fourteen to study for five years on the Continent, and to acquire a better preparation for life than Oxford or Cambridge could offer. Of these universities Chesterfield had a low opinion. He could not sufficiently scorn an education which did not prevent a man from being flurried at his Presentation to the King. ”

“ He has knocked at the doors of some of the ministers, but to no purpose. I wish with all my heart that I could help him: I told him fairly that I could not, but advised him to find some channel to Lord B——-, which, though a Scotchman, he told me he could not. He brought a packet of letters from the office to you, which I made him seal up; and keep it for you, as I suppose it makes up the series of your Ratisbon letters.
As for me, I am just what I was when you left me, that is, nobody. Old age steals upon me insensibly. I grow weak and decrepit, but do not suffer, and so I am content. ”

“ Leicester House took advantage of these difficulties: they engaged Lord Chesterfield to negotiate between Newcastle and Pitt. The Earl, who had lived for some time retired from business, undertook the Embassy. It seemed a marvellous office for him, who had long broken with the latter, [31] and had even, in very cutting terms, acquainted the world with his reasons for breaking with the former. But it seems he had still stronger prejudices to the Duke of Cumberland: he undertook the employ [7] with cheerfulness and success. ”

“ Chesterfield did his level best with his godson; he gave what was seemly to his young friend Huntingdon and likewise to Solomon Dayrolles. Five unpublished letters at Yale, to a Mr. Clements of Dublin, repeat the formula on a minor scale, the fifty-five-year-old earl laying out a plan of education for the family hopeful. Chesterfield's interest to do good shows at its best in his too little known letter to the Duke of Bedford condemning the brutal treatment of French prisoners (Dobree, VI, 2960) . These all reveal something more praiseworthy in the man than the common interpretation of him. ”

“ Johnson also hurled this missile at Lord Chesterfield, calling him “A lord among wits, and a wit among lords.” The earl had offended the rugged lexicographer, whose barbarous manners in company Chesterfield holds up, in his Letters to his son, as things to be avoided.
Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.—Pope: Rape of the Lock. ”

“ The following is Lord Chesterfield's account of this negotiation:—"No mortal can comprehend the present state of affairs. Eight or nine persons, of some consequence, have resigned their employments; upon which, Lord Chatham made overtures to the Duke of Bedford and his people; but they could by no means agree, and his grace went the next day, full of wrath, to Woburn; so that negotiation is entirely at an end. People wait to see who Lord Chatham will take in, for some he must have; even he cannot be alone, contra mundum. ”

“ I find, by your account of him, that he has been trained up to homicide, the only science in which princes are ever instructed; and with good reason, as their greatness and glory singly depend upon the numbers of their fellow-creatures which their ambition exterminates. If a sovereign should, by great accident, deviate into moderation, justice, and clemency, what a contemptible figure would he make in the catalogue of princes! ”

“ Useful knowledge in my opinion consists of modern languages, history, and geography; some Latin may be thrown into the bargain, in compliance with custom, and for closet amusement.
You are, by this time, certainly tired with this long letter, which I could prove to you from Horace’s own words (for I am a scholar) to be a bad one; he says, that water-drinkers can write nothing good: so I am, with real truth and esteem, your most faithful, humble servant, CHESTERFIELD. ”