202

HERVEY'S MEMOIRS OF HIS OWN TIME,

as affording the most intimate portraiture of a court that has ever been presented to the English people. Such a delineation as Lord Hervey has left ought to cause a sentiment of thankfulness in every British heart for not being exposed to such influences, to such examples as he gives, in the present day, when goodness, affection, purity, benevolence, are the household deities of the court of our beloved, inestimable Queen Victoria.

PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, FOURTH EARL OF CHESTERFIELD.

THE subject of this memoir may be thought by some rather the modeler of wits than the original of that class; the great critic and judge of manners rather than the delight of the dinner-table; but we are told to the contrary by one who loved him not. Lord Hervey says of Lord Chesterfield that he was "allowed by every body to have more conversable entertaining table-wit than any man of his time; his propensity to ridicule, in which he indulged himself with infinite humor and no distinction; and his inexhaustible spirits, and no discretion; made him sought and feared-liked and not loved-by most of his acquaintance."

This formidable personage was born in London on the 2d day of September, 1694. It was remarkable that the father of a man so vivacious, should have been of a morose temper; all the wit and spirit of intrigue displayed by him remind us of the frail Lady Chesterfield, in the time of Charles II.*—that lady who was looked on as a martyr because her husband was jealous of her; "a prodigy," says De Grammont, "in the city of London," where indulgent critics endeavor to excuse his lordship on account of his bad education, and mothers vowed that none of their sons should ever set foot in Italy, lest they should "bring back with them that infamous custom of laying restraint on their wives."

.

Even Horace Walpole cites Chesterfield as the "witty earl:" apropos to an anecdote which he relates of an Italian lady, who said that she was only four-and-twenty; "I suppose," said Lord Chesterfield, "she means four-and-twenty stone."

By his father the future wit, historian, and orator was utterly neglected; but his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax, supplied to him the place of both parents, his mother -her daughter, Lady Elizabeth Saville-having died in his childhood. At the age of eighteen, Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was one of the features of his character to fall at once into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown. One can hardly imagine his being "an absolute pedant," but such

*The Countess of Chesterfield here alluded to was the second wife of Philip, second Earl of Chesterfield. Philip Dormer, fourth Earl, was grandson of the second Earl, by his third wife.

204

HERVEY'S DESCRIPTION OF CHESTERFIELD.

was, actually, his own account of himself: "When I talked my best, I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious, I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman, I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but the ancients had common sense; that the classics contained every thing that was either necessary, useful, or ornamental to men; and I was not even without thoughts of wearing the toga virilis of the Romans, instead of the vulgar and illiberal dress of the moderns."

Thus, again, when in Paris, he caught the manners, as he had acquired the language, of the Parisians. "I shall not give you my opinion of the French, because I am very often taken for one of them, and several have paid me the highest compliment they think it in their power to bestow-which is, 'Sir, you are just like ourselves.' I shall only tell you that I am insolent; I talk a great deal; I am very loud and peremptory; I sing and dance as I walk along; and, above all, I spend an immense sum in hair-powder, feathers, and white gloves."

Although he entered Parliament before he had attained the legal age, and was expected to make a great figure in that assembly, Lord Chesterfield preferred the reputation of a wit and a beau to any other distinction. "Call it vanity, if you will," he wrote in after life to his son, "and possibly it was so; but my great object was to make every man and every woman love me. I often succeeded; but why? by taking great pains."

According to Lord Hervey's account he often even sacrificed his interest to his vanity. The description given of Lord Chesterfield by one as bitter as himself implies, indeed, that great pains were requisite to counterbalance the defects of nature. Wilkes, one of the ugliest men of his time, used to say, that with an hour's start he would carry off the affections of any woman from the handsomest man breathing. Lord Chesterfield, according to Lord Hervey, required to be still longer in advance of a rival.

"With a person," Hervey writes, "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 the most in fashion. 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, who said a few good things, though admired for many, told Lord Chesterfield once, that he was like a stunted giant-which was a humorous idea and really apposite."

STUDY OF ORATORY.-DUTY OF AN EMBASSADOR.

205

Notwithstanding that Chesterfield, when young, injured both soul and body by pleasure and dissipation, he always found time for serious study: when he could not have it otherwise, he took it out of his sleep. How late soever he went to bed, he resolved always to rise early; and this resolution he adhered to so faithfully, that at the age of fifty-eight he could declare that for more than forty years he had never been in bed at nine o'clock in the morning, but had generally been up before eight. He had the good sense, in this respect, not to exaggerate even this homely virtue. He did not rise with the dawn, as many early risers pride themselves in doing, putting all the engagements of ordinary life out of their usual beat, just as if the clocks had been set two hours forward. The man who rises at four in this country, and goes to bed at nine, is a social and family nuisance.

66

Strong good sense characterized Chesterfield's early pursuits. Desultory reading he abhorred. He looked on it as one of the resources of age, but as injurious to the young in the extreme. "Throw away," thus he writes to his son, none of your time upon those trivial, futile books, published by idle necessitous authors for the amusement of idle and ignorant readers."

Even in those days such books "swarm and buzz about one:" "flap them away," says Chesterfield, "they have no sting." The earl directed the whole force of his mind to oratory, and became the finest speaker of his time. Writing to Sir Horace Mann, about the Hanoverian debate (in 1743, Dec. 15), Walpole praising the speeches of Lords Halifax and Sandwich, adds, "I was there, and heard Lord Chesterfield make the finest oration I ever heard there." This from a man who had listened to Pulteney, to Chatham, to Carteret, was a singularly valuable tribute.

While a student at Cambridge, Chesterfield was forming an acquaintance with the Hon. George Berkeley, the youngest son of the second Earl of Berkeley, and remarkable rather as being the second husband of Lady Suffolk, the favorite of George II., than from any merits or demerits of his own.

This early intimacy probably brought Lord Chesterfield into the close friendship which afterward subsisted between him and Lady Suffolk, to whom many of his letters are addressed.

His first public capacity was a diplomatic appointment: he afterward attained to the rank of an embassador, whose duty it is, according to a witticism of Sir Henry Wotton's, "to lie abroad for the good of his country;" and no man was in this respect more competent to fulfill these requirements than Chesterfield. Hating both wine and tobacco, he had smoked and

206

GEORGE II.'S OPINION OF HIS CHRONICLERS.

drunk at Cambridge, "to be in the fashion;" he gamed at the Hague, on the same principle; and, unhappily, gaming became a habit and a passion. Yet never did he indulge it when acting, afterward, in a ministerial capacity. Neither when Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, or as Under-secretary of State, did he allow a gaming-table in his house. On the very night that he resigned office he went to White's.

The Hague was then a charming residence: among others who, from political motives, were living there, were John Duke of Marlborough and Queen Sarah, both of whom paid Chesterfield marked attention. Naturally industrious, with a ready insight into character-a perfect master in that art which bids us keep one's thoughts close, and our countenances open, Chesterfield was admirably fitted for diplomacy. A master of modern languages and of history, he soon began to like business. When in England, he had been accused of having "a need of a certain proportion of talk in a day:" "that," he wrote to Lady Suffolk, "is now changed into a need of such a proportion of writing in a day."

In 1728 he was promoted: being sent as embassador to the Hague, where he was popular, and where he believed his stay would be beneficial both to soul and body, there being "fewer temptations, and fewer opportunities to sin," as he wrote to Lady Suffolk, "than in England." Here his days passed, he asserted, in doing the king's business very ill-and his own still worse: sitting down daily to dinner with fourteen or fifteen people; while at five the pleasures of the evening began with a lounge on the Voorhoot, a public walk planted by Charles V.: then, either a very bad French play, or a "reprise quadrille," with three ladies, the youngest of them fifty, and the chance of losing, perhaps, three florins (besides one's time) -lasted till ten o'clock; at which time "His Excellency” went home, "reflecting with satisfaction on the innocent amusements of a well-spent day, that left nothing behind them," and retired to bed at eleven, "with the testimony of a good conscience."

All, however, of Chesterfield's time was not passed in this serene dissipation. He began to compose "The History of the Reign of George II." at this period. About only half a dozen characters were written. The intention was not confined to Chesterfield: Carteret and Bolingbroke entertained a similar design, which was completed by neither. When the subject was broached before George II., he thus expressed himself: and his remarks are the more amusing as they were addressed to Lord Hervey, who was, at that very moment, making his notes for that bitter chronicle of his majesty's