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Edited by Robert MicMurdp

 
 

CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Cornell University Library
BJ1671 .C52 1917
selection of Ches

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PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF CHESTERFIELD

 
 

 

ae — |

THE MODERN||
CHESTERFIELD ||

A_ Selection of CHESTERFIELD’S
LET CE RS TO: Hrs SON
Edited by ROBERT McMURDY
Author of *‘The Upas Tree.’’| |

 

 

 

 

Printed for RICHARD G. BADGER

at THE GoruaM Press and sold by him at 194

BoYLsTON STREET, Boston, and by all venders
of Choice Books.

 

 

 

 

 
Copyright 1917 by Roperrt \icMurby
All Rights Reserved.

[BOI3 P23

THE GORHAM PRESS. BOSTON, U. S. a.
TO THE BOYS—
YOUNG AND OLD—LITTLE AND BIG—
EVERYWHERE
With books of old men, and sleep,

And hours of dreamy ease, to creep

Into oblivion sweet of life,

Its agitations and its strife.
—Greenwood’s Horace.

Copied by Lord Chesterfield in the original Latin upon the frieze of
his library.
PREFACE

Inspiration leaps forward, now and then, a
century at a bound; little grains of thought long
unheeded, like grains of wheat released from their
long hibernation in the winding sheet of a mummy,
spring into animation, for kindred mysteries en-
velop the principle of life and the soul of a thought.

This edition of the famous letters was inspired
by words of Dr. Johnson, written so long ago that
the United States of America was at the time
declaring her Independence. The original edition
had just been published, and some comment was
due from the choleric Doctor, notwithstanding his
aversion to their author. History has embalmed
his words:

Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, I
think, might be made a very pretty book. Take
out the immorality, and it should be put into
the hands of every young gentleman.

In the hope of realizing this prediction and
meeting this criticism, whatever is unwholesome has
been eliminated and that deemed unimportant has
been omitted; some careless writing natural in
casual letters never intended for publication has
been edited; and a few passages from other writings
of the same author have been added, together with
original matter suggested by an extended, sympa-

7
 

8 Preface

 

thetic, and affectionate association with young men.
But care has been exercised to preserve the flavor
of the style, with its essential characteristic of
condensed diction, suggesting that of Bacon, who is
quoted more often than any other writer. Accuracy
of reproduction has thus been sacrificed to the
interest of growing manhood, following Dr. Maty’s
precept that it ought to be the object of every
writer to promote the benefit of mankind.
Schopenhauer would have characterized such a
plan as impertinent—an arrogating term, by the way,
imposed on us by caste. If, however, the edition
proves beneficial to the young, the result will justify
the plan, no matter how impertinent. Helpful
guides to the adolescent, written from a parent’s
angle, are rare, and while in their present form the
letters are still subject to the objection of aristo-
cratic view-point, they. follow good ethical stand-
ards, embody a useful scheme of social and intellec-
tual development, and are believed worthy to be
“put into the hands of every young gentleman.”
INTRODUCTION

Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield,
was born in 1694 and died in 1773.

Nature had designed him for leisure; at all
events, he was indolent. But he was ambitious.
And the two characteristics were ever contending,
pride in general being the master.

Admonished that lying late in bed would hinder
his rise in the world, he acquired the habit of
comparatively early rising, and steadfastly main-
tained it, to the great benefit not only of his career
but of his health.

He had the good fortune, also, of having set
before him in early youth the advantages of oratory
as the surest and quickest means of making a mark,
and pursued the study with resolute determination.
But even oratory has its drawbacks; Chesterfield
violated the law of the land by sitting asa Member
of Parliament before attaining his majority, an
offence which would have passed unchallenged had
he not taunted fate by taking part in debate. Made
aware of his peril, his valor failed him and he
ingloriously fled, but when time removed his dis-
ability he returned from exile, and safely resumed
his seat. Later he entered the House of Lords, the
“Hospital of Incurables,’’ as he styled it, where
he earned distinction as a master of oratorical
graces to so great a degree that he was called the
British Cicero. Although one of the acknowledged

9
 

10 The Modern Chesterfield

 

leaders of the Lords, his chronicle of positive achieve-
ments seems to be limited to the adoption by Eng-
land of the present calendar. He was on two
occasions Ambassador to Holland, and had bestowed
upon him, after once refusing it, the Order of the
Garter. This was the only distinction he ever
sought, and on the contrary a number were refused.
Later he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
discharging the difficult duties of the long coveted
office with strict impartiality, and making a brilliant
but brief record; he proved himself a true ruler
though beset with embarrassing religious conten-
tions, and demonstrated that he possessed the finest
element of character—he was just.

His official career was immediately brought to a
close in the office of Secretary of State, which he by
no means desired, and in which he was allowed no
freedom of action. He had little taste for sinecures,
and soon declined to act further as a gilded automa-
ton.

His name is remembered not on account of these
distinctions but because of his stately manners. They
became a not unimportant part of the man. They
gave him the name of The First Gentleman of
Europe. They admitted him into the companion-
ship of the leading men of his time. They won for
him as a wife the daughter of a sovereign. When
hearing had departed and sight had nearly fled, they
borrowed the livery of chivalry and remained stead-
fast and loyal to their courtly companion even to
the last summons. At the same time they congealed
him with the chill of culture. Notwithstanding
 

Introduction II

 

their veneer of charm they warned all not to tres-
pass. And they forbade the approach of many a
potential friend, for a repellant figure ever takes the
chair from which spontaneity is ejected.
Finish and elegance of manner produced, also,
a distrust in his sincerity which materially lessened
his influence. Moreover, he was hobbled with a
dangerous gift, one which led him to be known not
only as ‘‘a wit among Lords” but “a Lord among
wits.” Had he been endowed with humor merely,
it would never have alienated a friend, but wit
became a weakness that proved costly, for he used
a rusted rapier which inflicted not only a deep wound
but one that would not heal.
Chesterfield came to realize this defect, but too
late in life, probably, to correct it. When nearly
sixty he takes occasion to write his son:

That ready wit which you so partially allow
Mex se Bs may create many admirers; but, take
my word for it, it makes few friends. It shines
and dazzles like the noonday sun, but, like that
too, is very apt to scorch.

And some years later he writes to his
godson:

The injustice of a bad man is sooner for-
given than the insult of a witty one; the
former only hurts one’s liberty and property,
but the latter hurts and mortifies that secret
pride which no human breast is free from.
 

12 The Modern Chesterfield

 

This Attic salt is notable in his literary style;
not only do striking figures and effective allusions
abound, but the reader is often surprised and some-
times delighted with a picturesque or illuminating
word, or a usual word employed in an unusual
sense or relation, an embellishment ordinarily con-
fined to makers of prose who are also weavers of
poetry.

The accomplishments of the man aroused
jealousy and made enemies who retarded his prog-
ress, so that his wealth of talent never won for
him the place which it seemed to promise.

The monument which time has erected to his
memory is the fame of the celebrated letters to
his idolized son. ‘The ruling passion of the father,
a never-faltering love, pulsates throughout the entire
series of letters covering a period stretching from
the boy’s early youth to his middle life. The letters
were personal; they sprang from the heart; and
when, after the death of father and son, they were
given, or rather sold, to the world, the real character
of the author stood revealed.

Philip Stanhope, the son, was awkward, which
probably explains the undue emphasis that the
father continually lays upon the Graces. In doing
so he never misses a chance to rail at the manners
of his countrymen, little thinking, of course, that
his strictures upon them would ever become public
property.

The boy was not made of hickory. His careful
preparation for the public service under the eye
of his constant, watchful, learned, and wise father,
 

Introduction 13

 

served only for a mortifying experience as a member
ot the House of Commons, and uneventful diplo-
matic charges at Hamburg, Dresden, and Ratisbon,
followed by an abortive and disastrous experiment
at Brussels.

Followers of the curious will note with interest
some prophetic words written by the father to the

son five years before he was appointed to the first of
these posts:

If to your merit and knowledge you add
the art of pleasing, you may very probably come
in time to be Secretary of State; but, take
my word for it, twice your merit and knowl-
edge, without the art of pleasing, would at
most raise you to the important post of
Resident at Hamburg or Ratisbon.

Thus the fond parent’s hope by day and dream
by night ended, like so many other consuming am-
bitions, in disappointment, reserved, moreover, for
the decline of life, when he was least able to rise
above it—perhaps a punishment for violating the
commandment, ‘“Thou shalt have no other gods
before me.”
 
THE MODERN CHESTERFIELD
 

LORD CHESTERFIELD’S
LETTERS TO HIS SON

 

November 20, 1739.
Dear Boy:

As you are now reading Roman History I hope
you do it with the care and attention that it
deserves. ‘The utility of history consists principally
in the examples it gives of those who have gone
before us: upon which we ought to make the proper
observations. History animates and excites us to
the love and practice of virtue, by showing us the
regard and veneration which were always paid to
great and virtuous men in the times in which they
lived, and the praise and glory with which their
names have been perpetuated and transmitted to
our times.

Roman History furnishes more examples of vir-
tue and magnanimity, or greatness of mind, than
any other.

It was a common thing for the Consuls and
Dictators to leave the plow and lead their armies
against their enemies; and, after victory, to return
to their plows and pass the rest of their lives in

y
 

18 The Modern Chesterfield

modest retirement—a retirement more glorious, if
possible, than the victories which preceded it!
Many of the greatest men of Rome died so
poor that they were buried at the expense of the
public.
Curius, who had no money of his own, refused
a great sum offered him by the Samnites, saying
that he saw no glory in having money himself but

in commanding those who had.
Fabricius, who had often commanded the Roman

armies, and as often triumphed over the enemy, went
back to his fireside, and to a diet of roots and herbs
which he had planted and cultivated in his own field.

Such are the characters that you should imitate
if you would be a great and good man, which is the
only way to be a happy one!
 

The Afodern Chesterfield 19

 

II
Wednesday.
Dear Boy:

You behaved so well last Sunday that you justly
deserve commendation; besides, you encourage me
to give you some rules of politeness and good breed-
ing, persuaded as I am that you will observe them.

Know, then, that as learning, honor, and virtue
are absolutely necessary to gain the esteem and
admiration of mankind, politeness and good breeding
are equally necessary to make you welcome and
agreeable in conversation and in common life.

Great talents, such as learning, honor, virtue,
and parts, are above the generality of men, who
neither possess them nor judge of them rightly in
others; but all people are judges of the less talents,
such as civility, gentleness, and an obliging and in-
gratiating address and manner, because they feel the
good effects of them in making society easy and
pleasing.

Good sense must in many cases determine good
manners, because the same thing that would be civil
at one time, and to one person, may be quite other-
wise at another time, and to another person; but
there are some general rules that always hold true.
For example, it is rude to answer only yes or no, to
anybody.

It is likewise extremely rude not to give the
proper attention and a civil answer when people
speak to you; or to leave them, or to be doing some-
thing else than listening while they are speaking to
 

20 The Modern Chesterfield

 

you; for such conduct convinces them that you do
not think it worth while to hear what they have to
say.

Besides being civil, which is absolutely neces-
sary, the perfection of good manners is to be civil
with ease. If you wish a model you should observe
the French, who excel in this art, and whose polite-
ness seems as easy and natural as their conversation,
whereas the English are often awkward in their
civilities, and when they mean to be civil are too
much ashamed to succeed.

But pray remember never to be embarrassed in
doing what is right: you would have a great deal
of reason to be ashamed if you were not civil; but
not for being so. And why not say a civil and
obliging thing as easily and naturally as you would
ask the time of day? ‘This kind of bashfulness is
the distinguishing characteristic of an English booby
who is frightened out of his wits when people of
fashion speak to him, and when he is to answer
them, blushes, stammers, can hardly make known
what he would say, and becomes really ridiculous
from a groundless fear of being laughed at, whereas
a really well-bred man would speak to any king in
the world with as little concern and as much ease as
he would speak to you.

Remember, then, that to be civil, and to be civil
with ease, which is properly called good manners, is
the only way to become beloved, and to be well
received in company; that to be ill-bred and rude is
intolerable ; and that to be bashful is to be ridiculous.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 21

 

Hand-shaking is one of the fine arts. Some
condemn it, but they are ultra-reserved. Study the
most pleasing hand-clasps of men of real worth, and
adopt the best parts of all, having a care to let
your own be characteristic of yourself. A firm press-
ure is better than pumping; and the thumb and the
muscle at its base may be used with good effect.
Have in mind that the hand-shake is specially im-
portant because it is one means of conveying a first
impression—if it is cordial, it creates a favorable
atmosphere which will win you many friends and
smooth some rough places. Offering the left hand
is not an uncommon affectation, very obnoxious to
some, for it has the suggestion of assumed super-
iority, or indifference, or condescension, not un-
reasonably if we test it by the fact that no one
meeting or parting from a superior would ever
extend the left hand.

For like reasons, when conditions warrant it
have a kindly phrase of welcome on your lips. A
meeting well started has a momentum that carries
a great distance.

These are not to be considered tricks, but rather
aids to happiness, and happiness is one of the fore-
most objects of life.
 

22 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Ill

Spa, July 25, N. S., 1741.
Dear Boy:

I have often told you that good breeding is
absolutely necessary to make you liked and sought
after in private life. Not only is it very important
in itself, but it adds great luster to the more solid
attainments both of the heart and the mind.

This letter shall concern the next necessary
qualification to it, which is a gentle, easy manner
and carriage, wholly free from those odd tricks, ill
habits, and awkwardness which afflict even worthy
and sensible people. However trifling the subject
of a gentle manner may seem, such a grace is of
importance in the matter of pleasing in private life,
especially such women as, at one time or another,
you will think worth pleasing. I have known many
a man, from his clumsiness, to give people such a
dislike to him at first that all his merit could not
get the better of it afterwards, whereas a gentle
manner prepossesses people in your favor, bends
them towards you, and makes them wish to like you.

Awkwardness can proceed but from two causes—
either not having kept good company, or not having
attended to it. As for your keeping good company,
I will take care of that; you take care to observe
their ways and manners and to form your own upon
them. Attention is absolutely necessary for this, as
indeed it is for everything else, and a man without
attention is not fit to live in the world. When an
 

The Modern Chesterfield 23

 

awkward fellow comes into a room he very
probably will stumble. At dinner his awkwardness
distinguishes itself particularly; he holds his knife,
fork, or spoon differently from other people, and
picks his teeth. If he is to carve he can never hit
the joint, but, in his vain efforts to cut through the
bone, scatters the sauce. When he drinks he infal-
libly coughs in his glass and besprinkles his neighbor.
Besides all this he has strange tricks and gestures,
such as snuffing up his nose, making faces, putting
his finger in his nose or blowing it at table, or if
not at table, looking afterwards in his handkerchief,
so as in either case to make the company sick. His
hands are troublesome to him and he does not know
where to put them; they are in perpetual motion
between his bosom and his breeches; he does not
wear his clothes, nor, in short, does he do anything,
like other people. All this, I own, is not in any
degree criminal; but it is highly disagreeable in
company and ought to be shunned by whoever
desires to please.

There is, likewise, a crudeness of expression and
of words most carefully to be avoided, such as false
English, bad pronunciation, slang, old sayings, and
common proverbs, which are so many proofs of
having kept inferior company. For example, if, in-
stead of saying that tastes differ, and that every man
has his own peculiar one, you should let off a prov-
erb and exclaim, “Every one as he likes, as the
good man said as he kissed the cow,” all would
be persuaded that you had never kept company with
anybody above footmen and housemaids.
 

24 The Modern Chesterfield

Attention will correct these faults, and without
attention nothing can be done; want of it, which is
really want of thought, is folly. You should not
only give attention to everything, but with alertness,
so as to observe at once all the people in the room,
their motions, looks, and words, and yet without
staring at them or seeming to be an observer. ‘This
quick and concealed observation is of infinite ad-
vantage and can be acquired by care.

I would have you keep in mind the distinction
between good manners and courtesy. In our class
good manners are not uncommon but in general we
lack courtesy, which is‘ on much the higher plane,
for it involves justice—a just consideration for the
feelings of others as well as a regard for their rights.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 25

 

IV
Spa, August 6, 1741.
Dear Boy:

I warned you in my last against those disagree-
able tricks which many people contract when they
are young, through the negligence of their parents,
and cannot get rid of when they are old; such as
odd motions, strange postures, and ungentle car-
riage.

There is likewise an awkwardness of the mind
that ought to be avoided, and with care it may be,
as, for instance, to mistake or forget names; or to
call people by improper titles or appellations. To
begin a story or narration when you are not perfect
in it and cannot go through with it, but are forced,
possibly, to say in the middle of it, ‘I have forgotten
the rest,” is unpleasant and bungling.

One must be extremely exact, clear, and per-
spicuous in everything he says; otherwise, instead
of entertaining or informing others he only tires
and puzzles them. The voice and manner of speak-
ing are not to be neglected; some people almost
shut their mouths when they speak, and mutter so
that they can not be understood; others, with the
same result, talk fast and sputter; some speak
loud, as if they were talking to deaf people; and
others so low that you cannot hear them.

All these habits are disagreeable, and may be
avoided by attention; they are the distinguishing
marks of those who have had no care taken of their
education. You cannot imagine how necessary it is
 

26 The Modern Chesterfield

 

to mind all these little things, for I have seen
people with great talents ill received for want of
having these small ones; and others well received
because of their little talents, when they had no
great ones.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 27

 

Vv

Paris, August, 1741.
Dear Boy:

Since my last I have changed considerably for
the better, thanks to the pleasures of Paris, which,
however, you will be better able to enjoy than I. It
is a magnificent town, not nearly so big as London,
but much finer, the houses being larger and all of
stone. It is not only much enlarged but embellish-
ed by the magnificence of the last King, Louis XIV,
and a prodigious number of expensive buildings
and useful and charitable foundations, such as
libraries, hospitals, and schools, will long remain the
monuments of the magnificence, humanity, and good
government of that Prince.

The people here are well-bred, just as I would
have you be; they are not awkwardly bashful and
ashamed, like the English, but easily civil without
ceremony. ‘Though they are very gay and lively,
they give attention to everything, always minding
what they are about. I hope you now do the same,
and that my highest expectations of your improve-
ment will be more than answered, for I hope to find
you proficient in both Greek and Latin. As to the
genius of poetry, I own that if nature has not given
it to you, you cannot have it, for it is true that poets
are born, not made; but the invention and imagina-
tion of the poet are alone referred to, for everybody
can, by application, make himself master of the
mechanical part of poetry, which consists in num-
 

28 The Modern Chesterfield

bers, rhymes, measure, and harmony of verse. Ovid
was born with such a genius for poetry that he says
he could not help thinking in verse, whether he
would or not, and often spoke verses without intend-
ing to do so.

I would not have you a poet, but you will miss
a great deal if you do not become familiar in your
youth with the best poetry, to which people daily
refer in their ordinary intercourse. There is a rich
vocabulary to be acquired from poetry, not to be had
elsewhere, that illuminates one’s conversation. There
is, also, a culture of the heart which flows from
contact with the imaginative and emotional fea-
tures, largely wanting in prose. For these reasons
I recommend acquiring the habit of reading poetry,
not in heavy doses, but a little each day, committing
a short poem now and then, and copying fine pass-
ages and preserving them for future use, for a bit
of such literature gives a fine touch to an address.

Contrary to the rule respecting poets, it is cer-
tain that by study and application every man can
make of himself a fairly good orator, eloquence de-
pending upon observation and care. Every man
may choose good words instead of bad ones, may
speak properly instead of improperly, may be clear
and perspicuous in his recitals, instead of dark and
muddy, may have grace instead of awkwardness in
his motions and gestures; in short, may be an agree-
able, instead of a disagreeable, speaker, if he will
take the pains. And surely it is well worth while
to take a great deal of pains to excel other men in
that particular article in which they excel beasts.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 29

 

Cicero and Caesar appreciated so fully the advant-
ages to be gained from proficiency in public speaking
that they sought instruction in the art.

__ Demosthenes, the celebrated Greek orator, the
_exponent of the theory that action, by which is
meant delivery, is the soul of oratory, stuttered and
had weak lungs, but he thought it so absolutely
necessary to speak well that he resolved by applica-
tion to get the better of those disadvantages. Ac-
cordingly, he cured his stammering by putting small
pebbles in his mouth, and strengthened his lungs
gradually by accustoming himself every day to
declaim with force and distinctness for a long time.
He likewise went often to the sea-shore and there
used the full strength of his voice in order to enure
himself to the noise and murmurs of the Athenian
popular assemblies. By such care, joined to the
constant study of the best authors, he became at
last the greatest orator of his own country and of
his own age, and probably of any country and of
all the ages, though born without any natural talent
for public speaking. Good-bye! Copy Demosthe-
“nes.

 
 

 

30 The Modern Chesterfield

Bath, June 28, 1742.

Dear Boy:

Your promises give me great pleasure, and your
performance of them, upon which I rely, will give
me still greater. Promises are to be sparingly made
and_faithfully kept. I am sure you know that

breaking your word is a folly as well as a dishonor.
It is a folly because nobody will trust you after-
wards; it is a dishonor, truth being the first duty of
religion and morality; and whoever has not truth
cannot be supposed to have any other good quality,
and must become detested by God and man.

Since I now have your voluntary promise, I ex-
pect, from your truth and your honor, that you will
do that which, independently of your promise, your
own interest and ambition ought to incline you to
do, that is, to excel in everything you undertake.
When I was of your age I should have been ashamed
if any boy of my years had learned his books better,
except in_the matter of mathematics, wherein I was
Jame_at birth, or if any such rival played at any
play better than I did; and I would not have rested
a moment until I had pushed ahead of him.

Julius Caesar, who had a noble thirst for glory,
said that he would rather be first in a little shep-
herd’s village than second in Rome; and Plutarch,
the great biographer, tells in his engaging way

_an_instructive anecdote of Caesar. He says:

 
 

The Modern Chesterfield 31

 

Again in Spain, when he had some leisure
and was reading the history of Alexander, he
was for a long time in deep thought, and at
last burst into tears; and on his friends asking
the reason of this, he said, “Don’t you think it
is a matter of sorrow that Alexander was king
of so many nations at such an early age, and I
have as yet done nothing of note?”

These sentiments are manly, and those who do
not have them will pass their lives in obscurity and
contempt, whereas those who endeavor to excel all
are at least certain of excelling many.

The sure way to excel in anything is to maintain
a close and undissipated attention while you are
about it, and then you need not spend half the time
on it that otherwise you must; for long, plodding,
puzzling application is the business of dullness, but
good parts attend regularly and take a thing imme-
diately.

Consider, then, which you would choose; to
attend diligently while you are learning, and there-
by excel all other boys, get a great reputation, and
have a great deal more time to play; or not mind
your books, let boys even younger than yourself
pass beyond you, be laughed at by them for a dunce,
and have no time to play at all: for, I assure you,
if you will not learn, you cannot play.

What is the way, then, to arrive at that perfec-
tion at which you agree to aim? It is: First,
to do your duty towards God and man, without
which everything else signifies nothing; Second, to
 

32 The Modern Chesterfield

acquire great knowledge, without which you will be
a contemptible man, though you be an honest and_
even_an honorable one; and, lastly, to be well-bred,
without which you will be a disagreeable, unpleasing
man, even though an upright and a learned one.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 33

 

VII

Dublin Castle, November 19, 1745.
Dear Boy:

Now that the Christmas breaking-up draws
near I have ordered Mr. Desnoyers to go to you
and teach you to dance. I desire you particularly
to attend to the graceful motion of your arms,
which, with the manner of giving your hand, is all
that a gentleman need attend to. Dancing, in itself,
is a trifling thing, but it is one of those established
follies to which people of sense are sometimes obliged
to conform, and they should be able to do it well.
Though I would not have you a dancer, yet, when
you dance, I would have you do it well, as I would
have you do in all that you undertake. I have
never counted it a distinction to play a fine game of
billiards, but when I took up the game I made up
my mind to have the respect of my antagonist.

Nearly everything is, for one reason or another,
important; some things are more important than
others. ‘There is no one thing so inconsequential
but that it ought to be done well, if it is to be done
at all. For instance, dress is foolish, and yet it is
foolish not to be dressed well according to one’s
rank and way of life. I confess that I cannot help
forming some opinion of a man’s character from his
dress, and I believe that other people do the same.
It is so far from being a reflection upon any man’s
understanding that it is rather a proof of it, to be
as well dressed as those with whom he lives. Any

 
 

34 The Modern Chesterfield

 

affectation whatsoever in dress implies, to my mind,
a flaw in the understanding, and, in general, jewels
fand colors, which are so precious to the savage, are
_adopted, by the several men you meet, in the inverse
order of their merit. Most young fellows display
some characteristic dress. Some affect the tremen-
dous; they wear a great and fiercely cocked hat, a
short waistcoat, and a black cravat; these are meek
asses in lions’ skins. Others go about in brown
frocks and leather breeches, carrying great oaken
cudgels, their hats uncocked, and they imitate
grooms, stage-coachmen, and country bumpkins.

A man of sense carefully avoids any particular
character in his dress. He knows that if he dresses
better than people of sense he will be a fop; that if
he dresses worse, he is unpardonably negligent; and
he realizes that if remiss in the matter at twenty
he will be a sloven at forty, and a social exile at
fifty. When you are once well-dressed, think no
more of the matter and let all your motions be easy
and natural. ‘The difference in this case between a
man of sense and a fop is that the fop values him-
self upon his dress, and the man of sense laughs at it
while knowing he must not neglect it, for, among
other things, it may be a part of the potential first
impression.

There are a thousand foolish customs which, not
being criminal, must be complied with even cheer-
fully by men of sense. Diogenes the Cynic was a
wise man for despising them, but a fool for showing
it. Be wiser than other people if you can, but do
not tell them so,

 

 
The Modern Chesterfield . 35

 

VIII

Dublin Castle, April 5, 1746.

Dear Boy:

In my opinion you will before long both think
and speak more favorably of women than you do
now. You seem to think that from Eve downward
they have done a great deal of mischief, but history
will inform you that men have done much more
mischief in the world than women.

I advise you never to attack whole bodies of
any kind, for all general rules have their exceptions,
and you unnecessarily make enemies by attacking a
corps collectively. Among women, as among men,
there are good as well as bad.

This rule applies to lawyers, soldiers, parsons,
courtiers, citizens. They are all subject to the same
passions and sentiments, differing only in the man-
ner, according to their several educations, and it
would be as imprudent as unjust to attack any of
these classes in the lump. Individuals forgive some-
times, but bodies and societies never do. a ae

[fthat in public life I have carried this rule still
further—I oppose measures, not men.

All general reflections upon nations and societies
are the trite, threadbare jokes of those who merely
set up for wits. Judge of the individuals from your
own knowledge of them, and not from their sex,
profession, or denomination.
 

36 The Modern Chesterfield

 

When I was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ire-
land the office was understood to be one, as the
Duke of Shrewsbury described it, wherein a man
has business enough to prevent him from falling
asleep and not sufficient to keep him awake. You
know that if this were true the place would not
suit an active and a hard-working man such as you
know me to be, but I made up my mind at the time
that there would be plenty to do, of importance, too;
and so it has proved. ‘The truth is that the business
here is continual, and as I am resolved to do it while
I remain, it leaves me little time for things I like
better.

The situation affords me an opportunity to set
a good example to my Irish brethren, who are not
very industrious, perhaps because there is altogether
too much drinking among them. And iin that
matter, too, I am taking occasion to set them an
example of abstemiousness, having in mind that
they are as fit for arts, sciences, industry, and labor
as any people in the world, and might, notwith-
standing some hard restraints which England by a
mistaken policy has laid them under, push several
branches of trade to great perfection and profit. I
shall always entertain the truest affection for this
country, whose men, by the way, are the healthiest
and strongest of whom I have any knowledge.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 37

 

IX

Bath, October 4, O. S., 1746.
Dear Boy:

To my mind, one may as well not know a thing
at all as to know it imperfectly. To know a little
of anything gives neither satisfaction nor credit, and
often brings disgrace or ridicule.

Pope says, very truly,

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

What is called a smattering of everything in-
fallibly constitutes a coxcomb. I have often, of late,
reflected what an unhappy man I would now be if
I had not acquired in my youth some fund of learn-
ing as well as a taste for it. Otherwise, what
could I do with myself at this age? As many
ignorant people do, I would be destroying my health
and faculties by sotting away the evenings; or, by
wasting them frivolously in the tattle of women’s
company, would be exposing myself to the ridicule
and contempt of those very women; or, lastly, I
would hang myself, as a man once did, for weariness
of putting on and pulling off his shoes and stockings
every day. For now my books, and my books alone,
are left to me.

I do not mean by this to exclude conversation
from the pleasures of advanced age; on the contrary,
it is a great and rational pleasure at all ages; but
 

38 The Modern Chesterfield

 

the conversation of the ignorant is no conversation,
and gives even them no pleasure; they tire of their
own sterility.

Let me, then, most earnestly recommend you
to hoard up, while you can, a great stock of learning;
during the dissipation of your youth you may not
have occasion to spend much of it, yet a time will
come when you will need it.

I will say no more to you upon this subject; you
have your tutor to enforce it; you have reason to
assent to the truth of it; so that, in short, you “have
Moses and the Prophets”; if you “hear not” them,
“neither will” you “be persuaded, though one rose
from the dead.” Do not imagine that the knowl-
edge which I so much recommend to you is con-
fined to books, pleasing, useful, and necessary as
they are; I include in it the great knowledge of the
world, still more necessary than that of books. In
truth, the two assist each other reciprocally; and no
man will have either perfectly who does not acquire
both. The knowledge of the world is to be learned
in the world, and not in a closet. Books alone will
never teach it to you, but they will suggest many
things which might otherwise escape you; and your
own observations upon mankind when compared
with those which you find in books will help you to
fix the true point.

To know mankind well requires as much atten-
tion and application as to know books, and, it may
be, more sagacity and discernment. I am, at this
time, acquainted with many elderly people who have
passed their lives in the great world but with such
 

The Modern Chesterfield 39

 

inattention that they know hardly more of it now
than they did at fifteen.

Do not flatter yourself therefore with the
thought that you can acquire this knowledge in the
frivolous chit-chat of idle companions: no, you must
dig much deeper than that. You must look into
people as well as at them. You must observe as
well as see. Try to be wise as well as learned.

 
 

40 The Modern Chesterfield

 

x

Bath, October 9, O. S., 1746.
Dear Boy:

I must say a word to you of negligence. You
know that I have often told you that my affection
for you is not a weak one; and, far from blinding
me, it makes me but the more quick-sighted as to
your faults; of those it is not only my right but
my duty to tell you, and it is your duty and your
interest to correct them.

In the strict scrutiny which I have made of you
I have, thank God, hitherto not found any vice of
the heart, nor any peculiar weakness of the head;
but I have discovered laziness, inattention, and in-
difference—faults which are pardonable only in old
men, who, in the decline of life, when health and
spirits fail, have a kind of claim to that sort of
tranquillity. A young man should be ambitious to
shine and excel; alert, active, and indefatigable in
the means of doing it. Without the desire and the
pains necessary, depend upon it you can never excel,
as, without the desire and attention necessary to
please, you never can please.

I am sure that any man of common understand-
ing may, by proper culture, care, attention, and
labor make of himself whatever he pleases. Your
destination is the great and busy world; your object
is the affairs, interests, history, constitutions, cus-
toms, and manners of the several parts of Europe.
In this any man of common sense, by application,
 

The Modern Chesterfield 41

 

may be sure to excel. Ancient and modern history
are by study easily mastered. With geography and
chronology it is the same. None of them requires
any uncommon share of genius or invention. Speak-
ing and writing clearly, correctly, and with ease and
grace are certainly to be acquired by reading the
best authors with care, and by attention to the best
models.

These are the qualifications more particularly
necessary for you in your department, which you
may be possessed of if you please, and which, I tell
you fairly, I shall be very angry at you if you are
not, because, as you have the means in your hands,
it will be your own fault.

If care and application are necessary to the ac-
quiring of these qualifications, without which you
can never make a figure in the world, they are none
the less necessary with regard to the small accom-
plishments requisite to make you agreeable and
pleasing in society.

He who is commonly called an absent man is
ordinarily weak or affected; but be he which he
will, he is, I am sure, a disagreeable man in com-
pany. He fails in all the common offices of civility;
he seems not to know those to-day with whom yester-
day he appeared to live on terms of intimacy. He
takes no part in the general conversation, but, on
the contrary, breaks into it from time to time with
some start of his own as if waking from a dream.

Sir Isaac Newton, Locke, and perhaps five or
six more, may have had a right to absence, from
that intense thought which the things they were
 

42 The Modern Chesterfield

 

investigating required. But if a young man and a
man of the world, who has no such engrossments
to plead, will claim and exercise that right of ab-
sence, his pretended right should, to my mind, be
turned into an involuntary absence by his perpetual
exclusion from company.
Attention may be cultivated like any other facul-
ity. If you will contest with your companions to
| ez who can remember the greatest number of objects
in a shop window as you pass by it, or who can
remember the most of a book page, réad for the
purpose, you will find it interesting, and by frequent
practice you will increase your capacity for attention,
as well as your ability to observe quickly.
However frivolous a company may be, still, while
you are among them, do not show by your inatten-
tion that you think them so; but rather take their
tone, and conform in some degree to their weakness
instead of manifesting your contempt for them.
There is nothing people bear more impatiently, or
forgive less, than contempt; and an injury is much
sooner forgotten than an insult.
If therefore you would rather make others happy
_.than uncomfortable, would rather please than offend,
rather be well than ill spoken of, rather be loved
than hated, remember to have that constant atten-
tion about you which flatters every man’s little
vanity, and the want of which, by mortifying his
pride, never fails to excite his resentment, or at
least his ill-will. For instance, most people, I might
say all, people, have aversions to certain things and
likings for others; if you were to laugh at a man
 

The Modern Chesterfield 43

 

for his aversion to a cat or to cheese, which are
common antipathies, or negligently let them come
in his way when you could prevent it, he would,
in the first case, think himself insulted and, in the
second, slighted, and would remember either, where-
as your care to procure for him what he likes, and
to remove from him what he dislikes, shows him
that he is at least an object of your attention; it
flatters his vanity and makes him possibly more your
friend than a more important service would have
done.

With regard to women, attentions still below
these are necessary, and in some measure due, by
the custom of the world and according to the laws
of good breeding.
 

44 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XI

London, March 27, O. S., 1747.
My Dear Boy:

Pleasure is the rock upon which most young

people split: they launch out with crowded sails in
quest of it, but without a compass to direct their
course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel; and
pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns
of their voyage. Do not think I mean to snarl at
pleasure like a stoic, or to preach against_it like a
parson; no, I mean to point it out, and recommend
it to you like an epicurean: I wish you a great deal,
and my only object is to hinder you from failing
to distinguish between pleasure and happiness, and
from enjoying one_at the expense of the other.
The character at which most young men aim is
that of a man of pleasure, but they generally take
it upon trust, and instead of consulting their own
taste and inclinations they blindly adopt whatever
those with whom they chiefly converse are pleased
to call by the name of pleasure. As it may be of
use to you, I am willing to confess, though ashamed
to own, that the vices of my youth proceeded much
more from my silly resolution to be what I heard
called a man of pleasure than from my own inclina-
tions.

I naturally hated drinking, and yet I often
drank, with disgust at the time, attended by great
sickness the next day, merely because I mistakenly
considered drinking a necessary qualification for a
 

The ALodern Chesterfield 45

 

fine gentleman and a man of pleasure. ‘There is,
but one safe course for the young, as I have so
often told you, and that is to let liquor alone entirely
until you are of age and have completed your studies.
By that time you will have learned to better com-
mand yourself, and can make up your mind how far
one of your temperament ought to be set free among
such dangers. ‘Three out of four drunkards acquire
the habit in their nonage, and many a youth, as
strong in character and will as you, has gone down
from overconfidence in his powers of resistance, mis-
led by the conceit that he knew where to draw the
line.

As to gambling, I did not need money and con-
sequently had no occasion to play for it, but I
thought play another necessary ingredient in the
composition of a man of pleasure, and accordingly I
plunged into it, without desire at first, sacrificed
happiness to it, and made myself solidly uneasy by it.

Thus seduced by fashion, I blindly adopted nom-
inal pleasures and lost real ones; an impaired fortune
and a shattered constitution are, I confess, the just
punishment for my errors.

Take warning, then; choose your pleasures for
yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you.
Follow nature, and not fashion; weigh the present
enjoyment of your pleasures against the necessary
consequences of them, and then let your own com-
mon sense determine your choice.

Were I to begin the world again with the
experience which I now have I would lead a life
of happiness—of real, not imaginary pleasure.
 

46 The Modern Chesterfield

 

I would pass some of my time in reading; the
rest in the company of people of sense and learning,
and chiefly of those above me, and I would frequent
the mixed companies of men and women of fashion.
Though often frivolous, they unbend and. refresh
the mind—not uselessly, because they certainly polish
and soften the manners.

These would be my pleasures and amusements
if I were to live the last thirty years over again;
they are rational ones; and moreover they are really
the fashionable ones; for the others are not, in truth,
the pleasures of people of fashion, but of those who
merely call themselves so. Does good company care
to receive a man reeling drunk? Or to see another
tearing his hair and blaspheming for having lost at
play more than he is able to pay? ‘Or a man with
half a nose? No; those who practice vices, much
more those who brag of them, are no part of good
company, and are most unwillingly, if ever, admitted
into it.

A real man of fashion observes decency; at least,
neither borrows nor affects vices, and if, unfor-
tunately, he has any, gratifies them with choice deli-
cacy and secrecy.

I have not mentioned the pleasures of the mind.
They are the complete and permanent ones, but
they do not come under the head of what people
commonly call pleasures, which they seem to con-
fine to the senses. The pleasure of virtue, of charity,
and of learning is true and lasting pleasure; it is
happiness, with which I hope you will be well and
long acquainted.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 47

 

XII

London, April 14, O. S., 1747.
Dear Boy:

I have always earnestly recommended to you to
do what you are about, be that what it will, and to
do nothing else at the same time.

Do not imagine that I mean by this that you
should plod at your books all day long. Far from
it; I mean that you should have your pleasures, too;
and that you should attend to them as much as to
your studies; and if you do not attend equally to
both, you will not have improvement or satisfaction
from either.

A man is unfit for either business or pleasure
unless he directs his attention to the present object,
and in some degree banishes, for the time, all other
objects from his thoughts. If at a ball, a supper,
or a party of pleasure a man were to be solving
in his own mind a problem of Euclid, he would be
a bad companion and make a poor figure; or if, in
studying a problem in his closet, he were to think
of a minuet, I believe that he would make a poor
mathematician.

There is a time for everything in the course of
the day if you do but one thing at a time to com-
pletion. De Witt, who was torn to pieces in the
year 1672, did the whole business of the Republic,
and yet had time left to go to assemblies and sup
in company. Being asked how he could possibly
find time to go through so much business and yet
 

48 The Modern Chesterfield

 

amuse himself in the evenings as he did, he answered,
“There is nothing so easy; for it is only doing one
thing at a time, and never putting off anything until
tomorrow that can be done today.”

This steady and undissipated attention to one
subject is a sure mark of superior genius, as hurry,
bustle, and agitation are the never-failing symptoms
of a weak mind. When you read Horace attend
to the justness of his thoughts, the happiness of his
diction, and the beauty of his poetry, and do not
think of Puffendorf; when you are reading Puffen-
dorf, do not think of Madame de St. Germain; nor
of Puffendorf when you are talking to Madame de
St. Germain.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 49

XIII

London, July 30, O. S., 1747.
Dear Boy:

You will have found by my late letter that you
are to be at Leipzig by next Michaelmas, where
you will be lodged in the house of the learned
Professor Mascow, and boarded in the neighbor-
hood with some young men of fashion. I expect
you while there to make yourself master of the
German language, which you may very soon do if
you please.

There is a great deal of company at Leipzig
which I would have you frequent in the evenings,
when the studies of the day are over, but I must
remind you at the same time that it will be of little
purpose to frequent good company if you do not
conform to their manners.

As you must attend to your manners, so you
must not neglect your person; take care to be clean,
well dressed, and gentle; to have no disagreeable
attitudes, nor awkward tricks, to which many peo-
ple accustom themselves and then cannot leave them
off.

While I am speaking of cleanliness of the person
I may as well refer to a somewhat unusual subject.

It is strange that we can overlook an offense to
every sense but that of smell. The olfactory nerve
is a tyrant. One cannot be too careful in this
matter. To me, artificial perfume has about it the
suggestion that some perfume is necessary, so that
 

50 The Modern Chesterfield

 

it destroys its purpose. And it has been truly said
that there is no perfume so sweet as the perfume of
clean linen. An entire change of raiment each day
is a good plan. This applies to outside as well as
inside apparel, and to live up to the rule requires
only two sets of garments. One is airing at the
windows all night. It is damp in the morning and
hung in the closet to dry until the next morning,
when it is ready for use. Meanwhile the other is
being worn; and the two are thus alternated
throughout the week. Of course the main recipe
for an acceptable body is the daily bath of hot water
to be clean, followed by cold water to close the
pores and to obviate catching cold: a luxury, but it
makes friends, and the sense of being clean is a
real source of strength to nerves and will.

Take care to keep your teeth clean by brushing
them carefully every morning and at bed-time, and
when practicable after every meal. This is neces-
sary to preserve your teeth and to save you pain
and_discomfort. Mine have plagued me long, and
are now falling out merely for want of care when
I was of your age.

Dress well, but not too well. Observe the dress
of men of parts; you will perceive that it is neat,
but never noticeable, either for conformity to fash-
ion or disregard of it.

 

Consider sufficiently your air and manner of
presenting yourself, but not too much! Be neither
negligent nor stiff. All these things deserve a de-
gree of care, a second-rate attention; they give an
 

The Modern Chesterfield 51

 

additional luster to real worth. Bacon says that a
pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommenda-
tion. It is certainly an agreeable forerunner of
merit and smooths the way for it.
 

52 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XIV

London, August 7, O. S., 1747.
Dear Boy:

I sent you by the last post a letter of recom-
mendation to one of the first citizens of Munich,
which you will take care to deliver to him in the
most polite manner. He will have you presented
to the Electoral family, and I hope you will go
through that ceremony with great respect, good
breeding, and ease.

As this is your first visit to a Court, take care
to inform yourself of the particular customs to be
observed, that you may not make any mistake. At
Vienna men always make courtesies, instead of bows,
to the Emperor; in France, nobody bows at all to
the King or kisses his hand; but in Spain and Eng-
land bows are made, and hands are kissed. Thus
every Court has some peculiarity, of which, to
avoid blunders, those who go to them ought previ-
ously to inform themselves.

I turn abruptly from this subject to remind you
of my lifelong friend Lewin, whom you remember
pleasantly, for his coming to our home was ever a

: benediction. He has a highly original mind (an
uncommon endowment), and has boiled down the
decalogue and all moral precepts into one: Never
lcave a scar! Give your imagination wings and you
can make of this a comprehensive code.

The primary idea is never to leave a scar upon
another; every wound which you can justly inflict,
 

The Modern Chesterfield 53

 

in great matters and in small, must be such that it
will heal without leaving a trace. Think how your
cruel or inconsiderate acts and words are thus
limited.

Secondarily, you must not leave a scar upon
yourself!

Keep both these ideas before you, and when
alluring temptations beset you, apply them con-
scientiously with their full, proper atmosphere, and
vou will not go far in the wrong path.

Take special care to keep this rule in mind now
and in later years in your association with women.
Be sure that upon their sensitive souls you never
leave a scar, and have a care, also, that they leave
no scar on you.

I have another friend, a little woman, who lives
by another of these laconic codes. It consists of but
two words: Be honest. Less imaginative than the
other, it is equally comprehensive when interpreted
broadly. I will illustrate the manner in which it
is applied: she is restrained in many particulars not
so much by religious or ethical rules, such as govern
her sisters of less mentality, as by the faith of her
friends in her own integrity. And she feels it
would not be honest to fall below the standard which
her friends believe to be hers. I count it an inspira-
tion to have such a friend—a woman capable of
evolving such a philosophy and of living up to it,
as she does, with the spirit of a soldier.

Justinian, in his Institutes, endeavored to con-
dense morals into a sentence, and he nearly succeed-
ed. You know the instance: ‘“These are the pre-
 

54 The Modern Chesterfield

 

cepts of the law: to live honorably, to injure nobody,
to render to everyone his due.” Many generations
have come and gone since that was written but it
has not been improved upon.

While I am writing in this vein I must tell you
of a striking thought uttered by Judge Burke in a
recent public speech in which he was discussing
moral philosophy. ‘“The code of Socrates,” he said,
“was, Know thyself; the code of Marcus Aurelius,
Restrain thyself; the code of Christ, Deny thyself.”
And if a man lived up to the true meaning of any
of those commands he would be good and just.

But the greatest of all these condensed moral
guides is, of course, the Golden Rule, which, by the
way, seems to me technically imperfect. You may
be willing that others should act unjustly to you,
and in that event doing unto others “whatsoever ye
would that men should do to you,” would license
you to act unjustly to them. The true intent of
the rule is unmistakable—to do unto others as they
should be done by. But think how much would
have been lost to the world by being too exact, for
if the rule had been stated strictly it would have
lost its vitality, its appeal, its argument to the man,
its grip.

Confucius, who preceded Socrates in the doc-
trine Know thyself, and who, in passing, did not
lay claim to any divine inspiration, stated the princi-
ple of the Golden Rule in negative form, expressed
in these words: “Do not unto others what you
would not have them do unto you.”
 

The Modern Chesterfield 55

 

XV

London, September 21, O. S., 1747.
Dear Boy:

I received by the last post your letter of the
eighth and I do not wonder that you were sur-
prised at the credulity and superstition of the
Papists at Einsiedeln. But remember that errors
and mistakes, however gross, in matters of opinion,
are to be condoned, and not punished or laughed at.
The blindness of the understanding is as much to be
pitied as the blindness of the eye. Each man’s
reason must be his guide; and I micht as well
expect everyone to be of my size and complexion
as to reason just like me. Each individual seeks
for the truth, but only God knows who has found it.

It is therefore as absurd to ridicule people, as
it is unjust to punish them, for opinions which they
cannot help entertaining upon the conviction of their
reason. It is the man who tells or acts the lie
that is guilty, and not he who honestly and sincerely
believes. I really count nothing more criminal,
mean, and ridiculous than lying. It is the prod-
uct of unalloyed malice, cowardice, or vanity, and
generally misses its aim in every one of these views,
for lies are always detected sooner or later. If I
tell a malicious untruth in order to affect any man’s
fortune or character I may indeed injure him for a
time, but I shall be sure to be the greater sufferer
myself at last, for as soon as I am detected I am
blasted for the infamous attempt, and whatever is
 

56 The Modern Chesterfield

 

said afterwards to the disadvantage of that person,
however true, passes for calumny. If I lie or equiv-
ocate in order to excuse myself for something that
I have said or done, or to escape the consequences,
I disclose my fear as well as my falsehood, and
increase rather than avoid the danger or the shame;
I show myself to be low and mean, and am sure
to be treated accordingly. Fear, instead of avoiding,
invites danger, for concealed cowards will insult
known ones. If one has had the misfortune to be
in the wrong there is something noble in frankly
acknowledging it—it is the only way of atoning
for it, and the only path to forgiveness.

There is another sort of lies, inoffensive enough
in themselves, but ridiculous: I mean those which
vanity suggests, that defeat the very end for which
they are calculated, and terminate in humiliation
and confusion; these are chiefly narrative and histor-
ical, intended to do honor to their author. He is
always the hero of his own romances; he has been
in dangers from which nobody but himself escaped ;
he has seen with his own eyes whatever other
people have heard of; and has ridden more miles
post in one day than ever a courier went in two. He
is soon discovered, and becomes the object of con-
tempt and ridicule.

Remember, then, as long as you live, that noth-
ing but strict truth can carry you through the world
with either your character or your reputation un-
wounded, and as you jog along you will observe
that the greatest fools are the greatest liars.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 57

 

XVI

London, October 2, O. S., 1747.
Dear Boy:

From your last letter I learn that you are a
tolerably good landscape painter, and can present to
the curious the several views of Switzerland.

I am glad of it, as it is a proof of attention, but
I hope you will be as good a portrait painter, which
is a much more noble art. By portraits, you will
easily judge, I do not mean the outlines and the
coloring of the human figure but the inside of the
heart and mind. ‘This art requires more attention,
observation, and penetration than the other, and
indeed it is infinitely more useful. Search therefore
with the greatest care into the characters of all
those with whom you converse; endeavor to discover
their dominant passions, their prevailing weaknesses,
their vanities, their follies, and their humors, to-
gether with all the right and wrong, the wise and
silly springs of human actions, which make such
inconsistent and whimsical beings of us rational
creatures. A moderate share of penetration with
great attention will infallibly make these necessary
discoveries.

This is the true knowledge of the world; and
the world is a country which nobody ever yet
knew by description; to be acquainted with it one
must travel through it himself. The scholar,
who in the dust of his closet talks or writes of the
 

58 The Modern Chesterfield

 

world, knows no more of it than the orator did
of war who judiciously endeavored to teach the art
of war to Hannibal.

Courts and camps are the only places in which
to learn the world. There alone all kinds of char-
acters resort, and human nature is seen in all the
various shapes and modes given to it by education,
custom, and habit, whereas in all other places one
local mode generally prevails and produces a seem-
ing, though not a real, sameness of character. For
example, one general mode distinguishes a univer-
sity town, another a trading town, a third a sea-
port town, whereas at a capital, where the supreme
power resides, some or all of these modes are to be
seen, and seen in action, each person exerting his
utmost skill in pursuit of his object.

Human nature is the same all over the world
but its operations are so varied by education and
habit that one must see it in all its dresses in order
to be intimately acquainted with it. The passion
of ambition, for instance, is the same in a courtier, a
soldier, or an ecclesiastic, but from their different
educations and habits they will take very different
methods of gratifying it. Civility, which is a dis-
position to accommodate and oblige others, is essen-
tially the same in every country, but good breeding,
as it is called, which is the manner of exerting that
disposition, is unlike in different countries. It is
merely local, and every man of sense imitates and
conforms to the local variety.

Conformity, which involves flexibility of man-
ners, is necessary in the course of the world; that
The Modern Chesterfield 59

 

is, with regard to all things not wrong in themselves.
A genius for versatility is the most useful of all
this class of graces—the ability to turn instantly
from one object to another, assuming the proper
manner for each—to be serious with the grave,
cheerful with the gay, and trifling with the frivolous.
Endeavor by all means to acquire this talent, for it
is a great one.
 

60 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XVII

London, October 9, O. S., 1747.
Dear Boy:

People of your age have commonly about them
an unguarded frankness which makes them the easy
prey of the artful; they look upon every knave or
fool who tells them that he is their friend, to be
really so, and they reward that profession of simu-
lated friendship with an indiscreet and unbounded
confidence, always to their loss, sometimes to their
ruin.

Beware therefore, now that you are coming into
the world, of these professed friends. Receive them
with great civility but with great incredulity, too,
and pay them with compliments but not with con-
fidence. Do not let your vanity and self-love make
you suppose that people become your friends at
first sight, or even upon a short acquaintance. Real
friendship is of slow growth, and never thrives
unless grafted upon a stock of known and reciprocal
merit.

There is another kind of nominal friendship
among young people which is warm for the time,
but, by good luck, of short duration. This friendship
is hastily induced by accidental association in the
pursuit of pleasure. Friends thus made lend each
other money for bad purposes; they engage in quar-
rels, offensive and defensive; they tell each other
all they know and often more; and when, of a
sudden, some accident separates them, they think
 

The Modern Chesterfield 61

 

po more of each other. Remember to draw a dis-
tinction between companions and friends, for a very
complaisant and agreeable companion may, and often
does, prove a very improper and dangerous friend.

People will in a great degree and not without
reason form their opinion of you upon that which
they have of your friends, and there is a Spanish
proverb which says very justly, Tell mc with whom
you live and I will tell you who you are. One may
fairly suppose that a man who makes a friend of a
knave or a fool has something bad to do, or to
conceal. But at the same time that you carefully
decline the friendship of knaves and fools, if it can
be called friendship, there is no occasion wantonly
to make them your enemies. I would rather choose
a secure neutrality than alliance or war with them.
You may be a declared foe to their vices and follies
without being marked out by them as an enemy, for
their enmity is the next dangerous thing to their
friendship.

Have a real reserve with almost everybody, and
have a seeming reserve with almost nobody, for it
is very disagreeable to seem reserved and very dan-
gerous not to be so. Few people find the true
medium; many are ridiculously mysterious and re-
served upon trifles, and many imprudently commu-
nicative of all they know.

The next thing to the choice of your friends is
the choice of your company. Endeavor as much as
you can to keep company with people above you,
with whom you rise as much as you sink with
people below you, for you will not rise above the
 

62 The Modern Chesterfield

 

company you keep. Do not mistake when I say
company above you and think that I have reference
to birth alone; that is the least consideration. I
refer to worth, and the light in which the world
considers the company.

There are two sorts of good company; one
consists of those people who have the lead in the gay
part of life; the other consists of those who are
distinguished by some peculiar merit of .mind or
heart, or who excel in some useful or valuable art
or science. For my own part I used to think myself
in company as much above me when I was with
Addison and Pope as if I had been with all the
princes of Europe.

What I mean by low company is those who,
absolutely insignificant and contemptible in them-
selves, think they are honored by being in your
company, and who flatter every vice and folly you
have in order to engage you to converse with them.
The pride of being the first in the company is but
natural, yet it is silly and prejudicial.

You may possibly ask me if a man has it always
in his power to get into the best company. I
answer, Yes, he has—by deserving it, provided
he is in circumstances which enable him to appear
upon the footing of a gentleman. Worth and
good breeding will make their way anywhere.
Knowledge will introduce you, but fine breeding
will alone endear you, for, as I have often told
you, politeness and pleasing manners are absolutely
necessary to adorn all other good qualities and
talents. Without them no knowledge, no perfection
 

The Modern Chesterfield 63

 

whatsoever, is seen in its best light. Without good
breeding the scholar is a pedant; the philosopher, a
cynic; the soldier, a brute; and every man, dis-
agreeable.
 

64 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XVIII

London, October 16, O. S., 1
Dear Boy:

Caesar paid great attention to the art of 5
ing; he believed it necessary to possess but diff
‘to acquire. It can hardly be reduced to rules,
your own good sense and observation will teach
more of it than I can.

Politeness is kindness. If you wish to deter.
whether an act is polite, ask yourself whether
kind. Do as you would be done by, is the s
method that I know. Observe carefully what ¢g
fies you in others, and probably the same thin;
you will gratify them. If you are pleased
the complaisance and attention of others to
humors, your tastes, or your weaknesses, de
upon it the same complaisance and attention on
part to theirs will equally please them.

There is something ennobling in kindness,
there is a real satisfaction that flows from cou:
to the one who bestows it. Many, in their sel
ness or their hurry, never fully know such a kt
ing, which is above ordinary satisfactions, is ope
all, and costs nothing.

Do not tell stories in company unless they
exceedingly applicable to the present subjec
conversation.

Of all things banish egotism, and discrimi
carefully in regaling people with your own pers
concerns or private or family affairs; though
 

’

Vhe Modern Chesterfield 65

 

are interesting to you, they may be tedious to others.
Whatever you think your own excellencies, do not
display them in company, nor labor, as many do, to
give a turn to the conversation which will supply
you with an opportunity of exhibiting them. If
they are real they will be discovered infallibly with-
out your pointing them out yourself, and with much
more advantage.

Never maintain an argument with heat and
clamor, though you know yourself to be in the right,
but give your opinion modestly and coolly, which is
the only way to convince. I suggest ending your
statements with the expression, in my opinion. It
will encourage others to advance their opinions, and
when you have heard them you may have occasion to
modify yours. I have borrowed this rule from one
of the world’s great men.

Remember that there is a local propriety to be
observed in all companies. The particular charac-
ters, the habits, the cant, of a company may give
merit to a word or a gesture which would have none
at all if divested of those accidental circumstances.

In this respect people commonly err, and, fond
of something that has entertained them in one group
and under certain circumstances, repeat it with em-
phasis where it is either insipid, or, it may be,
offensive by being ill-timed or misplaced. Nay,
they often use this preamble: “I heard a funny
story the other day,” or, “I will tell you the best
thing in the world.” Such introductions raise ex-
pectations which, when disappointed, make the re-
lator look very deservedly like a fool.
66 The Modern Chesterfield

 

It is of value in estimating the character of a
person, whether a man or a woman, to find out his
dominant excellence and his controlling weakness.
Men have various objects in which they excel, or
believe they excel, or wish to excel, and yet are
doubtful whether they do or not.

You will easily discover a man’s prevailing
vanity by observing his favorite topic of conversa-
tion; in general a man talks most of what he wishes
to be thought to excel in.

The late Sir Robert Walpole, who was certainly
an able man, was in no doubt on that point, but his
weakness was to be thought to give a polite and
happy turn to gallantry, of which he had undoubt-
edly less than any man living; it was his favorite
and frequent subject of conversation, which proved
to those who had penetration that it was his greatest
weakness.

Most women have but one object, which is
their beauty. Nature has rarely formed a2 woman
ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her
person; if her face is so shocking that in some degree
she must be conscious of it, her figure and air, she
trusts, make ample amends for it. If her figure is
deformed, her face, she thinks, counterbalances it.
If they are hoth bad, she comforts herself with the
belief that she has graces, a certain manner, still
more engaging than beauty. ‘This truth is evident
from the studied and elaborate dress of the ugliest
women in the world. An undoubted, uncontested,
conscious beauty is, of all women, the least sensible
°

The Modern Chesterfield 67

 

to flattery on that head; she knows it is her due, and
is therefore obliged to nobody for giving it to her.

Do not mistake me, and think that I mean to
recommend the use of flattery. I do not advocate

obtaining goods by false pretenses. But there is no
living in the ord without a complaisant indulgence
for people’s weaknesses and innocent, though absurd,
vanities. If aman has a mind to be thought wiser
than he is, and a woman handsomer than she is, their
error is a comfort to themselves and innocent with
regard to other people, and I would rather make
them my friends by indulging them in it, as far as
honesty will permit, than to make them my enemies
by endeavoring to undeceive them.

There are little attentions, likewise, which are
infinitely engaging, and which sensibly affect that
pride and self-love which is inseparable from human
nature, as they are unquestioned proofs of the regard
and consideration which we have for the person to
whom we pay them, as, for example, to observe the
little habits, the likings, and the antipathies of our
friends, and then to take care to provide them with
the one, and to shield them from the other.

Attention to such trifles contributes legitimately, ,
il believe, to the happiness of those about us. It
‘wins friends; it promotes companionships; and there
‘is nothing in the world but people, and nothing in

‘people but companionship.

 
 

68 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XIX

London, February 9g, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

You will receive this letter not from a Secretary
of State, but from a man in private life; for whom,
on account of his years, quiet is as fit and necessary
as labor and activity are for you at your age and
will be for a long time to come. Last Saturday I
resigned the Seals to the King, who parted with me
most graciously, and I may add, for he said so
himself, with regret. As I retire from hurry to
quiet, and to enjoy the comforts of private and
social life, you will easily imagine that I have no
thoughts of opposition, or meddling with business.
I am now happy, but I found that I could not be so
in my former public station.

As I like your correspondence better than that
of all the kings, princes, and Ministers in Europe
I shall now have leisure to carry it on more reg-
ularly. My letters to you will be written by me,
and, I hope, read by you, with pleasure, which I
believe seldom happens reciprocally to letters written
from and to a Secretary.

As I put behind me the allurements of official
life I am impelled to the confession that pride has
been no small factor in my seeking preferment. It
is so with all men. We live in our pride more than
we admit, even to ourselves. To guard, however,
against that inflation which so ill becomes us, I
have made it a rule to search myself, and upon the
 

The Modern Chesterfield 69

 

slightest suspicion of overesteem I have indulged in
self-castigation, ever with this reflection: If my
head is turned by the power of this office, then the
office is bigger than I; if not, then I am bigger
than the office. This is in itself an appeal to the
pride but it has served me well, especially in my
younger days; otherwise I might have made myself
at times quite absurd, and, much worse, might have

alienated some friends who have been not only
prized but useful.
70 The Modern Chesterfield

XX

Bath, February 16, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

The first use that I made of my liberty was to
come hither, where I arrived yesterday. My health
needed some repairs which these waters never fail
to make.

I must observe to you upon this occasion that the
satisfaction which I expect to find in my new library
will be chiefly owing to my having employed my
time well at your age. If I had employed it still
better my satisfaction would now be complete, but,
however, I planted, while young, that degree of
learning which is now my refuge and my shelter.
Make your plantings more extensive and they will
more than pay you for your trouble.

I do not regret the time that I passed in
pleasures; they were seasonable; they were the
pleasures of youth, and I enjoyed them. If I had
not, I should probably overvalue them now, but
acquainted with them as I am, I know their real
value and how much they are generally overrated.

Nor do I regret the time that I have passed in
business, for the same reason; those who see only
the outside of it imagine that it has hidden charms,
after which they pant, and nothing but acquaintance
can undeceive them.

I, who have been behind the scenes, both of
pleasure and business, and have seen all the springs
and pulleys of those decorations which astonish and
 

The Modern Chesterfield 71

 

dazzle the audience, retire, not only without regret,
but with contentment and satisfaction. What I do
regret, and ever shall, however, is the time that
I lost in mere idleness. This is the common effect
of the inconsiderateness of youth, against which I
beg you will be most carefully on your guard. Every
moment may be put to some use, and with much
more pleasure than if unemployed.

Do not imagine that by the employment of time
I mean an uninterrupted application to serious
studies. No; pleasures are, at proper times, both
necessary and useful; they fashion and form you
for the world; they teach you characters, and show
you the human heart in its unguarded moments. I
have known many people, from laziness of mind,
to go through both pleasure and business with equal
inattention, neither enjoying the one, nor transacting
the other; thinking themselves men of pleasure
because they mingled with those who were, and
men of business because they had business to do
though they did not do it. Whatever your task, do
it to the purpose; do it thoroughly, not superficially ;
go to the bottom of things. Anything half done,
or half known, is, to my mind, not done or known
at all.

There is hardly any place or any company where
you may not gain knowledge if you please; almost
everybody knows some one thing and is glad to talk
upon it. ‘Seek, and ye shall find,” applies to this
world as well as the next. See everything, inquire
into everything; you may excuse your curiosity, and
the questions you ask, which otherwise might be
 

72 The Modern Chesterfield

 

though impertinent, by your manner of asking them,
for most things depend a great deal upon manner.
For example: I am afraid I am very troublesome
with my questions; but nobody else can inform me
so well as you.

Now that you are in the country of the
Lutherans, go to their churches and observe the
manner of their public worship; attend to their
ceremonies and inquire the meaning of every one of
them. And, as you will soon understand German
well enough, attend to their sermons, and observe
the manner of preaching. Inform yourself of their
church government, whether it resides in the sover-
eign, or in consistories, or synods; whence arises the
maintenance of their clergy—whether from tithes,
as in England, or from voluntary contributions, or
from State pensions.

Do the same thing when you are in Roman
Catholic countries; go to the churches, see all the
ceremonies, ask the meaning of them, have the terms
explained to you. Inform yourself of the religious
orders, their founders, their rules, their vows, their
habits, their revenues. But when you frequent
places of public worship—and I would have you
go to all the different ones you meet with—remem-
ber that, however erroneous the worship, it is not
an object of laughter or jest. Honest error is to
be pitied, never ridiculed. The object of all the
public worship in the world is the same; it is that
great, eternal Being who created everything. The
different manners of worship are by no means sub-
jects for ridicule. Each sect thinks itself the best;
The Modern Chesterfield a8

 

and there is no infallible judge in the world to decide
which is the best.

I had almost forgotten one thing that I would
recommend as an object for your curiosity and
information, which is, the administration of justice.
As it is always carried on in open court, you may
go and freely observe its workings, and I would
have you do so with attention.
 

74 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXI

Bath, February 22, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

Every excellence, as well as every virtue, has its
kindred weakness or vice; and, if carried beyond
certain bounds, sinks into the one or the other.
Generosity often runs into profusion, economy into
avarice, courage into rashness, caution into timidity:
so much so that I believe there is more judgment
required for the proper conduct of virtues than for
avoiding the opposite vices.

In its true light vice is so deformed that it
shocks us at first sight, and would hardly ever
seduce us if it did not first wear the mask of some
virtue. But virtue is in itself so beautiful that it
charms us immediately, engages us more and more
upon further acquaintance, and, as with other beau-
ties, we think excess impossible; it is here that
judgment is necessary to moderate and direct the
effects of an excellent cause.

I shall apply this reasoning at present not to any
particular virtue, but to an excellence which for
want of judgment is often the cause of blamable
effects; I mean, learning, which, if not accompanied
with sound judgment, frequently carries us into
error, pride, and pedantry.

Some learned men, proud of their attainments,
only speak to decide, and give judgment without
appeal. The consequence is that mankind, provoked
by the insult, and injured by the oppression, revolt,
The Modern Chesterfield 75

 

and in order to shake off the tyranny even call the
lawful authority in question. ‘The more you know,
the more modest you should be; and, by the way,
modesty is the surest means of gratifying vanity.
Even where you are sure, seem rather doubtful;
represent, but do not pronounce; and if you would
convince others, seem open to conviction yourself.

Some persons, to show their learning, or often
from the prejudices of a school of education in
which they hear of nothing else, speak of the ancients
as something more than men, and the moderns as
something less. They are never without a classic
or two in their pockets; they stick to the old good
sense; they read none of the modern trash; and
will show you plainly that no improvement has been
made in any art or science these last seventeen
hundred years. I would by no means have you
disown your acquaintance with the ancients, but
still less would I have you brag of an exclusive
intimacy with them. Speak of the moderns without
contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry;
judge them all by their merits but not by their
ages, and.if you happen to have a classic in your
pocket neither show it nor mention it.

A few great scholars most absurdly draw all
their maxims, both for public and private life, from
what they call parallel cases recorded by the ancient
authors, without considering in the first place that
there never were, since the creation of the world,
two cases exactly parallel; and, in the next place,
that no case was ever known by an historian with
every one of its circumstances; and all the conditions
76 The Modern Chesterfield

 

must be known in order to be reasoned from. Rea-
son upon the case itself and the several circumstances
that attend it, and act accordingly, but not from
the authority of ancient poets or historians. Take
into consideration, if you please, cases seemingly
analogous, but take them as helps only, not as guides.
We are really so prejudiced by our educations that,
as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their
madmen; of which, with all due regard to antiquity,
I take Leonidas and Curtius to have been distin-
guished examples. And yet a solid pedant would,
in a speech in Parliament, relative to a tax of two-
pence in the pound upon some commodity or other,
quote those two heroes as models of what we ought
to do and suffer for our country.

There is another species of learned men who,
though less dogmatic and supercilious, are not less
impertinent. These are the communicative and
shining pedants who adorn their conversation with
happy quotations of Greek and Latin, and who have
contracted such a familiarity with ancient authors
that they call them by certain names or epithets
denoting intimacy: as old Homer; that sly rogue
Horace; Maro, instead of Virgil; and Naso, instead
of Ovid.

These are often imitated by coxcombs who have
no education at all, but who have learned by heart
some names and some scraps of the old authors,
which they retail.in all companies in the hope of
passing for scholars.

If therefore you would avoid the accusation of
pedantry on the one hand or the suspicion of
 

The Modern Chesterfield 77

 

ignorance on the other, abstain from learned osten-
tation. Speak the language of the company that
you are in; speak it purely and unlarded with any
other. Never seem wiser or more learned than the
people you are with. Wear your learning, like
your watch, in a private pocket; do not pull it out
and exhibit it merely to show that you have it. If
you are asked the time of day, tell it, but do not
proclaim it hourly and unasked, like a watchman.

Upon the whole, remember that learning, I mean
Greek and Roman learning, is a useful and neces-
sary Ornament; but at the same time carefully avoid
those errors and abuses which I have mentioned, and
which too often attend it.

Remember, too, that modern knowledge is more
necessary than ancient, and that you would better
know perfectly the present state of Europe than its

past, though I would have you acquainted with
both.
78 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXII

Bath, March 9, O. S., 1748.

Dear Boy:
I must, from time to time, remind you of what
I have often recommended, and to which you cannot
over-attend—to sacrifice to the Graces, a phrase I

thave borrowed from Plutarch’s Caius Marius,

‘where you will find these words:

Plato often used to say to Xenocrates, the
philosopher, who was thought to have more than
ordinary harshness of disposition, “I pray you,
good Xenocrates, sacrifice to the Graces.”

The same thing, said or done, when accom-
panied or abandoned by the Graces, produces radi-
cally different effects. “The Graces prepare the way
to the heart, and the heart has such an influence over
the understanding that it is worth while to engage
it in our interest: it is the whole of women, who
are guided by nothing else, and it has so much to
say with men that it commonly triumphs in every
struggle with the understanding.

This being the case, aim at the heart. Intrinsic
merit alone will not do; it will gain you the general
esteem of all, but not the particular affection, that is,
the heart, of any. To engage the affection of any-
one you must, over and above your general worth,
have some special merit in his eyes brought about
by services done or offered, by expressions of regard
The Modern Chesterfield 79

 

and esteem, by attentions bestowed; and the graceful
manner of doing these things opens the way to the
heart, and facilitates, or rather insures, their effects.

From your own observation reflect what a dis-
agreeable impression a stranger creates at first sight
by a slovenly figure, an awkward address, an un-
graceful manner of speaking, whether stuttering,
monotony, muttering, or drawling; and consider
how these defects prejudice you against him, though,
for aught you know, he may have great intrinsic
merit.

Consider, on the other hand, how much the
opposites of these things prepossess you immediately
in favor of those who are blessed with them. A
thousand little things, not separately to be defined,
conspire to form these Graces that always please.
A proper degree of dress, a cleanly person, a distinct
and properly varied manner of speaking, an harmon-
ious voice, gentle motions, something open and cheer-
ful in the countenance, but without vulgar laugh-
ing: all these things, and many others, are ingre-
dients in the composition of that pleasing address
which everybody feels though nobody can describe.
80 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXIII

London, April 26, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

I am extremely pleased with your communica-
tion on the history of the Reformation, one of those
important eras that deserve your utmost attention,
and of which you cannot be too minutely informed.
You have doubtless considered the causes of that
great event, and have observed that disappointment
and resentment had a much greater share in it than
religious zeal or an abhorrence of the errors and
abuses of popery.

Luther, an Augustin monk, enraged that his
order, and consequently that he himself, had not
the exclusive privilege of selling indulgences, and
that the Dominicans were let into a share of that
profitable but infamous trade, turns reformer and
exclaims against the abuses, the corruption, and the
idolatry of the Church of Rome, which were cer-
tainly gross enough for him to have perceived long
before, but in which he had at least acquiesced till
what he called the rights, that is, the profit, of his
order came to be touched. The Church of Rome
furnished him ample matter for complaint and ref-
ormation, and he laid hold of it ably.

This seems to me the true cause of that great
and necessary work, but, whatever the cause, the
effect was good, and the Reformation spread itself
by its own truth and fitness; was conscientiously
received by great numbers in Germany and other
 

Lhe Modern Chesterfield 81

 

countries; and was soon mixed up with the politics
of princes, and, as it always happens in religious
disputes, became the specious covering of injustice
and ambition.

Under the pretense of crushing heresy, as it was
called, the House of Austria meant to extend and
establish its power in the empire; on the other
hand, many Protestant princes, under the pretense
of extirpating idolatry, meant to enlarge their
dominions or increase their privileges. These objects
among the chiefs on both sides, much more than
religious motives, continued what were called the
religious wars in Germany almost uninterruptedly
till the affairs of the two religions were finally
settled by the treaty of Minster.

Were we to trace historical events to their real
causes I fear we would find them not much more
noble or disinterested than Luther’s disappointed
avarice, and therefore I look with some contempt
upon those refined and sagacious historians who
ascribe all, even the most common, events to some
deep political cause, whereas mankind is made up of
inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to
his dominant character. ‘The wisest man sometimes
acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely. Our
jarring passions, our variable humors, nay, our
greater or less degree of health and spirits, produce
such contradictions in our conduct that I believe
those are often mistaken who ascribe our actions to
the most seemingly obvious motives, and I am con-
vinced that a light supper, a good night’s sleep, and
82 The Modern Chesterfield

 

a fine morning have sometimes made a hero of a
man who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and a
rainy day, would have proved a coward.

Our best conjectures therefore as to the true
springs of action are uncertain, and the acts them-
selves are all that we may learn from history. That
Caesar was murdered by twenty-three conspirators
I have no doubt, but I do doubt that their love of
liberty and of country was their sole motive, or
even the principal one, and I dare say, if the truth
were known, that we should find many other motives
concurred, even in the great Brutus himself, such as
pride, envy, personal pique, and disappointment.
Nay, I cannot help carrying my contention still fur-
ther and extending it to historical facts themselves, at
least to most of the circumstances with which they
are related; every-day experience confirms me in
this incredulity. Do we ever hear the most recent
fact related exactly in the same way by the several
people who were eve-witnesses of it? No. One
mistakes, another misrepresents, and others warp it
a little to their own turn of mind or private views.
A man who has been concerned in a transaction
will not record it fairly, and a man who has not, is
unable to. The Gospels do not fully agree with
one another.

Notwithstanding all this uncertainty, history is
not the less necessary to be known, as the best his-
tories are taken for granted and are the frequent
subjects both of conversation and writing. Though
I am convinced that Caesar’s ghost never appeared
to Brutus, vet I should be much ashamed to be
The Modern Chesterfield 83

 

ignorant of the incident as related by the historians
of those times. Thus the pagan theology is univer-
sally received as matter for writing and conversa-
tion, though not now believed by anybody, and we
talk of Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, as gods, though we
know that if they ever existed at all it was only
as mere mortal men. ‘This historical pyrrhonism,
then, proves nothing against the study and knowl-
edge of history, which of all studies is the most
necessary for a man who is to live in the world. It
only points out to us that we should not be too
decisive and peremptory, but cautious, rather, how
we draw inferences from remote facts, partially or
ignorantly related, of which we can at best but
imperfectly guess, and the motives of which we
certainly do not know.

Bolingbroke in the fourth of his Letters on the
Study of History has an original and instructive
passage in his usual style, which reads:

When the brain is well heated, and devo-
tion or vanity, the semblance of virtue or real
vice, and, above all, disputes and contests,
have inspired that complication of passions we
term zeal...... history becomes very often a
lying panegyric or a lying satire; for different
nations, or different parties in the same nation,
belie one another without any respect for truth,
as they murder one another without any regard
to right, or sense of humanity. Religious zeal
may boast this horrid advantage over civil zeal,
that the effects of it have been more sanguinary,
84 The Modern Chesterfield

 

and the malice more unrelenting. In another
respect they are more alike, and keep a nearer
proportion: different religions have not been
quite so barbarous to one another as sects of the
same religion; and, in like manner, nation has
had better quarter from nation than party from
party.

The testimonies of ancient history must neces-
sarily be weaker than those of modern times, since
all testimony is the weaker the more remote it is
from us. I would therefore advise you to study
ancient history, in general, as other people do; that
is, not to be ignorant of any of those incidents
which are universally received upon the faith of
the best historians, and, whether true or false, you
have them as other people have them.

Modern history, I mean particularly that of the
last three centuries, is what I would have you apply
yourself to with the greatest attention and exactness.
In this period the probability of coming at the truth
is much greater, as the testimonies are much more
recent, and anecdotes, memoirs, and original letters
often aid.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 85

 

XXIV

London, May 10, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

I suppose that this letter will find you just
returning from Dresden. What inclination for
Courts the taste of them may have given you, I
cannot tell. A mere courtier, without parts or
knowledge, is the most frivolous and contemptible
of beings: on the other hand, a man of parts and
knowledge who acquires the easy and noble manners
of a Court is almost perfect.

It is a trite, commonplace observation that
Courts are seats of falsehood and dissimulation,
which, like many other such observations, is over-
drawn. Falsehood and dissimulation are certainly
t) be found at Courts, but where are they not to
te found? Cottages have them as well as Courts,
and with worse manners. A farmer will contrive
and practice as many tricks to overreach his neigh-
bor at the next market, or to supplant him in the
favor of the squire, as any courtier will do to
ingratiate himself with his prince. Whatever poets
may write or fools believe of rural innocence and
truth, and of the perfidy of Courts, the fact remains
that shepherds and Ministers are men; their natures
and passions are the same; they differ only in their
modes.

Having mentioned commonplace observations, let
me particularly caution you against either using,
believing, or approving them. They are the stock
 

86 The Modern Chesterfield

 

in trade of witlings and coxcombs; those of real
wit have a contempt for them.

Religion is one of the favorite topics with those
who do not think. They affirm that it is all priest-
craft, and an invention of priests, of whatever sect,
devised for their own profit. From this absurd
and false principle flow the commonplace, insipid
jokes and insults offered the clergy. With these
people every priest is either an avowed or a concealed
unbeliever, drunkard, and what not, whereas I
conceive that priests are like other men, and neither
the better nor the worse for wearing a gown or a
surplice, although by affecting it they separate them-
selves from their fellow-men, to their own _dis-
advant tage and that of their calling ; but if they are
“different from other people, probably the balance is
on the side of religion and morality, or at least
on the side of decency, from their education and
manner of life.

Another common topic for false wit aad cold
raillery is matrimony. It is a common statement
that every man and wife hate each other cordially,
whatever they may pretend in public to the con-
trary, yet I presume that men and their wives
neither love nor hate each other the more upon
account of the form of marriage service which has
been said over them. ‘The cohabitation, indeed,
which follows matrimony makes them either love
or hate more, accordingly as they respectively deserve
it, but that would be true between any man and
woman who lived together without being married.

Scofing at religion and the institution of

YEN nt tO ta oe ae rRNA NON aremcte
 

The Alodern Chesterfield 87

marriage is not infrequently heard, but no one has

ever invented an improvement upon the one or the
other.
 

88 The Modern Chesterfield

XXV

London, May 17, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

Your first reception at Court has, I find, been
very favorable; and his Polish Majesty has distin-
guished you. I hope you received that mark of
distinction with respect and steadiness. You should
not be dazzled by superior rank; should know and
pay all the respect that is due to it; but without
being disconcerted; and should converse just as
easily with a king as with one of his subjects. That
is the great advantage of being introduced young
into good company, and being used early to converse
with one’s superiors.

How many men have I seen who, after having
had the full benefit of an English education, first
at school, and then at the University, when they
have been presented to the King, did not know
whether they stood upon their heads or their heels!
If the King spoke to them, they were annihilated;
they trembled, endeavored to put their hands in their
pockets and missed them, let their hats fall, and
were ashamed to take them up; in short they put
themselves into every attitude but an easy and
natural one.

The characteristic of a well-bred man is to
converse with his inferiors without insolence, and
with his superiors with respect and ease. He talks
to kings without concern; he trifles with women of
the first condition with familiarity and gaiety but
 

The Modern Chesterfield 89

 

respect, and converses with his equals, whether he
is acquainted with them or not, upon general, com-
mon topics, that are not, however, quite frivolous,
without the least disquietude or awkwardness, for
neither mind nor body can appear to advantage
unless it is perfectly easy. Good-bye for this time,

and God bless you.
go The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXVI

London, June 21, O. S., 1748.

Dear Boy:

Your bad enunciation runs so much in my mind
and gives me such real concern that it will be the
subject of this letter and, I fear, of many more. [
congratulate both you and myself that I am in-
formed of it in time to correct it, as I hope. If this
ungraceful and disagreeable manner of speaking had
either by your negligence or mine become habitual
to you, as in a couple of years more it would, what
a figure you would have made in company or in a
public assembly! Who would have liked you in
the one or have attended to you in the other? Read
what Cicero and Quintilian say of enunciation, and
see what a stress they lay upon the gracefulness of it.

Men are much oftener led by their hearts than
by their understandings. The way to the heart is
through the senses. Please the eyes and ears, and
the work is half done. I have frequently known a
man’s fortune decided forever by his first address.
If it is pleasing, people are hurried involuntarily
into a persuasion that he has merit, even if he has
not; on the other hand, if it is ungraceful they are
immediately prejudiced against him and unwilling
to allow him the merit which he has. Nor is this
sentiment so unjust and unreasonable as it may seem;
if a man has parts he must know of what infinite
consequence it is to him to have a graceful manner
 

The Modern Chesterfield gI

of speaking and a gentle, pleasing address, and he
should cultivate them to the utmost.

What is the constant and just observation as
to all actors upon the stage? Is it not that those
who have the best sense alivays speak the best, though
they may happen not to have the best voices? They
will speak plainly, distinctly, and with the proper
emphasis, be their voices ever so bad.

Had Roscius spoken quickly, thickly, and un-
gracefully, I will answer for it that Cicero would
not have thought him worth the oration which he
made in his favor.

Words were given us with which to communi-
cate our ideas, and there must be something incon-
ceivably absurd in uttering them in such a manner
that people cannot understand them, or will not
desire to understand them.

When you speak, take care to open your mouth;
to articulate every word distinctly. Read aloud to
yourself and tune your utterance to your own ear;
read at first much more slowly than you need to,
in order to correct yourself of that shameful trick
of speaking faster than you ought. In short, make
it your business, your study, and your pleasure to
speak well.
 

92 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXVIT

London, September 27, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

Pray let no quibbles of lawyers, no refinements
of casuists, break into plain notions of right
and wrong which every man’s reason and plain
common sense suggest to him. To do as you
would be done by is the sure and undisputed rule
of morality and justice. Stick to that, and be con-
vinced that whatever breaks into it in any degree,
however speciously it may be turned, and however
puzzling it may be to answer it, is, notwithstanding,
false in itself, unjust, sometimes criminal.

I do not know of a crime in the world which
is not by the casuists among the Jesuits allowed in
some cases, or even in many, not to be criminal.
The principles first laid down by them are often
specious and the reasonings plausible, but the con-
clusion is always a lie, for it is contrary to that
evident and undeniable rule of justice which I have
mentioned of not doing to anyone what you would
not have him do to you.

However, these refined pieces of sophistry, be-
ing very convenient and welcome to people’s passions
and appetites, afford an excuse for them to gladly
accept the indulgence without desiring to detect the
fallacy of the reasoning, and, indeed, many people
are not able to do it, which makes the publication
of such quibblings and refinements the more perni-
cious.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 93

I am no skillful casuist nor subtle disputant, and
yet I would undertake to justify the profession of
a highwayman, step by step, and so plausibly as to
make many ignorant people ready to embrace the
profession as innocent, if not laudable; and I could
puzzle people of some degree of learning to answer
me point by point. Bishop Berkeley, a worthy, in-
genious, and learned man, has written a book to
prove that there is no such thing as matter, and that
nothing exists but ideas—that you and I only fancy
ourselves eating, drinking, and sleeping; that we
think we have flesh and blood, legs and arms, but
that we are only spirit. His arguments are, strictly
speaking, unanswerable, but I am so far from being
convinced by them that I am determined to go on
eating and drinking, walking and riding, in order
to keep that matter, of which I so mistakenly imag-
ine my body to consist, in as good condition as
possible.

Common sense, which in truth is very uncom-
mon, is the best sense I know of: abide by it; it will
counsel you best. For your amusement read and
hear ingenious systems and nice questions subtilely
agitated with all the refinements that warm ima-
ginations suggest, but consider them only as exercises
for the mind, and return always to settle with
common sense.
94 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXVIII

Bath, October 19, O. S., 1748.
Dear Boy:

Having pointed out what sort of company you
should keep, I will now give you some rules for
your conduct in it—rules which my own experience
and observation enable me to lay down with some
degree of confidence.

I shall say nothing with regard to your bodily
carriage and address, but leave them to the care of
your dancing-master, and your own attention to
the best models: remember, however, that they are
of consequence.

You may speak often, but never long at a time.
If you do not please your hearers, at least make
sure not to tire them.

Tell stories seldom, and never unless they are
apt and short. Omit every circumstance that is
not material, and beware of digressions.

Never hold anybody by the button or the hand
in order to be heard out; if people are not willing
to hear, you would much better hold your tongue
than to hold them.

Most long talkers single out some one unfor-
tunate man in company, commonly him whom they
observe to be the most silent, or their next neighbor.
This is excessively ill-bred, and in some degree a
fraud, conversation stock being a joint and common
property. But on the other hand, if one of these
unmerciful talkers lays hold of you, hear him with
Sse,

The Modern Chesterfield 95

at least seeming attention, for nothing will please
him more than a patient hearing, as nothing would
hurt him more than to have you leave him in the
midst of his discourse or to uncover your impatience
under your affliction.

In mixed companies avoid as much as you can
argumentative, polemic conversation, which, though
it should not, yet certainly does for a time indispose
the contending parties toward each other, and if
the controversy grows warm and noisy, endeavor
to put an end to it by some levity or joke.

If you mention your relatives at all, say as little
as possible regarding them; if they are unknown to
your hearer he is bored; and if known, you may be
suspected of family pride, which is never quite agree-
able to a member of another family. There are
three subjects which are taboo—your ailments, your
underwear, and your relatives.

Above all things, and upon all occasions, avoid
speaking of yourself as far as you can. Such is the
natural vanity of our hearts that it perpetually
breaks out even in people of the best parts, and in
all the various modes and figures of egotism.

Some abruptly speak advantageously of them-
selves without either pretense or provocation.

Others endeavor to proceed more artfully, and
forge accusations against themselves in order to
justify the exhibition of a catalogue of their many
virtues. This thin veil of modesty drawn before
vanity is too transparent to conceal it, even from
those of moderate discernment.
96 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Still others move more slyly, as they think, but,
to my mind, more ridiculously. They confess them-
selves, not without some degree of shame and confu-
sion, into all the cardinal virtues, by first degrading
them into weaknesses, and then owning their misfor-
tune in being made up of those weaknesses. They
cannot see people suffer without sympathizing with
them and endeavoring to help. They cannot see
people want without relieving them, though truly
they cannot afford it. They cannot help speaking
the truth, though they know the imprudence of it.

This sounds too ridiculous, almost, for the stage,
and yet, take my word for it, you will frequently
meet with it on the common stage of the world.
And here I will observe, by the way, that you will
now and then meet with characters so extravagant
that a discreet playwright would not venture to set
them upon the stage in their true and high coloring.

Vanity is so strong in human nature that it
descends even to the lowest objects, and one often
sees people angling for praise when, admitting all
they say to be true, no just praise is to be caught.
One man affirms that he has ridden post a hundred
miles in six hours; probably it is a lie; but supposing
it to be true; what then? Why, he is a very good
post-boy; that is all. Another asserts, and probably
not without oaths, that he has drunk six or eight
bottles of wine at a sitting; out of charity I will
believe him a liar; for if I do not, I must think
him a beast.

Such, and a thousand more, are the follies and
extravagancies which vanity draws a person into.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 97

 

They always defeat their own purpose, and, as
Waller says, upon another subject,

render him despised,
Where he endeavors to be prized.

The only sure way of avoiding these evils is
never to speak of yourself at all. But when his-
torically you are obliged to mention yourself, take
care not to drop one single word that can directly
or indirectly be construed as fishing for applause.
Be your character what it will, it will be known,
and nobody will take it upon your own word.
Never imagine that anything you can say yourself
will varnish your defects, or add luster to your
perfections; but, on the contrary, it may make the
former more glaring and the latter more obscure,
and nine times out of ten it will. If you are silent
upon the subject of yourself neither envy, indigna-
tion, nor ridicule will obstruct or allay the applause
which you really deserve, but if you publish your
own panegyric upon any occasion or in any shape,
however artfully dressed or disguised, all will con-
spire against you, and you will be disappointed of
the very end at which you aim. Moreover, there
are few greater obstacles to progress than jealousy;
be careful therefore not to arouse it.

Always look people in the face when you speak
to them; not doing so is thought to imply conscious
guilt of some sort; besides that, you lose the ad-
vantage of observing by their countenances what im-
pression your discourse makes upon them. In order

\

 
 

98 The Modern Chesterfield

 

to know people’s real sentiments I trust much more
to my eyes than to my ears, for people can say what-
ever they have a mind I should hear, but they can
seldom help looking what they have no intention that
I should know.

Neither retail nor receive scandal willingly;
though the defamation of others may, for the present,
gratify the malignity or the pride of our hearts, cool
reflection will draw unfavorable conclusions from
such a practice, and in the case of scandal, as in that
of robbery, the receiver is thought as bad as the
thief.

Mimicry, which is the favorite amusement of
little minds, is in the utmost contempt with great
ones. It is the lowest and most illiberal of buffoon-
ery. Pray neither practice it yourself nor applaud
it in others.

I need not, I believe, advise you to adapt your
conversation to the people with whom you are con-
versing, for I suppose, without this caution, you
would not have spoken upon the same subject and
in the same manner to a Minister of state, a bishop,
a philosopher, a captain, and a woman. A man of
the world must, like the chameleon, be able to
assume different hues, which is by no means crim-
inal or abject, but a necessary complaisance, for it
relates merely to manners, and not to morals.

One word only as to swearing or cursing. You
may sometimes hear people interlard their discourses
with oaths by way of adornment, but you will
observe that those who do so are rarely those who
contribute in any degree to give company the denom-
 

The Modern Chesterfield 99

 

ination of good company: they are people of low
education. Moreover, the practice not only has no
recommendation, but is silly and illiberal, and dwarfs.
the vocabulary.
‘ admonish you, as you value your popularity, to
| converse and not to lecture. Do not mistake the
(parlor for a platform. And within bounds learn
| to be a talented listener.

All these rules, however carefully observed, will
lose half their effect if unaccompanied by the Graces.
Whatever you say with a supercilious, cynical face,
or an embarrassed countenance, or a disconcerted
grin, will be ill-received. If, into the bargain, you
mumble or do not enunciate distinctly, your efforts
will be still worse received. If your air and address
are awkward you may be esteemed provided you
have great intrinsic merit, but you will never please,
and without pleasing you will rise but heavily.
Venus was synonymous with the Graces, who were
always supposed to accompany her; Horace tells us
that even Youth and Mercury (the god of arts and
eloquence) would not go anywhere without her.

 
 

100 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXIX

London, January 10, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

Now that you are going a little more into the
world I will take this occasion to explain my in-
tentions as to your future expenses, that you may
know what you have to expect from me, and make
your plans accordingly.

I shall neither deny nor grudge you any money
that may be necessary for your improvement or
your pleasures; I mean the pleasures of a rational
being. Under the head of improvement, I mean
the best books and the best masters, cost what they
will; I also mean all the expense of lodgings, coach,
dress, etc., which, according to the several places
where you may be, shall be respectively necessary
to enable you to keep the best company.

Under the head of rational pleasures I include:
First, proper charities, to real and benevolent ob-
jects; Second, proper presents, to those to whom
you are obliged, or whom you desire to oblige, and
small but frequent remembrances to _your_com-

_panions; Third, a conformity of expense to that
of the company you keep; as in public spectacles, your
share of little entertainments and other incidental
calls of good company.

The specific articles that I never will supply
are a profusion of low riot, and an idle lavishness
of negligence and laziness. A fool squanders away
without credit or advantage to himself more than a

 
 

The Modern Chesterfield 101

 

man of sense spends with both. The latter employs
his money as he does his time, and never spends a
shilling of the one nor a minute of the other but in
something that is useful or rationally pleasing to
himself or to others. The former buys what he
does not need, and does not purchase what he does
need. He cannot withstand the charms of a toy-
shop; snuff-boxes, watches, and heads of canes are
his destruction. His servants and the tradesmen
conspire with his own indolence to cheat him; and
in a brief space of time he is astonished, in the midst
of all his ridiculous superfluities, to find himself in
want of all the real comforts and necessaries of life.

With care and method the smallest fortune will
supply all necessary expenses, and without them the
largest fortune will not. As far as you can, pay
ready money for everything you buy, and avoid bills.
Where you must have bills, as for food and clothes,
pay them regularly and at the first practicable
moment, and with your own hand as_a matter of
fellowship. Small tradesmen need prompt pay-
ments. It makes their lives easier; they feel more
kindly to you, and as a consequence you secure
better attention and superior value. In passing, it
is a fine bit of benevolence to give the preference to
the smaller dealers, to any one of whom your

| custom may mean much.

Never from a mistaken notion of economy buy a
thing you do not want because it is cheap, or from a
silly pride because it is dear.

' Be punctilious in the prompt repayment to your
‘companions of borrowings and other obligations,
 

102 The Modern Chesterfield

 

however small. Neglect in this matter sets badly,
and if you should happen to forget to make return,
‘your character might be in question.

During your stay in Berlin I expect you to
inform yourself thoroughly of the present state of
the civil, military, and ecclesiastical government, par-
ticularly of the military, which is upon a better
footing in Prussia than in any other country in
Europe. You will attend at the reviews, see the
troops exercise, and inquire into the number of
soldiers and the companies of the respective regi-
ments of horse, foot, and dragoons; the number and
titles of the commissioned and non-commissioned
officers in the several troops and companies; and,
also, take care to learn the technical military terms
in the German language, for, though you are not
to be a military man, yet these matters are so fre-
quently the subject of conversation that you will
be more companionable if you are familiar with
them.

You must also inform yourself of the reforma-
tion which Frederick the Great has lately made in
the law, by which he has both lessened the number
and shortened the duration of lawsuits; a great
work, and worthy of so great a prince. As he is
indisputably the greatest ruler in Europe every part
of his government deserves your diligent inquiry
and serious attention.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 103

 

XXX

Dear Boy:

I persuade myself that your stay at Venice will
be properly employed in seeing all that is to be seen
at that extraordinary place, and in conversing with
people who can inform you of the constitution of
the government.

But the important point is Turin, for there I
propose for you a long stay to pursue your studies,
learn your exercises, and form your manners.

I own that I am not without anxiety for the
consequences of your stay there, which must be
either very good or very bad. Wherever you have
been hitherto you have conversed chiefly with people
wiser and more discreet than yourself, and have
been equally out of the way of bad advice and bad
example, but in the Academy at Turin you will
probably meet with both, considering the variety of
young fellows of about your own age. Among
them some will be dissipated and idle, others vicious
and profligate. I believe you have sagacity enough
to distinguish betwen good and bad characters, and
both sense and virtue enough to shun the latter and
connect yourself with the former.

One year is the longest period that I have in
mind for your sojourn at Turin, and that year, if
you employ it well, perfects you; twelve months
more of your late application will complete your
classical studies. You will be, likewise, master of
your exercises in that time, and will have formed
 

104 _ The Modern Chesterfield

 

yourself so well at that Court as to be fit to appear
advantageously at any other. These should be the
happy effects of your year’s stay at Turin, but if
either ill advice or bad example seduce you, you are
ruined forever.

I look upon this as your decisive year of proba-
tion. Go through it well, and you will be all-
accomplished, and fixed in my tenderest affection
forever, but, should the contagion of vice or idle-
ness lay hold of you there, my hopes and conse-
quently my favor, your fortune, your character, are
all blasted, and you are undone.

The more I love you, from the good opinion
that I now have of you, the greater will be my
indignation if I should have reason to change it.
In the past you have had every possible proof of
my affection because you have deserved it, but when
you cease to deserve it you may expect every possi-
ble mark of my resentment.

I will tell you what I expect and insist upon
from you at Turin: First, that you pursue your
classical and other studies every morning; Second,
that you learn uninterruptedly your exercises, of
riding, dancing, and fencing; Third, that you make
yourself master of the Italian language; and Last,
that you pass your evenings in the best company.

If you will but finish your year in this manner
I have nothing further to ask of you, and I will
give you everything that you ask of me. ‘You shall
after that be entirely your own master: I shall
believe that you are safe; shall lay aside all author-
ity over you; and friendship shall be our mutual
 

The Modern Chesterfield 105

 

and only tie. Weigh this, I beg of you, deliberately
in your own mind, and consider whether the appli-
cation and the degree of restraint which I require
but for one year more will not be amply repaid by
all the advantages and the perfect liberty which you

will receive at the end of it. God bless you!
Good-bye!
 

106 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXXI

London, May 15, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

This letter will, I hope, find you settled to your
serious studies and your necessary exercises at Turin,
after the hurry and dissipation of the Carnival at
Venice.

I mean that your stay at Turin shall be a useful
and ornamental period of your education, and I
flatter myself that it will be so, but at the same time
I must tell you that I have never before felt so
much anxiety for you. While you are in danger
I shall be in fear—and you are in danger at Turin.
I am informed that there are now many English
in the Academy, and I fear those are just so many
dangers for you to encounter. Who they are I do
not know, but I well know the general ill conduct,
the indecent behavior, and the illiberal views of my
young countrymen abroad, especially wherever they
are in numbers together.

Ill example is of itself dangerous enough, but
those who give it seldom stop there; they add their
infamous exhortations and invitations, and if these
fail they have recourse to ridicule, which is harder
for one of your age and inexperience to withstand
than either of the former. Be on your guard there-
fore against these batteries, which will be played
upon you.

You are not sent abroad to converse with your
own countrymen; among them, in general, you will
 

The Modern Chesterfield 107

 

acquire little knowledge, no language, and, I am
sure, no manners. I desire that you will form with
them no connections, and no friendships, as they
impudently call them, for they are, in truth, only
combinations and conspiracies against good morals
and good manners. In young people there is com-
monly a complaisance which makes them unwilling
to refuse anything that is asked of them, and at the
same time an ambition to please and shine in the
company they keep; these causes produce the best
effect in good company but the very worst in bad.
If people had no vices but their own, they would
not have so many. For my own part, I would
sooner wear other people’s clothes than their vices,
and they would fit me just as well. I hope you
will have none, but if ever you have I beg at least
they may be all your own. Vices of adoption are,
of all vices, the most disgraceful and unpardonable.

There are degrees in vices, as well as in virtues,
and I must do my countrymen the justice to say
that they generally take their vices in the lowest
degree. Their pleasures of the table end in beastly
drunkenness, low riot, broken windows, and very
often, as they well deserve, broken bones. ‘They
game for the sake of the vice, not of the amusement,
and therefore carry it to excess and undo their
companions or are undone by them. By such con-
duct they put us to shame abroad, and come home
the unimproved, illiberal, and ungentlemanly crea-
tures that one daily sees in the park and on the

streets, for one never meets them in good company,
 

108 The Modern Chesterfield

 

where they have neither manners to present them-
selves nor merit to be received.

With the manners of footmen and grooms they
assume their dress too, for you must have observed
them on the streets here in dirty blue frocks, with
oaken sticks in their hands, and their hair greasy,
tucked up under their hats of an enormous size.
Thus finished and adorned by their travels they
become the disturbers of playhouses; they break the
windows, and commonly the landlords, of the tav-
erns where they drink; and are at once the support,
the terror, and the victims of the doubtful houses
they frequent. These poor, mistaken people think
they shine, and so they do, indeed, as putrefaction
shines, in the dark.

I am not now preaching to you, like an old
fellow, upon either religious or moral texts: I am
persuaded that you do not lack the best instruction
of that kind, but I am advising you as a friend, as
a man of the world, as one who would not have you
old while you are yet young, but would have you
take all the pleasures that reason points out and
that decency warrants. I will therefore suppose,
for argument’s sake, that vices are perfectly innocent
in themselves; they would still degrade, vilify, and
sink those who practiced them; would obstruct
their rising in the world by debasing their charac-
ters; and would give them a low turn of mind and
manner absolutely inconsistent with their making
any figure in upper life or great business.

What I have now said, together with your own
good sense, is, I hope, sufficient to arm you against
 

The Modern Chesterfield 109

 

the seductions, the invitations, and the exhortations
of those unfortunate young people. On the other
hand, when they would engage you in these schemes,
content yourself with a decent but firm refusal;
avoid controversy upon such plain points. You are
too young to, convert them, and, I trust, too wise
to be converted by them. Shun them, not only in
reality but even in appearance, if you would be well
received in good company, for people will always be
shy of receiving any man who comes from a place
where the plague rages, let him look ever so healthy.

Let me recur to a phase of this subject of which
I have spoken to you more plainly than I shall write.
Keep ever in mind, my dear son, how great is the
risk to your health of a false step among the women.
Three-quarters of the loathsome sex diseases are
contracted in doubtful houses, but exclusiveness does
not insure immunity; indeed, these afflictions are
most common in the abodes of luxury. One can
never count upon escape. And the wrecks from
even a single folly are to be seen everywhere. Men
pay the penalty ten, twenty, forty years after the
fact, and they pay in the hardest coin—insanity, im-
becility, death by inches, suffering of innocent wives,
blindness of unoffending children, “unto the third
and fourth generation.” And let me again warn
you against the use of liquor while among women,
lest your judgment as well as theirs be dissolved,
and unhappiness result to them, or to you, or to both,
but whatever you do, I trust you will not be so
unfair, so unmanly as to endeavor to obtain favors
 

110 The Modern Chesterfield

 

from them_by the use_of liquor. Good-bye, my

dear child! Consider seriously the importance of
the next year to your character, your health, your

figure, and your fortune.
 

The Modern Chesterfield III

 

XXXII

London, September 22, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

If I had faith in philters and love potions I should
suspect that you had given a powder to Sir Charles
Williams, judging by the manner in which he
speaks of you. It will be easy for you to imagine
how many questions I asked, and how narrowly I
sifted him; he answered me just as I could have
wished, till, satisfied entirely with his account of
your character and learning, I inquired into other
matters, intrinsically indeed of less consequence, but
still of great moment ; I mean your address, manners,
and air.

He told me that in company you are frequently
most provokingly inattentive and absent, and that
you neglect your person and dress to a degree un-
pardonable at any age, and especially so at yours.

These things, however immaterial they may
seem to people who do not know the world and
the nature of mankind, give me great concern. No
one thing is more offensive to a company than in-
attention and distraction. No man is distracted
with the man he fears, or the woman he loves;
which is a proof that every man can get the better
of distraction when he thinks it worth while. For
my own part, I would rather be in company with a
dead man than with an absent one, for if the dead
man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no
 

112 The Modern Chesterfield

 

contempt, whereas the absent man, silently indeed,
but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me
worth his attention.

You know by experience that I grudge no ex-
pense in your education, but I will positively not
supply you with a flapper. You may read in Dr.
Swift the description of these flappers, and the use
they were to your friends the Laputans, whose
minds, Gulliver says, are so taken up with intense
speculations that they neither speak nor attend to
the discourses of others unless roused by some
external action upon the organs of speech and hear-
ing, for which reason those who can afford it keep
a flapper in their family as one of their domestics.
and never make visits without him. This flapper is
likewise employed diligently to attend his master in
his walks, and upon occasion to give a soft flap upon
his eyes, because he is always so wrapped up in
cogitation that he is in manifest danger of falling
down every precipice and bouncing his head against
every post, and, in the streets, of jostling others or
being jostled himself.

I give you fair warning that when we meet,
if you are absent in mind I will soon be absent in
body, since it will be impossible for me to stay in
the room. I cannot bear inattention—it would
endanger my health.

You have often observed Lyttelton’s distin-
guished abstraction and clumsiness. Wrapped up,
like a Laputan, in intense thought, or possibly in no
thought at all, he does not know his most intimate
acquaintance by sight, or answers him as if they
 

The Alodern Chesterfield 113

 

were at cross-purposes. He leaves his hat in one
room, his sword in another, and would leave his
shoes in a third if his buckles, though awry, did
not save them; his legs and arms are awkwardly
managed; and his head, always hanging upon one
shoulder, perhaps because it_is_not well-balanced,
seems to have received the first stroke upon a block.
I sincerely value and esteem him for his parts,
learning, and virtue, but T cannot love him in
company.

This will be universally the case in common life
with every pre-occupied, awkward man, whatever
may be his real merit and knowledge.

These things are by no means trifles; they are
of greatest consequence to those who are to be
thrown into the great world and who would make
a figure or a fortune in it. It is not sufficient to
deserve well; one must please well, too. Bungling,
disagreeable merit will never carry anybody far.
Wherever you find a good dancing-master, pray let
him put you upon your haunches, not so much for
the sake of dancing, as for coming into a room and
presenting yourself gracefully. Women, whom you
ought to endeavor to please, cannot forgive a vulgar
or deficient air and gestures. The generality of
men are like them, and are equally taken by the

same exterior graces.
Good-bye, my dear child!

 
 

114 The Modern Chesterfield

XXXII

London, September 27, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

A vulgar, ordinary way of thinking, acting, or
speaking implies a low education, and a habit of low
company. Young people contract it at school or
among servants, but after they frequent good com-
pany they must lack attention and observation very
much if they do not lay it quite aside. The various
kinds of vulgarisms are infinite; I cannot pretend
to point them out to you, but I will give you some
samples by which you may guess the rest.

A vulgar man is captious and jealous; eager and
impetuous about trifles. He suspects that he is
slighted and thinks everything that is said is meant
for him; if the company happens to laugh, he is
persuaded they laugh at him; he grows angry and
testy, says something impertinent, and draws himself
into a scrape by showing what he calls a proper
spirit, and asserting himself.

A man of breeding does not suppose himself to
be either the sole or the principal object of the
thoughts, looks, or words of the company, and never
suspects that he is either slighted or laughed at un-
less he is conscious that he deserves it. And if
the company should be absurd or ill-bred enough to
do either, he does not care twopence, unless the
insult be gross and plain. As he is above trifles,
he is never vehement and eager about them, and,
 

The Modern Chesterfield 115

 

wherever they are concerned, rather acquiesces than
wrangles.

A vulgar man’s conversation always savors
strongly of the lowness of his education and com-
pany. It turns chiefly upon his domestic affairs,
his servants, the excellent order he keeps in his own
family, and the little anecdotes of the neighborhood,
all of which he relates with emphasis. He is a
man gossip.

Vulgarism in language is the next and distin-
guishing characteristic of bad company and a poor
education. A man of real worth avoids nothing with
more care. Proverbial expressions and trite say-
ings are the vulgar man’s flowers of rhetoric. _His_
_verbal garden is overgrown with weeds. Would he
say that men differ in their tastes, he both supports
and adorns that opinion by the good old saying, as
he respectfully calls it, what is one man’s meat is
another man’s poison. If anybody attempts playing
smart with him, as he calls it, he gives him tit for tat.
He has always some favorite word for the time
being, which, for the sake of using often, he com-
monly abuses by forcing with combinations, such as
vastly angry, vastly kind, vastly handsome, and vastly
ugly. Even his pronunciation of proper words
carries the mark of the beast. He sometimes affects
hard words by way of ornament, and always mangles
them.

A man of parts never has recourse to prov-
erbs and vulgar aphorisms, uses neither favorite
words nor hard words, and takes great care to speak
correctly and grammatically but not priggishly, and
 

116 The Modern Chesterfield

 

to pronounce properly, that is, according to the
usage of the best companies; above all, his vocabu-
lary is simple. He avoids foreign words and un-
usual pronunciations, reserving classical references
and quotations for use with his intimates.

 

An awkward address, ungraceful attitudes and
actions, and a certain left-handedness loudly pro-
claim low education and low company, for it is
impossible to suppose that a man can have frequent-
ed good company without having caught something,
at least, of correct air and motions.

A newly-raised man is distinguished in a regi-
ment by his awkwardness, but he must be impene-
trably dull if in a month or two he cannot perform
at least the common manual exercises and look like
a soldier. ‘The very accoutrements of a man of
fashion are grievous encumbrances to a vulgar one.
He is at a loss what to do with his hat when it is
not upon his head; his cane is at perpetual war with
every cup of tea or coffee he drinks—he destroys
them first and then accompanies them in their fall.
His sword is formidable only to his own legs, which
would possibly carry him fast enough out of the way
of any sword but his own. His clothes fit him so
ill and constrain him so much that he seems rather
their prisoner than their proprietor. He presents
himself in company like a criminal in a court of
Justice, his very air condemns him, and people of
fashion will no more connect themselves with the
one than will people of character with the other.
 

The Aflodern Chesterfield 117

 

This repulse drives and sinks him into low company,
a gulf from whence no man, after a certain age,
ever emerged.

You are traveling now in a country once so
famous for arts and arms that it deserves your
attention and reflection. View it therefore with
care, compare its former state with its present, and
examine into the causes of its rise and its decay.
Consider it classically and politically, and do not
run through it, as too many of your young country-
men do, musically, and, to use a ridiculous word,
knick-knackically. Let there be no piping or fid-
dling, I beseech you, and do not become a virtuoso
of small wares. Form a taste for painting, sculpture,
and architecture, if you please, by a careful exam-
ination of the works of the best ancient and modern
artists. A real knowledge of them becomes a man
of taste, but beyond certain limits the man of taste
ends, and the frivolous virtuoso begins.
 

118 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXXIV

London, November 3, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

A friend of ours has justly defined good breed-
ing to be the result of much good sense, some good
nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.
It is astonishing to me that anybody of sense can
essentially fail in good breeding. As to the modes
of it, they vary according to persons, places, and
circumstances, and are only to be acquired by obser-
vation and experience, but the substance of it is
everywhere and eternally the same.

Good manners are to particular societies what
good morals are to society in general—their cement
and security. And as laws are enacted to enforce
good morals, or at least to prevent the ill effects
of bad ones, so there are certain rules of civility,
universally implied and received, to enforce good
manners and to punish bad ones. The ill-bred man
who by his manners invades and disturbs the quiet
and comfort of private life is by common consent
banished from society. Mutual complaisances, at-
tentions, and sacrifices of little conveniences are an
implied compact among civilized people. Whoever
violates that compact justly forfeits all advantages
arising from it.

For my own part I really think that next to the
consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing
a civil one is the most satisfying, and the appella-
 

The Modern Chesterfield 119

 

tion which I should covet the most, next to that
which belonged to Aristides the Just, would be that
of well-bred.

I wish you would turn to the life of Aristides in
your copy of Plutarch’s Lives, which book, by the
way, has been the companion of more great men
than almost any other. You will there learn why
it was that Aristides was called the just. Such a
title involves fine qualities of brain and heart and
soul. It embraces the brain quality of ability—the
heart quality of unselfishness—and the soul quality
of genuineness, which is honesty. Ability is an
essential element, for one must analyze and weigh
to be able to sense the proportions; unselfishness is
required for a proper estimate of the rights of
others, and because most problems of justice directly
or indirectly affect the person who is charged with
their solution; and genuineness is a habit of honesty,
and, as such, indispensable to fairness. All these
were attributes of Aristides, as you will perceive
from incidents in his career of which you will read.
He demonstrated his ability when he readjusted the
taxes to the satisfaction of his country; his unselfish-
ness by living and dying poor; and his genuineness by
conforming to the maxim, To be and not to seem.
 

120 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXXV

London, November 24, O. 5., 1749.
Dear Boy:

Every rational being proposes to himself some
object more important than mere respiration and
obscure animal existence. He desires to distinguish
himself among his fellow-creatures. Caesar when
embarking in a storm said it was not necessary that
he should survive, but it was absolutely necessary
that he get to his destination. And Pliny leaves
mankind this only alternative: doing what deserves
to be written, or writing what deserves to be read.
You have, I am convinced, one or both of these
objects in view, but you must know and use the
necessary means, or your pursuit will be vain.

Learning must be adorned; it must have luster
as well as weight, or it will be oftener taken for
lead than for gold. Learning you have, and will
have; I am easy upon that article. However, my
business as your friend is not to compliment you
upon what you have but to tell you with freedom
what you lack; and I must tell you plainly that I
fear you lack everything but learning.

I have written you so often of late upon good
breeding, address, and the Graces that I shall confine
this letter to another subject, nearly akin, in which,
I am sure, you are as deficient ; I mean, style.

Style is the dress of thoughts, and let them be
ever so just, if your style is coarse, homely, or vulgar,
they will appear to as much disadvantage and will
 

The Modern Chesterfield 121

 

be as ill received as your person would be, though
ever so well proportioned, if dressed in rags, tatters,
and dirt. It is not every understanding that can
judge of matter, but every ear can and does judge
more or less of style, and were I either to speak to
or write for the public, I should prefer moderate
matter, adorned with all the beauties and elegancies
of style, to the strongest matter in the world, ill-
worded or ill-delivered.

Your business is negotiation abroad and oratory
in the House of Commons at home. What figure
can you make in either case if your style be inelegant
—I do not say bad? Imagine yourself writing an
office-letter to a Secretary of State, to be read by
the whole Cabinet Council, and possibly afterwards
laid before Parliament; one barbarism, solecism, or
vulgarism might circulate through the whole king-
dom, to your disgrace and ridicule. For instance, I
will suppose you had written the following letter
from The Hague to the Secretary of State at Lon-
don, and leave you to suppose the consequences of it.

My Lorp,

I had, last night, the honor of your Lord-
ship’s letter of the 24th, and will set about
doing the orders contained therein, and if I get
that affair done by the next post, I will not fail
to give your Lordship an account of it by next
post. I have told the French Minister that if
that affair be not soon concluded your Lord-
ship would think it all long of him, and that he
must have neglected to have written his Court
 

122 The Modern Chesterfield

 

about it. I must beg leave to put your Lord-
ship in mind that I am now full three quarters
in arrear; and if I do not very soon receive at
least one half year, I shall cut a very bad figure,
for this here place is very dear; and so I rest,
or remain, Your, etc.

You will tell me, possibly, that this is a caricature
of an illiberal and inelegant style; I admit it, but I
assure you at the same time that a dispatch with less
than half of these defects would blow you up for-
ever. It is by no means sufficient to be free from
defects in speaking and writing; you must do both
correctly and elegantly. No one is pardoned who
has any notable defect, because it is his own fault;
he need only to attend to, observe, and imitate the
best models.

The first qualification of an orator is to speak
his own language, particularly, with purity and ele-
gance. A man will be forgiven great errors in a
foreign language, but in his own even the least slips
are justly laid hold of and ridiculed.

A member of the House of Commons two years
ago asserted that we had the finest navy upon the
face of the yearth. This happy mixture of blunder
and vulgarism, you may easily imagine, was a matter
of immediate ridicule, but I can assure you that it
continues so still and will be remembered as long
as the man lives. Another, with like effect, speak-
ing in defense of one upon whom a vote of censure
was moved, observed that the gentleman was
more liable to be thanked and rewarded than cen-
 

The Modern Chesterfield 123

 

sured. You know, I presume, that liable can never
be used in a good sense.

You have with you three or four of the best
English authors—Dryden, Atterbury, and Swift;
read them with the utmost care and with a particu-
lar view to their language; they may possibly correct
that curious infelicity of diction which you acquired
at Westminster. Mr. Harte excepted, I will admit
that you have met with very few English abroad
who could improve your style, and many, I dare say,
speak as ill as yourself, and it may be worse; you
must therefore take the more pains, and consult
your authors the more.

I need not tell you how attentive the Romans
and the Greeks, notably the Athenians, were to this
object. It is also a study among the Italians and
the French; witness their respective academies and
dictionaries for improving and fixing their languages.
To our shame be it spoken, it is less attended to here
than in any polite country, but that is no reason why
you should not attend to it; on the contrary, it will
distinguish you the more. Cicero says truly that
it is glorious to excel other men in that very article
in which man excels brutes—speech.

Constant experience has shown me that great
purity and elegance of style, with graceful elocution,
cover a multitude of faults in a speaker. Gain the
heart or you gain nothing; the eyes and the ears
are the only roads to the heart. Merit and knowl-
edge will not gain hearts though they will secure
them when gained. Pray have this truth in your
mind. Engage the eves by your address, air, and
 

124 The Modern Chesterfield

 

motions; soothe the ears by the elegance and har-
mony of your diction; the heart will certainly follow;
and the whole man, or woman, will as certainly
follow the heart.

With all the knowledge which you have at pres-
ent, or may hereafter acquire, and with all the merit
that ever man had, I must repeat to you over and
over, if you have not a graceful address, liberal and
engaging manners, a prepossessing air, and a degree
of eloquence in speaking and writing, you will be
nobody, but will have the daily mortification of
seeing people with not one-tenth of your merit or
knowledge distance you, both in company and in
business.

You have read Quintilian, the best book in the
world to form an orator; pray read Cicero, de
Oratore, the best book in the world to finish one.
‘Translate and retranslate, from and to Latin, Greek,
and English; make for yourself a pure and elegant
English style; it requires nothing but application.
I do not find that God has made you a poet, and I
am glad that He has not; therefore make yourself
an orator, which you can surely do.
 

The Alodern Chesterfield 125

 

XXxVi

London, November 26, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

While the Roman Republic flourished, while
glory was pursued and virtue practiced, and while
even little irregularities and indecencies not cogniz-
able by law were thought not to be below the public .
care, censors were established. They discretionally
supplied in particular cases the inevitable defects in
the law, for the law can only be general. This
employment I arrogate to myself with regard to your
own little republic, and I am of opinion that my
censorial power will neither be useless to you, nor a
sinecure to me. The sooner you make it both, the
better for us. I can now exercise this employment
only upon hearsay evidence, but when we meet I
can form my judgment upon ocular and auricular
evidence, and then I shall not let pass the least
impropriety, indecorum, or irregularity.

I shall read you with the attention of a critic,
not with the partiality of an author, but, different
from most critics, I shall seek for faults only to
correct them, and not merely to expose them.

I have often thought that there are few things
which people in general know less than how to love
and how to hate. They hurt those they love by a
mistaken indulgence—by a blindness, nay, often a
partiality to their faults. Where they hate, they
hurt themselves by ill-timed passion and rage. For-
tunately for you, I never loved you in such a mis-
 

126 The Modern Chesterfield

 

taken manner; from your infancy I made you the
object of my most serious attention, and not my
plaything; I consulted your real good, not your
humors or fancies; and I shall continue to do so
while you need it, which will probably be the case
during our joint lives, for, considering the differ-
ence in our ages, in the course of nature you will
hardly have acquired experience enough of your own
while I am here to lend you any of mine.

People bear being told of their vices or crimes,
but not of their little failings and weaknesses. They
in some degree justify or excuse the former by the
strong passions, seductions, and artifices of others,
but to be told of their foibles implies an inferiority
of parts too mortifying to that self-love and vanity
which are inseparable from our natures. I have been
intimate enough with several people to tell them
that they had said or done a criminal thing, but I
never was intimate enough with any man to tell
him seriously that he had said or done a foolish one.
Nothing less than the relation between you and me
can possibly authorize that freedom, but, fortunately
for you, my parental rights, joined to my censorial
powers, give it to me to its fullest extent, and my
concern for you will cause me to exert it.

Rejoice therefore that there is one person in the
world who can and will tell you what will be very
useful for you to know, and yet what no other man
could or would tell you. Whatever I shall tell you
of this kind, you may be sure, can have no other
motive than your interest. I can neither be jealous
nor envious of your reputation or your fortune, both
 

The Modern Chesterfield 127

 

of which I must be desirous and even proud to
establish and promote; I cannot be your rival, either
in love or in business; on the contrary, I want the
rays of your rising to reflect new luster upon my
setting light. In order to accomplish this I shall
analyze you so minutely and censure you so freely
that you will not have one single spot upon you
when in your meridian.
 

128 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XXXVIT

London, December 9, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

It is now above forty years since I have made
it a rule never to speak or write a word without giv-
ing myself at least a moment’s time to consider
whether it is a good one, and if so, whether I could
not find a better in its place. An inharmonious or
ragged period shocks my ears, and, like all the rest
of the world, 1 will cheerfully give up some meas-
ure of rough sense for a good degree of pleasing
sound. I will freely and truly own to you, without
either vanity or false modesty, that whatever repu-
tation I have acquired as a speaker is more owing to
constant attention to my diction than to my matter,
which has been necessarily just the same as other
people’s.

It is in Parliament that I have set my heart
upon your making a figure; it is there that I want
to have you justly proud of yourself, and to make
me justly proud of you. This means that you must
be a good speaker; I use the word must, because I
know you can if you will.

The vulgar look upon a speaker and a comet
with the same astonishment and admiration, taking
them both for preternatural phenomena. ‘This error
discourages many young men from attempting that
character. But let us analyze and simplify the good
speaker ; let us strip him of those adventitious plumes
with which his own pride and the ignorance of
 

The Modern Chesterfield 129

 

others have decked him, and we shall find the true
definition of him to be a man of good common sense
who reasons justly and expresses himself elegantly.
There is surely no witchcraft in this. A man of sense
without a superior and astonishing degree of parts
will not talk nonsense on any subject, nor will he,
if he has the least taste or application, talk inele-
gantly.

What, then, does all this mighty art and mystery
of speaking in Parliament amount to? Why, no
more than this: Every member who addresses the
House of Commons speaks to four hundred people
that opinion upon a given subject which he would
have no difficulty in expressing in any house in
England, around the fire or at table, to any fourteen
people whatsoever—better judges, perhaps, and
severer critics of what he says, than an average
fourteen gentlemen of the House of Comnions.

I have spoken frequently in Parliament, not
always without applause, and therefore I can assure
you from my experience that there is very little in it.
The elegance of the style and the turn of the periods
make the chief impression on the hearers. Give
them but one or two round and harmonious periods
in a speech, such that they will retain and repeat
them, and they will go home as well satisfied as
people from an opera, humming all the way one
or two favorite tunes that have struck their ears and
were easily caught.

Cicero, conscious that he was at the top of his
profession, for in his time eloquence was a profession,
in order to set himself off, defines an orator to be
 

130 The Modern Chesterfield

 

such a man as never was and never will be, and by
this fallacious argument—that he must know every
art and science whatsoever ; otherwise, how could he
speak upon them? But with submission to so great
an authority, my definition of an orator is extremely
different from his, and, I believe, much truer. I
call that man an orator who reasons justly and
expresses himself elegantly upon whatever subject
he treats. Problems in geometry, equations in alge-
bra, processes in chemistry, experiments in anatomy,
are never the subjects of eloquence, and therefore I
humbly conceive that a man may be a very fine
speaker and yet know nothing of geometry, algebra,
chemistry, or anatomy. ‘The subjects of all Parlia-
mentary debates are those of common sense singly.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 131

 

XXXVITI

London, December 12, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

Lord Clarendon says of John Hampden that
he had a head to contrive, a tongue to persuade, and
a hand to execute any mischief. 1 shall not now
enter into the justness of this characterization of
Hampden, to whose brave stand against the illegal
demand of ship-money we owe our present liberties,
but I mention it to you as the character to which
I would have you aspire, with the alteration of one
single word, mischief, which I would change to
worthy action. ‘The idea is not original, for with.
this change these very words were used to describe
your father by Sir Watkin Williams five years ago
in a debate in the House of Commons, at a time, by
the way, when I was wind-bound at Harwich on
my way back from Holland.

The head to contrive God must to a certain
degree have given you, but it is in your own power
greatly to improve it by study, observation, and
reflection.

As for the hand to execute, it entirely de-
pends upon yourself. Serious reflection will always
give courage in a good cause, and the courage
arising from reflection is much superior to the
mere animal and constitutional bravery of a foot-
soldier. The former is steady and unshaken; the
latter is often improperly exerted, and always bru-
tally. The second member of my text, to speak

 
 

132 The Modern Chesterfield

 

ecclesiastically, shall be the subject of my following
discourse: the tongue to persuade; as judicious
preachers recommend those virtues which they think
scarce in their several audiences; such as truth and
continence at Court; disinterestedness in the city;
and sobriety in the country.

In the course of your experience you must cer-
tainly have felt the effects of elegant and inelegant
_ speaking. Do you not suffer when people accost
you in a stammering or hesitating manner; in an
untuneful voice, with false accents and cadences;
puzzling and blundering through solecisms, barbar-
isms, and vulgarisms; misplacing even their bad
words and inverting all method? Do not these
defects prejudice you against their matter, be that
what it may; and even against themselves? I am
sure they do with me.

On the other hand, do you not feel yourself in-
clined, prepossessed, nay, even engaged, in favor of
those who address you in the directly contrary man-
ner? The persuasion of a correct and adorned
style is incredible; it often supplies the want of
reason or argument, but when used to support them
both it is irresistible.

The French attend greatly to the purity and
elegance of their style even in common conversation.
I have met with few Italians who do not speak
their own language correctly and elegantly. How
much more necessary is it for an Englishman to do
so who is to speak in a public assembly where the
laws and liberties of his country are the subject of
deliberation? The tongue that would persuade
 

The Modern Chesterfield 133

 

there must not content itself with mere articulation.

If you have the least defect in your elocution,
take the utmost pains and care to correct it. Do
not neglect your style, whatever language you speak
in, or whomsoever you speak to. Seek always for
the best words and the happiest expressions you can
find. Do not content yourself with being barely
understood, but adorn your thoughts, and dress
them as you would your person, which, however
well proportioned, it would be indecent to exhibit
naked, or noticeably worse dressed than people of
your sort. Customarily avoid all forms of careless
speech, for when you speak in public you cannot
fully lay aside your everyday habit of language.

I have sent you Lord St. John Bolingbroke’s
book, published about a year ago. I desire that
you read it over and over again, with particular
attention to the style, and to all those beauties of
expression with which it is adorned. ‘Till I read
that book I confess I did not know all the extent
and powers of the English language. Lord Boling-
broke has a tongue as well as a pen to persuade;

his. penetration_.is_almost.intuition; his manner of

speaking “in “private Conversation 1s fully as elegant
as his writings ; upon whatever. subject he either
speaks or writes, Hé adorns it with the most splendid

eloquence—not studied or labored, but a flowing
happiness of diction which has become so habitual
to him that even his most familiar conversations,
if taken down in writing, would bear the press with-
out the least correction, either as to method or style.

If his conduct in the former part of his life
 

134 The Modern Chesterfield

 

S been equal to all his natural and acquired
alents, he would most justly have merited the
appellation, bestowed.upon him by. his friend and
compariion Pope; of ~“‘all-accomplished St. t. Jol tag
Take him as -hé is now, the character of all-accom-
plished is more his due than any man’s I ever knew.

 

 

 
The Modern Chesterfield 135

 

XXXIX

London, December 19, O. S., 1749.
Dear Boy:

I have often told you that we must not draw
general conclusions with regard to mankind from
particular principles, though, in the main, true ones.

‘We must not suppose because a man is a rational
animal that he will always act rationally; nor,
because he has such or such a dominant passion, that
he will act invariably and consequentially in the
pursuit of it. No: we are complicated machines,
and though we have one main-spring that gives
motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little
wheels, which in their turn retard, precipitate, and
sometimes stop that motion.

Let me exemplify: I will suppose ambition to
be, as it commonly is, the dominant passion of a
Minister of State, and I will suppose that Minister
to be an able one: will he therefore invariably pur-
sue the object of that dominant passion? May I be
sure that he will do so and so because he ought to?
Sickness or low spirits may dampen his dominant
passion; humor and peevishnness may triumph over
it; inferior passions may at times prevail over it.
Is this ambitious statesman affectionate? Indis-
creet and unguarded confidences, made in tender
moments to his wife or some favorite, may defeat
all his schemes. Is he avaricious? Some great
appeal to cupidity suddenly presenting itself may
unravel all the work of his ambition. Is he passion-
 

136 The Modern Chesterfield

 

ate? Contradiction or provocation, sometimes art-
fully contrived, may extort rash and inconsiderate
expressions or actions destructive of his main object.
Is he vain, and open to flattery? A designing
sycophant may mislead him. Even laziness may, at
certain moments, make him neglect or omit the one
thing necessary to success.

There are two passions which, though incon-
sistent, frequently accompany each other, like man
and wife, and which are commonly clogs each upon
the other. I mean ambition and avarice; the latter
is often the true cause of the former. It seems to
have been so with Cardinal Mazarin, who did
everything, submitted to everything, and forgave.
everything for the sake of plunder. He loved and
courted power like a usurer, because it carried
profit along with it. Whoever therefore formed
his opinion or took his measure singly from the
ambitious part of his character often found himself
mistaken. Some, who had found this out, made
fortunes by letting him cheat them at play. On
the contrary, Cardinal Richelieu’s prevailing passion
seems to have been ambition, and his immense riches
only the natural consequence of that ambition grat-
ified.

Richelieu, by the way, is so strong a proof of the
inconsistency of human nature that I cannot help
observing to you that while he absolutely governed
both his king and his country, and was in a great
degree the arbiter of the fate of all Europe, he was
more jealous of the great reputation of Corneille
than of the power of Spain, and more flattered with
 

The Modern Chesterfield 137

 

being thought (what he was not) the best poet,
than being considered (what he certainly was) the
greatest statesman in Europe; and affairs stood still
while he was preparing his criticism upon The Cid.
Could one think this possible if he did not know
it to be true? Though men are all of one composi-
tion, the several ingredients are so differently pro-
portioned in each individual that no two are exactly
alike, and no one at all times the same. The ablest
man will, upon occasion, be weak; the proudest,
mean; the most honest, venal; and the most wicked,
good. Study individuals, then, and if you take their
outlines from their prevailing passion suspend your
last finishing strokes till you have attended to and
discovered the operations of their inferior passions,
appetites, and humors.

A man’s general reputation may be that of the
most upright man in the world: do not despise it;
you might be thought envious or ill-natured; but,
at the same time, do not take this probity upon trust
to such a degree as to put your life, fortune, or
reputation in his power. This honest man may
happen to be your rival in power, in interest, or in
love—three passions that often put honesty to most
severe trials: but first analyze this honest man your-
self, and then judge how far you may trust him.
 

138 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XL

Dear Boy:

Great talents and great virtues will procure you
the respect and admiration of mankind, but less
talents must win love and affection, which are more
satisfying. The former, unassisted and unadorned
by the latter, will extort praise, but will at the same
time excite fear and jealousy, sentiments absolutely
incompatible with love and affection.

Caesar had all the great vices, and Cato all the
great virtues. But the small talents, which Cato
lacked, Caesar had, and they made him beloved
even by his enemies, and gained him the hearts of
men in spite of their reason, while Cato was not
even beloved by his friends, notwithstanding the
esteem and respect they accorded him in recognition
of his virtues. I am inclined to believe that if Caesar
had lacked those small talents and Cato had
possessed them the former would not have assailed
with success the liberties of Rome, and the latter
would have protected them.

Addison, in his Cato, says of Caesar, and I be-
lieve with truth: “Curse on his virtues! they've
undone his country.” By which he means those
less but engaging virtues of gentleness, geniality,
complaisance, and good humor.

The knowledge of a scholar, the courage of a
hero, and the virtue of a stoic will be admired, but
if the knowledge be accompanied with arrogance,
the courage with ferocity, and the virtue with
 

The Modern Chesterfield 139

 

inflexible severity, the man will never be loved.
The heroism, or, more properly, the brutal bravery
of Charles XII, of Sweden, was universally admired,
but the man was nowhere beloved, whereas Henry
IV, of France, who had full as much bravery and
was much longer engaged in wars, was generally
beloved on account of his smaller virtues and social
graces. We are all so formed that our under-
standings are generally the dupes of our hearts, that
is, of our passions; and the surest way to the former
is through the latter, which must be engaged by the
small virtues alone, and the manner of exerting
them. For example, the insolent civility of a proud
man is more shocking than his rudeness could be,
because he shows you by his manner that he thinks
it mere condescension in him, and that his goodness
alone bestows upon you what you have no license
to claim. He intimates his protection instead of
his friendship, by a gracious nod instead of the
usual bow; and signifies his consent that you may
sit, walk, eat, or drink with him, rather than invites
you to do so.

The costive liberality of a purse-proud man
insults the distresses it relieves; he takes care to
make you feel your misfortunes, and the difference
between your situation and his; he insinuates that
both are merited—yours by folly, his by wisdom.

The arrogant pedant does not communicate but
promulgates his knowledge: he does not give it to
you but inflicts it upon you; and is more desirous to
show you your ignorance than his learning.
 

140 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Such manners as these, not only in the particular
instances mentioned but likewise in all others, shock
into rebellion the pride and vanity which every
man has in his heart, and obliterate in us the obliga-
tion for the favor conferred by reminding us of the
motive which produced it.

These faults point out their opposite perfections
which your own good sense will naturally suggest.

A man is not to be judged by his treatment of
his equals, much less his superiors, but by his deal-
ings with those who temporarily or otherwise are
in a relative position of dependence, so that they
cannot freely resent, for then every act of oppression
is the deed of a coward, and, on the other hand,
there is a sense of chivalry which uplifts a man
when he extends consideration to those less for-
tunate than himself. The great deformer of charac-
ter, and indeed of the divine expression of the
human face, is arrogance, particularly that which
has_its foundation in the. sands_of accidents_such_as
wealth: or class. "This" ‘principle applies with force.

to the” treatment of servants, whom J_consider as

unfortunate friends, my equals’ by"t nature, and iy
inferiors only by the difference of our positions. If
you will cultivate this mental attitude, your ser-
vants will never complain of your conduct; your own
household, in which you live day by day, will be at
peace.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 141

 

XLI

London, January 8, O. S., 1750.
Dear Boy:

I have seldom written to you upon the subject
of religion or morality: your own reason, I am per-
suaded, has given you true notions of both; they
speak best for themselves, and I confine myself in
this letter to the decency, the utility, and the neces-
sity of scrupulously preserving the appearances of
both. When I say the appearances of religion I do
not mean that you should talk or act like a mission-
ary or an enthusiast, nor that you should take up a
controversial cudgel against whoever attacks your
sect: this would be useless, and unbecoming your
age; but I mean that you should not seem to ap-
prove, encourage, or applaud those notions which
strike at religions equally, and which are the poor,
threadbare topics of half-wits and minute philoso-
phers. Even those who are silly enough to laugh at
such jokes are yet wise enough to distrust the char-
acters of the jokers, for, putting moral virtues at the
highest and religion at the lowest, religion must
still be allowed to be a collateral security, at least,
to virtue, and every prudent man will sooner trust
to two securities than to one.

Whenever therefore you happen to be in com-
pany with those who laugh at religion to show
their wit, or disclaim it to complete their riot, let no
word or look of yours intimate the least approba-
tion. Depend upon this truth: every man is the
 

142 The Modern Chesterfield

 

worse looked upon and the less trusted for being
thought to have no religion, in spite of all the
pompous and specious epithets he may assume, and
a wise atheist, if such a thing there is, would, for
his own interest and reputation in this world, pre-
tend to some religion.

For my own part, I have religion enough to
submit to’my fate here on earth without melancholy
and without a murmur, for though I can by no
means account for either the moral or the physical
evil in the world, yet, conscious of the narrow bands
of human understanding, and convinced of the
wisdom and justice of the Supreme and Intelligent
Being who gave my soul to me, and who placed
evil here, I am persuaded it is fit and right that
evil should be here.

One cannot contemplate his own existence with-
out thinking of the Eternal Author of it, and cannot
consider His attributes without some fear, though
to my mind still more hope. It is true that we
can have no adequate conception of a Being so
infinitely superior to us, but according to the best
notions which we are capable of forming concern-
ing His justice and mercy, the latter seems neces-
sarily topreponderate. But, on the other hand,
Thave little liking for dogma; I regard with jeal-
ousy any temporal advantage or power which any
church seeks for herself or her devotees; and IJ
exert my influence to rid religion of intolerance and
priestcraft.

Your moral character must not only be pure,
but, like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. The least
 

The Modern Chesterfield 143

 

blemish upon it is fatal. There are, however,
wretches in the world profligate enough to explode
all notions of moral good and evil, to maintain that
they are merely local and depend entirely upon the
customs and fashions of different countries: nay,
there are still, if possible, more unaccountable
wretches; I mean those who affect to preach and
propagate such absurd and infamous notions with-
out believing them themselves. These are the
devil’s hypocrites. Avoid, as much as possible, the
company of such people, who reflect a degree of
discredit and infamy upon all who converse with
them. But as you may sometimes, by accident, fall
into such company, take great care that no com-
plaisance, no good-humor, no warmth of festal
mirth shall ever cause you even to seem to acquiesce
in such doctrines, much less to approve or applaud
them. i

On the other hand, do not debate nor enter into
serious argument upon the subject, but content
yourself with telling these apostles that you know
they are not serious, that you have a better opinion
of them than they wish, and that you are sure they
would not practice the doctrine they preach. But
put your private mark upon them and shun them.

There is nothing so delicate as your moral char-
acter, and nothing which it is to your interest so
much to preserve pure. Should you be suspected of
injustice, malignity, perfidy, lying, all the parts and
knowledge in the world will never procure you
esteem, friendship, or respect. A strange concur-
rence of circumstances has sometimes raised bad men
 

144 The Modern Chesterfield

 

to high stations, but they have been raised like
criminals to a pillory, where their persons and their
crimes, by being conspicuous, are only the more
known and the more detested.

I would not advise you to a pharisaical pomp of,
virtue. But I will recommend to you a scrupulous
tenderness for your moral character, and the utmost
care not to say or do the least thing that may ever
so slightly taint it. Show yourself upon all occa-
sions the advocate and friend of virtue but not its
bully.

Colonel Charteris was, I believe, the most noto-
rious rascal in the world. By all sorts of crimes he
accumulated immense wealth. When _he came to
die, his neighbors, more intense than fastidious, threw
offal and dead dogs into the grave with him’ to
indicate the rare esteem in which they had held him
during life. This is the man whom my friend and
physician the talented Dr. Arbuthnot has immor-
talized by a celebrated epitaph in which he sets out
the evil character of the man, but generously sub-
stitutes the name of Don Francisco.

Charteris was so sensible to the disadvantage of
a bad reputation that I once heard him say, in his
impudent, profligate manner, that he would not
give one farthing for virtue, but he would give
ten thousand pounds for a good reputation, because
he would get a hundred thousand pounds by it,
whereas he was so blasted that he had no longer
any opportunity to cheat people. Is it possible,
 

The Mfodern Chesterfield 145

 

then, that an honest man can undervalue such an
advantage when a wise rogue would purchase it so
dearly?

There is one vice into which people of good
education, and in the main of good principles,
sometimes fall, from mistaken notions of skill, dex-
terity, and self-defense; I mean lying, though it is
inseparably attended with more infamy and _ loss
than any other. The prudence and necessity of
sometimes concealing the truth insensibly seduce
people to violate it. It is the only art of mean
capacities, and the only refuge of mean spirits.

Concealing the truth upon necessary occasions
is prudent and innocent, but telling a lie is infamous
and foolish. I will state you a case in your own
department. Suppose you are employed at a foreign
Court, and the Minister is absurd or impertinent
enough to ask you what your instructions are. Will
you tell him a lie, which, aside from moral consid-
erations, as soon as found out, and found out it
certainly will be, must destroy your credit, crush
your reputation, and render you useless there? No.
Will you tell him the truth, then, and betray your
trust? Ascertainly, xo. But you will answer with
firmness that you are surprised at such a question,
that you are persuaded that he does not expect an
answer to it, but that, at all events, he certainly
will not have one.

Lord Bacon observes that they are the weaker
sort of politicians who have recourse to lying. Here
are his words:
 

146 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Certainly the ablest men that ever were
have had all an openness and frankness of deal-
ing, and a name of certainty and veracity; but
then they were like horses well managed, for
they could tell passing well when to stop or
turn, and at such times when they thought the
case indeed required dissimulation, if then they
used it, it came to pass that the former opinion,
spread abroad, of their good faith and clearness
of dealing, made them almost invisible.

| The word invisible puzzled me for a time. At
first I regarded it as a printer’s error for invincible.
Then I thought it some sly reference, for Bacon
has been thought to use hidden writing, and one
meaning of the word is a Rosicrucian, a name adopt-
ed in recognition of the invisible, secret, and elusive
nature of the order of that name, with which
Bacon was suspected to have a more than formal
connection. But it became clear to me, upon
reflection, that the word means impenetrable, and
‘in our day so clear a writer as Bacon surely would
have used some such word.

There is a great difference between that purity
of character, which I so earnestly recommend to you,
and stoical gravity and austerity, which I do not.
At your age I would no more wish you to be a
Cato than a Clodius. Be, and be reckoned, a man
of pleasure, as well as a man of business. Enjoy
this happy and giddy time of your life; shine in the
pleasures and in the company of people of your own
age. This is all to be done, and indeed only can
 

The Modern Chesterfield 147

 

be done, without the least taint upon the purity of
your moral character. If you do not possess this
purity you can have no dignity of character, without
which it is impossible to rise in the world. _Do not_
‘confuse dignity of character with dignity of manner,
defined by a Frenchman to be ‘fa mysterious some-
thing in address assumed to hide deficiencies in in-
tellect.”” You must be respectable as well as repu-
__table, 1 if you will be respected. I have known people
to” “Slatterh: away their character without really
polluting it; the consequence of which has been that
they have ‘become innocently contemptible; their
merit has been dimmed, their pretensions have been
unregarded, and all their views have been defeated.
Character must be kept bright as well as clean. Con-
tent yourself with mediocrity in nothing. In purity
of character and in politeness of manner labor to
excel all, if you wish to equal many.
 

148 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XLII

London, January 18, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

I consider the solid part of your little edifice as
so nearly completed that my only remaining concern
is about the embellishments, and they must now be
your principal care. Adorn yourself with all those
graces and accomplishments which, without solidity,
are frivolous: take one man with a very moderate
degree of knowledge but with a pleasing figure, a
prepossessing address, graceful in all that he says
and does, polite, and, in short, adorned with all the
less talents; and take another man with sound sense
and profound learning but without these advantages ;
the former will not only get the better of the latter
in every pursuit of every ind, but in truth there will
be no sort of competition between them.

Can every man acquire these advantages? I
say, Yes, if he pleases, assuming that his situation
and circumstances enable him to frequent good com-
pany. Attention, observation, imitation will most
infallibly do it.

When you see a man who at first blush pre-
possesses you in his favor, and makes you entertain
a good opinion of him, and yet do not know why,
analyze his charm and the several parts that com-
pose it and you will generally find it to be the result
of a happy assembling of modesty unembarrassed,
respect without timidity, a gentle but unaffected atti-
tude of body and limbs, an open, cheerful, but un-
 

The Modern Chesterfield 149

 

smirking countenance, and a dress by no means
negligent and yet not foppish—in_ short, the man_
has achieved the golden mean in_these_ respects.
Copy him, then, not servilely, but as some of the
greatest masters of painting have copied others, in-
somuch that their copies have been equal to the
originals both as to beauty and freedom.

When you see a man who is universally allowed
to shine as an agreeable, well-bred man, and a fine
gentleman, attend to him, watch him carefully,
observe in what manner he addresses himself to
his superiors, how he lives with his equals, and,
above all, how he treats his inferiors, for this last
is the real test of true manhood. Mind his turn of
conversation in the several situations of morning
visits, the table, and evening amusements. Imitate
without mimicking him, and with due care of your
own individuality; be his duplicate but not his ape.
You will find that he takes care never to say or do
anything that can be construed into a slight, or
that can in any degree mortify people’s vanity or
self-love ; on the contrary, you will perceive that he
makes people pleased with him by first making them
pleased with themselves; he shows respect, regard,
esteem, and attention, where they are severally
proper; he sows them with care, and he reaps them
in plenty.

These amiable accomplishments are all to be ac-
quired by use and imitation. The great point is to
choose good models, and to study them with care.
People insensibly contract, not only the air, the
manners, and the vices of those with whom they

 
 

150 The Modern Chesterfield

 

commonly converse, but their virtues, too, and even
their way of thinking.

This is so true that I have known persons of
very plain understandings to catch a certain degree
of wit by constant contact with men of parts. Per-
sist therefore in keeping the best companions, and
you will insensibly become like them, but if you
add attention and observation you will very soon
be one of them. This inevitable contagion of
company shows you the necessity of keeping the
best, for in every companionship something will stick.

I here subjoin a list of all those necessary orna-
mental accomplishments without which no man
living can either please or rise in the world, and
which only require care and attention to possess:

To speak elegantly whatever language you speak

in, without which nobody will hear you with
pleasure.

An agreeable and distinct elocution, without
which no one will hear you with patience; this
everybody may acquire who is not born with some
imperfection in the organs of speech.

A distinguished politeness of manners and
address, which common sense, observation, and good
company will infallibly give you.

A gentle carriage and graceful motions, with the
air of a man of fashion. A good dancing-master,
with some care on your part, and some imitation of
those who excel, will soon bring this about.

To be extremely clean in your person, and
 

The Modern Chesterfield 151

 

dressed according to the fashion. Negligence in
dress while you were a schoolboy was pardonable,
but it is not so now.
 

152 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XLIII

London, January 25, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIenpD:
~ It is so long since I have heard from you that I
suppose Rome has engrossed every moment of your
time, and if it has in the manner I wish, I willingly
give up my share of it. Your studies, the respectable
remains of antiquity, and your evening amusements
cannot leave you much time to write. You will
probably never see Rome again, and therefore you
ought to see it well now: by seeing it well, I do
not mean merely the buildings, statues, and paintings,
though they undoubtedly deserve your attention, but
I mean seeing into the constitution and the govern-
ment,

How go your pleasures at Rome? Are you in
fashion there? That is, do you live with the people
who are so? That is the only way of becoming so
yourself. Has any woman of fashion and good
breeding taken the trouble to abuse and laugh at
you amiably to your face? I do not presume to
ask if you: have any attachment, because I believe
you will not make me your confidant, but let me
observe for your benefit that women are not so
much taken by good looks as men are, but prefer
almost always those men who show them the most
attention.

Let us now make a little excursion into poetry,
to learn how this idea may be expressed in softer
words.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 153

 

Would you engage the lovely fair?
With gentlest manners treat her;

With tender looks and graceful air,
In softest accents greet her.

Verse were but vain, the Muses fail,
. Without the Graces’ aid;

The God of Verse could not prevail
To stop the flying maid.

Attention by attentions gain
And merit care by cares;

So shall the nymph reward your pain,
And Venus crown your prayers.

I confess that this rhyme is my own, and I urge
you to similar effort; writing in poetic form is of
great service; “it increases the vocabulary and felic-
itates the expression,” as a great man put it when
he was twitted for the verses written in his youth.

Good-bye, my dear friend!
 

154 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XLIV

London, February 5, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

Few are good economists of their fortune, and
still fewer of their time; and yet time is the more
precious. I heartily wish you to be a good econo-
mist of both, and you are now of an age to begin
to think seriously of these two important articles.

Young people are likely to think they have so
much time before them that they may squander what
they please of it, and will yet have enough left, just
as great fortunes have frequently seduced people
to a ruinous profusion.

Old Mr. Lowndes, the famous Secretary of the
Treasury, used to say, “Take care of the pence, and
the pounds will take care of themselves.’ To this
maxim, which he not only preached but practiced,
his two grandsons at this time owe the very consid-
erable fortunes that he left them.

This holds equally true as to time, and I ear-
nestly recommend to you the care of those minutes
and quarter hours in the course of the day which
people think too short to deserve attention, and yet,
if summed up at the end of the year, amount to a
great portion of time.

For example, you are to be at such a place at
twelve; you go out at eleven to make two or three
visits first, upon persons who, it happens, are not
at home; instead of sauntering away that interme-
diate time, return home, write a letter, or take up a
 

The Modern Chesterfield 155

 

book—I do not mean Descartes, Locke, or Newton,
by way of dipping, but some book of rational amuse-
ment, some detached piece. This will be so much
time saved.

Many lose a great deal of time by reading friv-
olous stuff that nourishes the mind just as much as
whipped cream would the body. Stick to the best-
established books in every language; the celebrated
poets, historians, orators, and philosophers. In this
way, to use a city metaphor, you will make fifty
per cent of that time of which others make not
above three or four, or probably nothing at all.

Many lose time by laziness; they loll and yawn
in a great chair, tell themselves that they have not
time to begin anything, and that it will do as well
another day. This is a most unfortunate disposition,
and the greatest obstruction to both learning and
business. At your age you have no right nor claim
to laziness; you are but just listed in the world, and
must be active, diligent, indefatigable. If ever you
propose commanding with dignity, you must serve
up to it with diligence.

Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing
contributes more to dispatch than method and order.
You cannot conceive how much time you will save
by it, nor how much more easily and how much
better everything will be done.

The Duke of Marlborough slatterned himself
into that immense debt which is not yet paid off.

The hurry and confusion of the Duke of New-
castle do not proceed from much business, but from

lack of method. Sir Robert Walpole, who had
 

156 The Modern Chesterfield

 

ten times as much business to attend to, was never
in a hurry because he did it with method.

Method is the great advantage that lawyers have
over others in speaking in Parliament; the necessity
of observing it in their pleadings in court renders
it habitual to them.

Lay down a method for everything and stick to
Fs inviolably, as far as unexpected incidents allow.
Reply to every letter, for no slight is more generally
resented than an unanswered letter. As far as
.practicable answer a letter on the day of its receipt,
‘whereby you gain great favor, but hold all impor-
jtant replies until the next day. A night’s sleep is
-a great leveler of the judgment.

Adopt a method for your reading, for which
allot a certain share of your mornings; let it be in a
consistent and consecutive course, and not in that
desultory and unmethodical manner in which many
read scraps of different authors upon different sub-
jects. Keep a short commonplace book for passages
that strike your fancy or which may be useful to
quote. Read history with maps and a chronological
book, or tables, lying by you, and constantly refer
to them, without which history is only a confused
heap of facts.

In this connection remember the words of the
great Bacon:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be
swallowed, and some few to be chewed and
digested: that is, some books are to be read only
in parts; others to be read, but not curiously;
 

The Modern Chesterfield 157

 

and some few to be read wholly, and with

diligence and attention...... Reading maketh
a full man, conference a ready man, and writ-
ing an exact man...... Histories make men

wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle;
natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic
and rhetoric, able to contend.

One method more I recommend to you, which
I have found of great benefit; that is, to rise early
and at the same hour every morning, how late
soever you may have sat up the night before. This
secures you an hour or two, at least, of reading or
reflection before the common interruptions of the
morning begin, and it will save your constitution
by forcing you to go to bed early at least one night
in three.

You may say, it may be, as many young people
would, that all this order and method is very
troublesome, only fit for dull people, and a disagree-
able restraint upon the noble spirit and fire of youth.
I deny it, and assert, on the contrary, that it will
procure you both more time and more taste for
your pleasures; so far from being troublesome to
you, after you have pursued it a month it would
be troublesome to you to lay it aside. Business
whets the appetite, and gives a taste to pleasures,
as exercise does to food; and business can never be
done without method; it raises the spirits for
pleasure; and a spectacle, a ball, an assembly, will
much more sensibly affect a man who has employed
the preceding part of the day than one who has
158 The Modern Chesterfield

 

lost it: nay, I will venture to say that a lady of
quality will seem to have more charms to a man of
study or business than to a saunterer, with whom
the same listlessness runs through his whole conduct ;
he is insipid in his pleasures as he is inefficient in
everything else.

There is a certain dignity to be kept up in
pleasures as well as in business. In love, a man
may lose his heart with dignity. At table, a man
with decency may have a distinguishing palate, but
indiscriminate voraciousness degrades him to a
glutton.

Vivacity and wit make a man shine in company
but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a
buffoon. Every virtue, they say, has its kindred
vice; every pleasure, I am sure, has its neighboring
disgrace. Mark carefully therefore the line that
separates them; rather stop a yard short than step
an inch beyond, and never lose sight of the dis-
tinction between pleasure and happiness, of which I
have had a word to say before.
The Modern Chesterfield 159

 

XLV

London, April 26, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

As your sojourn in Paris will, in one way or
another, be of great consequence to you, my letters
will henceforward be principally calculated for that
meridian.

You will be left there to your own discretion.
You will find in the Academy a number of young
fellows much less discreet than yourself. They will
be your acquaintances, but inquire into their char-
acters before you form any connections among them.
Do not allow their ignorance and idleness to break
in upon those morning hours which you allot to
your studies. Do not breakfast with them, which
consumes a great deal of time, but tell them, not
magisterially and sententiously, that you must read
two or three hours in the morning, and that for
the rest of the day you are very much at their
service, though, by the way, I hope that you will
keep wiser company in the evenings.

Remember to receive coldly all civil gentlemen
who take a fancy to you at first sight, and take care
to be previously engaged, whatever excursion they
propose to you. A young fellow who seems to have
no will of his own and who does everything that
is asked of him is called good-natured but at the
same time is thought silly. Act wisely, upon solid
principles, and from true motives, but keep them
to yourself, and never talk dogmatically. When you
 

160 The Modern Chesterfield

 

are invited to drink, excuse yourself by saying that
you wish you could but it is impracticable, since
so little makes you both drunk and sick.

And now, my dear son, let me make some general
observations on small vices or indulgences. Some of
these do no harm if not over-indulged, but their
influence is insidious. Luxury is so comfortable and
so well-mated with laziness of mind and body that
it makes itself at home, and establishes itself as a
member of the family in the most ingratiating man-
ner, and by imperceptible degrees.

So it is that all our indulgences must be watched.
If you touch liquor, have a care to adopt rules and
limitations in advance—you cannot be sure of the
strength to do it later. All men of worth who
indulge this appetite at all do so under rules, such as
not to drink until after the business of the day is
over, not to patronize a public bar, and not to drink
more than one glass at a sitting. Such rules may
keep you from becoming a drunkard, but no man,
old or young, is safe even with them, so dangerous
is the habit. I am now referring to liquor in partic-
ular because it is the most progressive and des-
tructive of our indulgences, and if the habit should
become fastened upon you, all the others will cer-
tainly cling with it.

For the young, smoking is more harmful than
drinking, as far as the physical being is concerned,
and for the old, overeating more dangerous than
either. But if you acquire the liquor habit, you
will, as I say, have the others also. I am continu-
ally trying to point the way whereby you can make
 

The Modern Chesterfield 161

 

the most of yourself. You will be constantly in
competition with others, and if by indulgence you are
weakened in body or will, you are destined to lose
in the contest, provided only your competitor be not
also weak, and upon that you cannot rely.

Remember that to command others you must
have command of your own appetites, and that
character is built upon restraints. Be sure there-
fore that you are bigger than your habits. I com-
mend to you our friend Shermah, who, determined
to be sure that tobacco is not master, shuts off smok-
ing for a month in every year, though I confess he
always chooses the month of February.

Dedicate, I beg of you, the whole year to your
own advantage and final improvement, and do not
be diverted from those objects by idle dissipations
or bad example. After this year, do whatever you
please: I will interfere no longer in your conduct,
for I am sure that both you and I shall then be safe.
 

162 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XLVI

London, April 30, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

While in France connect yourself exclusively
with the French; improve yourself with the old,
divert yourself with the young; conform cheerfully
to French customs, even to the little follies, but not
to the vices. Do not, however, preach or remon-
strate, for remonstrances do not suit your age.

In French companies you will not customarily
find much learning; therefore take care not to
brandish yours in their faces. People hate those who
make them feel their inferiority. Conceal all your
learning carefully, or, at most, let it be extorted from
you. If a man of learning affects to show it, the
fact is questioned, and he is reckoned only superficial,
but if afterwards it appears that he really has it, he
is pronounced a pedant. Real merit of any kind
will be discovered, and nothing can depreciate it but
its exhibition. Merit may not always be fully re-
warded, but it will always be known.

You will in general find the women of the beau
monde in Paris better informed than the men, who
are bred up singly for the army, but that sort of
education which makes them ignorant of books
gives them a great knowledge of the world, an easy
address, and polite manners.

Fashion is more tyrannical in Paris than in any
other place in the world; it governs even more
absolutely than the king, which is saying a great
 

The Modern Chesterfield 163

 

deal. The least revolt against it is punished by
proscription. You must observe and conform if you
will be in fashion yourself, and there, if you are not
in fashion, you are nobody.
 

164 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XLVII

London, June 5, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

How many people one meets everywhere who
with moderate parts and little knowledge push them-
selves far by being sanguine, enterprising, and per-
severing! They will take no denial from man or
woman; difficulties do not discourage them; repulsed
twice or thrice, they rally, they charge again, and
nine times in ten prevail at last. The same means
will much sooner and more certainly attain the
same ends with your parts and knowledge. You
have a fund to be sanguine upon, and good forces to
rally. In business, talent supposed, nothing is more
effectual or successful than a just though concealed
confidence in yourself, a firm resolution, and an
unwearying perseverance.

None but madmen attempt real impossibilities,
and whatever is possible is in one way or another
to be brought about. If one method fails, try
another, and suit your methods to the characters
with whom you have to do.

At the treaty of the Pyrenees, which Cardinal
Mazarin and Don Louis de Haro concluded, the
latter carried some very important points by his
constant and cool perseverance. The Cardinal had
all the Italian vivacity and impatience; Don Louis
all the Spanish phlegm and tenaciousness. ‘The
point which the Cardinal had most at heart was
to hinder the re-establishment of the Prince of
 

The Modern Chesterfield 165

 

Condé, his implacable enemy, but he was impatient
to return to Court, where absence is always dan-
gerous. Don Louis observed this, and never failed
at every conference to bring the affair of the Prince
of Condé upon the carpet. The Cardinal refused
for some time even to treat upon it; Don Louis as
constantly persisted, till at last he prevailed, con-
trary to the intentions and the interest both of the
Cardinal and his Court. Sense must distinguish
between what is impossible and what is merely
difficult, and spirit and perseverance will get the
better of the latter, but_it is interesting to observe
how few things are really impossible—so few as to
give occasion to the saying, Nothing is impossible.

I must not omit one thing which is previously
necessary to this, and indeed to everything else, that
is, attention, a flexibility of attention, never to be
wholly engrossed by any past or future object, but
instantly directed to the present one, be it what it
may. An absent man can make but few observa-
tions, and those will be disjointed and imperfect ones,
as half the circumstances must necessarily escape
him. He can pursue nothing steadily because his
absences cause him to lose his way. Absences are
disagreeable, and hardly to be tolerated in old age,
but in youth cannot be forgiven. If you find that
you have the least tendency to them, pray watch
yourself carefully; you may prevent them now, but
if you let them grow into a habit you will find
it very difficult to cure them hereafter, and a worse
distemper I do not know.
 

166 The Modern Chesterfield

 

XLVIII

London, July 9, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

It has long been a matter of minor interest with
me that the use of the salutation my friend tech-
nically conveys a meaning, not the opposite, but the
reverse of that intended. While you are indeed
my friend, when I so address you I am inspired by
the thought that I am your friend—not you, mine;
and so it is in fact received throughout the world,
where a real friend is comparatively rare.

I should not deserve the appellation of friend in
return from you if I did not freely and explicitly
inform you of the corrigible defects which I may
discover in you. “Those who in the common course
of the world may call themselves your friends, or
those whom according to the accepted notions of
friendship you may possibly regard as such, will
never tell you of your faults, still less of your
weaknesses, nor should they do so, for human nature
is so frail that even the best friendships will not
stand personal criticisms.

I am credibly informed that there is still a hitch
or hobble in your enunciation, and that when you
speak fast you sometimes speak unintelligibly. I
have frequently laid before you my thoughts on this
subject so fully that I can say nothing new upon it.
I must therefore only repeat that your whole career
is in danger. Your trade is to speak well, both in
public and private. The manner of your speaking
 

The Modern Chesterfield 167

 

is fully as important as the matter, for more people
have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge.
Be your productions ever so good, they will be of no
use if you stifle and strangle them in birth.

The best compositions of Corelli, if ill executed
and played out of tune, instead of touching, as they
do when well performed, would only excite the
indignation of the hearers. Remember of what im-
portance Demosthenes, and one of the Gracchi,
thought enunciation; read what stress Cicero and
Quintilian lay upon it; even the herb-women of
Athens were correct judges of it.

Oratory with all its graces, that of enunciation
in particular, is fully as necessary in our government
as it ever was in Greece or Rome. No man can
make a figure in this country without speaking, and
speaking well, in public. If you would persuade,
you must first please; and if you would please you
must tune your voice to harmony; you must articu-
late every syllable distinctly; your emphasis and
cadences must be strongly and properly marked;
and the whole together must be graceful and en-
gaging; if you do not speak in that manner you
would much better not speak at all. All the learn-
ing you have, or ever can have, is not worth one
groat without it. It may be a comfort and an
amusement to you in your closet but can be of no
use to you in the world.

Let me conjure you therefore to make this your
only object till you have absolutely conquered it, for
that is in your power; think of nothing else, read and
speak for nothing else. Read aloud, though alone,
 

168 The Modern Chesterfield

 

and read articulately and distinctly, as if you were
reading in public, and on the most important occa-
sion. Recite pieces of eloquence, declaim scenes of
tragedies as if you had a large audience. By this
method others have succeeded notably.

Tf there is any particular consonant which you
have difficulty in articulating, as I think you had
with r, utter it a million times, till you enunciate it
correctly. Never speak quickly till you have first
learned to speak well. In short, lay aside every
book and every thought that does not directly tend
to this great object, absolutely decisive of your
future.

The next thing necessary to your destination is
writing correctly, elegantly, and in a good hand.
Your hand-writing is a bad one and would make a
scurvy figure in an office-book of letters, or even in
a lady’s pocket-book. But that fault is easily cured
by every man who has the use of his eyes and of his
right hand. Indeed a study of your hand-writin

melee

 

will show you that a few changes only will

great difference—two or three letters poorly formed
may be watched and corrected until the new form
becomes a habit; then two or three more, and most
of the defect is cured. You will be surprised at the
easiness of this undertaking, once you apply yourself
to if.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 169

 

XLIX

London, November 8, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

Before you get to Paris it is necessary that we
should understand each other thoroughly, which is
the most effective way of preventing disputes.
Money, the root of much mischief in the world, is
the cause of most quarrels between fathers and sons,
the former commonly thinking that they cannot
give too little, and the latter that they cannot have
enough, both being equally in the wrong.

You must do me the justice to acknowledge that
I have not hitherto grudged any expense that could
be of use or real pleasure to you, and I can assure
you, by the way, that you have traveled at a much
greater expense than I have myself, but I never so
much as thought of that while Mr. Harte was at
the head of your finances, being sure that the sums
granted were scrupulously applied to the uses for
which they were intended. But the case will soon
be altered, and you will be your own receiver and
treasurer. I promise you, however, that we will
not quarrel upon the amount, which shall be cheer-
fully and freely granted: the application and appro-
priation of it will be the material point, which I am
now going to clear up and finally settle with you.

I will fix no settled allowance, though I well
know in my own mind what would be proper, but I
will first try your drafts, by which I can in a good
degree judge of your conduct. This only I tell you
 

170 The Modern Chesterfield

 

in general, that if the channels through which the
money is to go are the proper ones the source shall
not be scant, but should it deviate into dirty, muddy,
or obscure ones, which it cannot do for a week with-
out my knowing it, I give you fair and timely notice
that the source will instantly be dry.

I would have you well dressed, by which I mean
dressed as the generality of people of fashion are,
that is to say, not to be taken notice of, for being
either better or worse dressed than other people;
it is by being well dressed, not finely dressed, that a
gentleman should be distinguished.

The article of pocket money is inconsiderable
in Paris compared with what it is in London—the
silly custom of giving money wherever one dines
or sups and the expensive importunity of subscrip-
tions not being introduced there.

All the decent expenses of a gentleman I will
most readily defray. I come now to those which I
will neither bear nor supply. The first of these is
gaming. ‘Though I have not the least reason to
suspect you of it, I think it necessary to assure you
that no consideration in the world shall ever make
me pay your play-debts: should you ever urge to me
that your honor is pawned I should immovably
assure you that it was your honor, not mine, and
that your creditor might even take the pawn for the
debt.

Low company and low pleasures are always more
costly than liberal and elegant ones. The disgrace-
ful riots of a tavern are much more expensive, as
well as dishonorable, than excesses in good company.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 171

 

I must absolutely hear of no tavern scrapes and
squabbles.

By what goes before, you will easily perceive
that I mean to allow you whatever is necessary not
only for the figure but for the pleasures of a gentle-
man, and not to supply the profusion of a rake.
This, you must confess, does not savor of either the
severity or parsimony of old age. I consider this
agreement between us as a subsidiary treaty on my
part for services to be performed on yours. I
promise you that I will be as punctual in the pay-
ment of the subsidies as England has been during
the last war, but then I give you notice at the same
time that I require a much more scrupulous execu-
tion of the treaty on your part than we met with
on that of our Allies, or the payment will be stopped.

I hope all that I have now said is absolutely
unnecessary, and that sentiments more worthy and
more noble than pecuniary ones would of them-
selves have pointed out to you the conduct I recom-
mend, but at all events I resolved to be once for all
explicit with you, that in the worst that can happen
you may not plead ignorance, and complain that I
had not sufficiently advised you of my intentions.

Having mentioned the word rake, I must say a
word or two upon that subject, because young people
too frequently, and always fatally, mistake the char-
acter for that of a man of pleasure, whereas there
are not in the world two characters more different.
A rake combines all the lowest, most ignoble, de-
grading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to
wreck his character and ruin his fortune, while
 

172 The Modern Chesterfield

 

wine and disease contend which shall the sooner and
the more effectually destroy his constitution. A dis-
solute footman or porter makes full as good a rake
as a man of the first quality.

A man of pleasure, though not always as scrupul-
ous as he should be, and as one day he will wish
he had been, at least refines his pleasures by taste,
accompanies them with decency, and enjoys them
with dignity. Few can be men of pleasure—every
man may be a rake.

Remember that I shall know everything you say
or do in Paris, exactly as if, by the force of magic,
I could follow you everywhere, like a sylph or a
gnome, invisible myself. Seneca says, very prettily,
that one should ask nothing of God but that which
he would be willing men should know; nor of men,
but that which he would be willing God should
know. I advise you to say or do nothing in Paris
but what you would be willing that I should know.
I hope, nay, I believe, that such will be the case.

Sense, I dare say, you do not lack; instruction,
I am sure, you have never been denied; experience
you are daily gaining; all of which together must
inevitably make you both respectable and reputable.

 
 

The Modern Chesterfield 173

 

L

London, November 12, O. S., 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

You will probably think that this letter turns
upon trifles but I assure you to the contrary.

I shall not dwell now on personal graces, a
liberal air, and an engaging address, which I have
so often recommended to you, but shall descend still
lower—to your dress, cleanliness, and the care of
your person.

Dress neatly and so as not to attract attention
in any way, which, in passing, cannot be done at all

unless your shoes are kept immaculate.

In your person and in your linen you must be
accurately clean; your teeth, hands, and nails should

be superlatively so; a dirty mouth infallibly causes
decay to the teeth and intolerable pain, besides being
offensive. Nothing looks more ordinary, vulgar,
and illiberal than dirty hands, and ugly, uneven and
ragged nails. I do not suspect you of that shocking,
awkward trick of biting your nails, but that is not
enough; you must keep the ends of them smooth
and clean; they should be small segments of circles,
which by a very little care in cutting they are easily
brought to; every time you wipe your hands, clean
the nails, which _can_ be done readily when they

are moist, and rub the skin around the nails back-
wards that it may not grow up and shorten them
too much.
 

174 The Modern Chesterfield

 

My mentioning these particulars arises from
some suspicion that such hints are not unnecessary,
for when you were a schoolboy you were slovenly
and dirty above your fellows.

I must add another caution, which is, upon no
account whatever put your fingers, as too many
people do, in your nose or ears. It is one of the
most shocking, nasty, vulgar acts of rudeness that
can be offered to company; it disgusts one; it turns
one’s stomach. Wash your ears well every morning,
and blow your nose in your handkerchief whenever
you have occasion, but, by the way, without vulgar
trumpeting, and never at the table, for this is sick-
ening to sensitive people, as I have told you before.

If you smoke at all avoid smoking at table until
all have dined, for it is unpardonable selfishness to
set up a stench and interfere with the relish of others
when a few moments’ delay will avoid it. Remem-
ber that those who do not indulge in small vices
are entitled to enjoy life according to their wishes;
while you have the unction of producing fresh
smoke, they must take theirs second-hand; and if
you are in a room, or in a home, still others, per-
haps, must at the time or later take theirs stale and
foul. They do not disturb you by refraining; have
a care, then, that you do not render them uncomfort-
able by your indulgence. JI have seen a man en-
joying a cigar in public while a dozen others, men
and women, were showered with ashes and regaled
with profane incense. It is obviously just to avoid
smoking in public places, particularly when women
are present.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 175

 

While I am speaking incidentally of the table,
let me suggest that you never hold a bone in your
hand and gnaw at it. Notice the effect upon your
eye of your neighbor opposite with a half-cleaned
bone in front of his face, and you will not again be
guilty of this solecism. In passing, let me admonish
you when you are dining to keep your elbows close
to your sides, or you will not cut a graceful figure.

And again, avoid topics for table-talk which jar upon
any of the senses.
 

176 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LI

THE ORIGINAL IN FRENCH
Translation by Grace Belden.

London, December 24, 1750.
My Dear FRIEND:

So you are at last a Parisian, and one must
address a Parisian in French. You will be good
enough to reply to me in the same tongue, that I
may learn to what degree you possess the elegance,
the delicacy, and the orthography of that language,
which has become, so to speak, the universal
language of Europe. They assure me that you
speak it very well, but this is comparative. ‘That
which will pass for correct speech outside of Paris
would there be considered out of date. In that
country even the language has its fashion, and one
which changes almost as often as the style of a coat.

The affected, the over-nice, the neologic, are too
much the fashion there to-day. Learn, observe, and
even imitate, but do not let your taste be infected.
Wit, also, has its fashion, and at this very time. in
Paris it is the fashion to have some of it, even in
spite of Minerva; everybody runs after wit, which,
by the way, never lets itself be caught; if it does not
come of itself, one runs after it in vain. But unfor-
tunately for those who pursue it, they catch some-
thing they merely take for wit, and which they put
 

The Modern Chesterfield 177

 

forth as such. “Theirs is at best the lot of Ixion;
it is a cloud which they embrace instead of the
goddess whom they are pursuing.

For a century and a half taste in France, like
that country itself, has had many ups and downs.
Good taste only began to make its way under the
reign of, I do not say, Louis XIII, but of Cardinal
Richelieu, and was refined under that of Louis XIV,
a great king at least, if he was not a great man.
Corneille was the restorer of true taste, as well as
the founder of the French theater.

Do not let yourself be imposed on by fashion,
nor by the cliques with which you may associate,
but try all these different kinds before receiving
them in exchange for the coin of good sense and
reason, and be persuaded that nothing is beautiful
but the true.

All this need not prevent you from outwardly
conforming to the fashion and tone of the different
companies. ‘Talk epigrams with the dandies, false
sentiments with the chatterers, and nonsense with
the professional fine wits. At your age it is not for
you to give tone to the company, but on the contrary
to receive it.

Examine well, however, and weigh all; distin-
guish carefully the false from the true, and do not
mistake the glitter of Tasso for the gold of Virgil.

You will find in Paris sound authors and com-
panies. You will never hear trifling, affectation, or
forced style at Madame de Monconseil’s, nor in the
homes where she will introduce you. President
Montesquieu will not talk with you in epigrams;
 

178 The Modern Chesterfield

 

his great book, The Spirit of the Laws, upon which
he labored for twenty years, is written in simple
language; it will please and instruct you.

As I leave you on your honor in Paris, I flatter
myself that you will not abuse my confidence. I do
not ask you to be a capuchin friar; on the contrary
I recommend pleasures, but I demand that they be
the pleasures of a gentleman, which add brilliancy
to the character of a young man; but debauchery
disgraces and degrades.

Associate as much as you can with the foreign
Ministers, which is equivalent to traveling through
different countries. Speak Italian to all the Ital-
ians, and German to all the Germans whom you
meet, in order to keep familiar with these languages.

I wish you, my dear friend, as many Happy New
Years as you deserve, and not one more. But may
you deserve a great many!
 

The Modern Chesterfield 179

 

LII

London, January 28, O. S., 1751.
My Dear FRiEenp:

A draft for ninety pounds sterling was brought
me the other day, said to be drawn upon me by you;
I scrupled paying it at first, not on account of the
sum but because you had sent me no letter of advice,
which is always done in such transactions, and still
more because I did not perceive that you had signed
it. The person who presented it desired me to look
carefully, saying that I would discover your name
at the bottom. With the help of my magnifying
glass I was able to perceive that what I had first
taken only for somebody’s mark was, in truth, your
name, written in the worst and smallest hand I ever
saw in my life. Gentlemen and men of business
write their names always in the same way, that their
signatures may be known, and they generally sign
in a larger character than their common hand,
whereas your name was signed in a smaller and a
worse hand than your customary writing.

I have often told you that every man can write
whatever hand he pleases, and it is plain that you
can, since you write both Greek and German char-
acters, which you never learned from a writing-
master, extremely well, though your common hand,
which you learned of a master, is an exceedingly
bad and illiberal one, equally unfit for business and
common use. I do not desire that you should write
the labored, stiff character of an expert penman; a
 

180 The Modern Chesterfield

 

man of business must write quickly and well, and
that depends upon care and use. I would therefore
advise you to apply yourself to your handwriting
for a month only, which will be sufficient, for,
upon my word, the writing of a gentle, plain hand
of business is of much more importance than you
think. It is your introduction to many, and_to
them, of course, creates the first impression, which
is highly likely to last and to affect all your subse-
quent acquaintance.

You will say, it may be, that when you write
so very ill, it is because you are in a hurry: where-
upon I ask, Why are you ever in a hurry? A
man of sense may be in haste but can never be in a
hurry, because he knows that whatever he does in a
hurry he must necessarily do very ill. He may be
in haste to dispatch an affair, but he will take care
not to let that haste hinder his doing it well.

Little minds are in a hurry when the object
proves too big for them: they run, they hare; they
puzzle, confound, and perplex themselves; they
want to do everything at once, and the result is
that they do nothing at all. But a man of sense
takes the time necessary for doing well the thing
he is about, and his haste to dispatch a business
only appears by the continuity of his application to
it; he pursues it with a cool steadiness, and finishes
it before he begins any other.

I own that your time is much taken up, and you
have a great many different things to do, but remem-
ber that you would much better do half of them
 

The Modern Chesterfield 181

 

well and leave the other half undone than do them
all indifferently.

There was a Pope, I think it was Alexander
VII, who was justly ridiculed for his attention to
little things, and his inability to rise to great ones,
and was therefore called maximus in minimis and
minimus in maximis. Why? Because he attended
to little things when he had great ones to do. At
this particular period of your life, and at the place
where you are now, you have only little things to
do; you should make it a habit to do them well, that
they may require no attention from you when you
have, as I hope you will have, greater things to
mind. Make good handwriting habitual to you
at this time, that you may have nothing but your
matter to think of when you have occasion to write
to kings and Ministers. Dance, dress, present your-
self uniformly well now, that you may have none
of these little things to think of hereafter.

As I am ever thinking of all things that can be
of benefit to you, one thing has occurred to me
which I think it necessary to mention; it is this:
As your acquaintance in Paris enlarges it will be
impossible for you to frequent your early friends
as much as you did while you had no others. Now
that you have so many new acquaintances you can-
not be with the old as often as formerly, but pray
take care not to give the old the least reason to
think that you neglect them for the sake of the
new and perhaps more dignified and shining ac-
quaintances, which would be ungrateful and impru-
dent on your part, and never forgiven on theirs.
 

182 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Call upon them often, though you do not stay as
long as formerly; tell them you are sorry you are
obliged to go away but that you have such and
such engagements which you are obliged to keep.

I would have you in this and other ways take
care to make as many personal friends as possible,
and as few personal enemies. I do not mean by
personal friends intimate and confidential friends,
of which no man can hope for more than half a
dozen in the course of his life, but I mean friends in
the common acceptation of the word, that is, people
who speak well of you, and who feel kindly toward
you. Good-bye, my dear child.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 183

 

LIII

London, February 11, O. S., 1751.
My Dear Frienp:

When you go to the play, which I hope you do
often, for it is a very instructive amusement, you
must certainly observe the decidedly different
effects which the several parts have upon you,
according as they are well or ill acted. The best
tragedy of Corneille’s, if well spoken and acted,
interests, engages, and agitates you. Love, terror,
and pity in turn possess you. But if ill spoken and
acted, it only excites indignation or laughter. Why?
It is still Corneille’s. It is the same sense, the
same matter, whether well or ill acted. It is, then,
merely the manner of speaking and acting that
makes this great difference in the effect.

Apply this to yourself, and conclude from it
that if you would either please in a private com-
pany or persuade in a public assembly your air,
looks, gestures, graces, enunciation, proper accents,
just emphasis, and tuneful cadences are full as
necessary as the matter itself.

Let awkward, ungraceful, inelegant, and dull
fellows say what they will in behalf of their solid
matter and strong reasonings, and let them despise
all those graces and ornaments which engage the
senses and captivate the heart; they will find that
their rough, unpolished matter, and their unadorned,
coarse, albeit strong, arguments will neither please
nor persuade, but, on the contrary, will wear out
 

184 The Modern Chesterfield

 

attention and produce disgust. We are so made
that we love to be pleased better than to be inform-
ed; information is, in a certain degree, mortifying,
as it implies our ignorance; it must be sweetened to
be palatable.

To bring this directly to you, remember that
no man can make a figure in this country except
through Parliament. Your fate depends upon your
success there as a speaker; and, take my word for
it, that success will turn much more upon manner
than matter.

Pitt and Solicitor-General Murray are, beyond
comparison, the best speakers. Why? Only be-
cause they are the orators. They alone can inflame
or quiet the House; they alone are so attended to in
that numerous and noisy assembly that you might
hear a pin fall while either of them is speaking.
Is it that their matter is better, or their arguments
stronger, than other people’s? Does the house
expect extraordinary information from them? Not
in the least. Pitt, particularly, has very little par-
liamentary knowledge ; his matter is generally flimsy,
and his arguments often weak; but his eloquence is
superior, his action graceful, his enunciation just
and harmonious; his periods are well turned; and
every word he makes use of is the very best and the
most expressive that can be used. This, and not
his matter, made him paymaster, in spite of both
King and Ministers.

From this draw the obvious conclusion. The
same thing holds full as true in conversation, where
even trifles, elegantly expressed, well looked, and
 

The Modern Chesterfield 185

 

accompanied with graceful action, will ever please,
beyond all the home-spun, unadorned sense in the
world. Reflect, on the one hand, how you feel
within yourself while you are forced to suffer the
tedious, muddy, and ill-turned narration of some
awkward fellow, even though the fact may be in-
teresting; and on the other, with what satisfaction
you attend to the relation of much less interesting
matter when elegantly expressed, gently turned, and
gracefully delivered.

By attending carefully to your daily conversa-
tion, grace of utterance will become habitual to you
before you come into Parliament, and you will have
nothing then to do but raise your voice a little
when you are there.

I would wish you to be so attentive to this
object that you will speak to your footman in the
very best words of which the subject admits. Think
of your words before you speak, choose the most
elegant, and place them in the best order. Consult
your own ear, to avoid cacophony, and, what is
almost as bad, monotony. Think also of your
gestures and looks when you are speaking even upon
the most trifling subjects. The same things differ-
ently expressed, looked, and delivered cease to be
the same things.

I knew a young man just elected a Member of
Parliament who was laughed at for being discovered
through the key-hole of his chamber-door speaking
to himself in the glass, and forming his looks and
gestures. I could not join in the laugh but on the
contrary thought him much wiser than those who
 

186 The Modern Chesterfield

 

laughed at him, for he knew the importance of those
little graces in a public assembly, and they did not.

The worst-bred man in Europe, if a lady let
fall her fan, would certainly pick it up and give
it to her; the best-bred man in Europe could do no
more. The difference, however, would be consid-
erable; the latter would please ,by doing it grace-
fully; the former would be laughed at for doing
it awkwardly.

I repeat it and repeat it again, and shall never
cease repeating it to you; air, manners, graces,
style, elegance, and all those ornaments must now
be the sole objects of your attention; it is now or
never that you must acquire them. Postpone there-
fore all other considerations; make them your seri-
ous study; you have not one moment to lose. The
solid and ornamental united are undoubtedly best,
but were I reduced to a choice I should without
hesitation choose the latter. Good-night, then, my

dear child.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 187

 

LIV

London, February 28, O. S., 1751.
My Dear FRrieEnpD:

I do not love thee, Sabidius, nor can I say why;
This only I can say, I do not love thee.

This translation of Martial has been rendered
into a very familiar rhyme by Tom Brown:

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this alone I know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

The epigram has puzzled many people, who
cannot conceive how it is possible to fail to love a
person, and yet not to know why. I think I per-
ceive the meaning clearly. I take it to be this:
Dr. Fell, you are a worthy, deserving man; you
have a thousand good qualities; you have a great
deal of learning; I esteem, I respect you; but for
the soul of me I cannot love you, though I cannot
particularly say why! You have not those engag-
ing manners, those pleasing attentions, those graces,
and that address which are absolutely necessary to
please, though impossible to define. I cannot say
it is this or that particular thing that hinders me
from loving you; it is the whole together; and upon
the whole you are not agreeable.
 

188 The Modern Chesterfield

 

How often have I, in the course of my life,
found myself in this situation with regard to many
acquaintances whom I have honored and respected
without being able to love!

There is a man whose moral character, deep
learning, and superior parts I acknowledge, admire,
and respect, but whom it is so impossible for me to
love that I am almost in a fever when in his com-
pany. His figure, without being deformed, seems
to disgrace or ridicule the common structure of the
human body. His legs and arms are never in the
position in which, according to the situation of his
body, they ought to be, but constantly employed
in committing acts of hostility upon the Graces. He
throws anywhere but down his throat whatever he
means to drink, and only mangles what he means to
carve. Inattentive to all the requirements of social
life, he mistimes or misplaces everything. His dis-
putes are heated and indiscriminate, mindless of
the rank, character, or situation of those with whom
he disputes: absolutely ignorant of the several gra-
dations of familiarity or respect, he is exactly the
same to superiors, equals, and inferiors; and there-
fore by a necessary consequence he makes himself
absurd to two of the three. Is it possible to love
such a man? No. The utmost I can do for him
is to consider him a respectable Hottentot.

I remember that when I came from Cambridge
I had acquired, among the pedants of that illiberal
seminary, a sauciness of literature, a turn to satire
and contempt, and a strong tendency to argumenta-
tion and contradiction, but I had been out in the
 

The Modern Chesterfield 189

 

world only a short while before I found that this
would by no means do. I immediately tried to
adopt the opposite character and began to conceal
what learning I had, applauded often without
approving, and yielded commonly without convic-
tion; if I pleased others, between you and me, it
was more owing to that habit than to any superior
knowledge or merit.

Let me warn you against a besetting sin of mine
which has done me measureless harm. At Cam-
bridge, also, I fell in with the common custom of
young people and acquired the use of sarcasm. It
laid hold of me like any other bad habit, but, in-
deed, it is peculiarly tenacious and next to impossi-
ble to shake off. It wounds; it leaves a scar; and
it is a sure recipe for making enemies. Shun it
as you would the pestilence.

A versatility of manners is as necessary in social
life as a versatility of parts in the political world.
One must often yield in order to prevail; one must
humble one’s self to be exalted; one must, like St.
Paul, become all things to all men to gain some
men; and, by the way, men are taken by the same
means that women are gained; by gentleness, in-
sinuation, and submission.

In real, active life qualities like that of the
chameleon, as I have said, are often necessary; nay,
they must be carried a little further and exerted a
little sooner; for you should, to a certain degree,
take the hue of either the man or the woman that
you wish to be upon terms with, but bear in mind

 

 
 

190 The Modern Chesterfield

 

that all this must be carefully subordinated to your
own nature so that you lose neither character nor
individuality.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 191

 

LV

My Dear FRIEND:

I mentioned to you some time ago a sentence
which I earnestly wish you always to retain in your
thoughts and observe in your conduct. It is suavi-
ter in modo, fortiter in re, which I translate,
gentle in manner, resolute in deed.

“T do not know any one rule so useful and neces-
sary in every part of life. I shall therefore take
it for my text to-day; and as old men love preach-
ing, and I have some right to preach to you, I here
present you with my sermon upon these words.

To proceed, then, regularly and pulpitically: I
will first show you, my beloved, the necessary con-
nection between the two members of my text. In
the next place, I shall set forth the advantages and
utility of a strict observance of the precept. And
I shall conclude with an application of it.

The suaviter in modo alone would degenerate
and sink into a mean, timid complaisance and
passiveness, if not supported and dignified by the
fortiter in re, which would run into impetuosity
and brutality, if not tempered and softened by the
suaviter in modo: however, they are seldom united.

The warm, choleric man, with strong, animal
spirits, despises the suaviter in modo, and thinks to
carry all before him by the fortiter in re. He may,
possibly, by great accident now and then succeed,
when he has only weak and timid people to deal
 

192 The Modern Chesterfield

 

with, but his general fate will be to shock, offend,
be hated, and fail.

On the other hand, the cunning, crafty man
thinks to gain all his ends merely by the suaviter in
modo, he has no opinion of his own, servilely adopts
the present opinion of the present person, insinuates
himself into the esteem of fools alone, but is soon
detected, and surely despised by everybody else.
The wise man, who differs as much from the cunning
as from the choleric man, joins the suaviter in modo
with the fortiter in re.

Now to the advantages arising from the strict
observance of this precept. If you are in authority,
and have a right to rule, your commands delivered
suaviter in modo will be willingly, cheerfully, and
in consequence well, obeyed, whereas if given only
fortiter, that is, brutally, they will rather be in-
terpreted than executed, as Tacitus says.

For my own part, if im a rough, insulting
manner I bid my footman bring me a glass of wine,
I should expect that in obeying me he would con-
trive to spill some of it upon me, and I am sure I
should deserve it. A cool, steady resolution should
show that where you have a right to command you
will be obeyed, but at the same time a gentleness
in the manner of enforcing that obedience should
make it a cheerful one, and soften as much as
possible the mortifying consciousness of inferiority.

If you are to ask a favor, or even to solicit
your due, you must do it swaviter in modo, or you
will give those who have a mind to refuse you an
opportunity to do so under the pretext of resenting
 

The Modern Chesterfield 193

 

your manner, but on the other hand, you must, by
a steady perseverance and decent tenaciousness, show
the fortiter in re.

The true motives of men are seldom the proper
ones; especially is this true of kings, Ministers, and
people in high station, who often give to importunity
or through fear what they refuse to justice or merit.
Engage the hearts of men by suaviter in modo if
you can; at least forestall the pretense of offense,
but take care to show enough of the fortiter in re
to extort from their love of ease, or their fear,
what vou might in vain hope for from their good
nature or sense of right.

People in high life are hardened to the wants
and distresses of men, as surgeons are to their
bodily pains; they see and hear of them all day long,
and they meet with so many simulated ones that
they do not know which are real and which are not.
Other sentiments must therefore be applied to than
those of mere justice and humanity; men’s favor
must be captured by the suaviter in modo; their
laziness overcome by unwearied importunity; and
their timidity wrought upon by a decent intimation
of implacable, cool resentment; this is the true
fortiter in re. This precept is the only recipe I
know in the world for being loved without being
despised, and feared without being hated. It con-
stitutes the dignity of character which every wise
man must endeavor to establish.

Now to apply what has been said, and so con-
clude.
 

194 The Modern Chesterfield

 

If you find that you have a hastiness of temper
which unguardedly breaks out into indiscreet sallies
or rough expressions, watch it narrowly, check it
carefully, and call the swaviter in modo to your
assistance; at the first impulse of passion be silent
till you can be soft. Labor even to get command
of your countenance so well that the emotion of
anger may not be read in it—an unspeakable advant-
age in business.

On the other hand let no complaisance, no
gentleness of temper, no weak desire of pleasing
on your part, no wheedling, coaxing, or flattery on
the part of other people, make you recede one
jot from any point that honor or reason or prudence
has bid you pursue, but return to the charge, persist,
persevere, and you will find most objects attainable.

Meekness, when yielding and timid, is always
abused and insulted by the unjust or the unfeeling,
but when sustained by the fortiter in re it is always
respected and commonly successful.

In your friendships as well as your enmities
this rule is particularly useful; let your firmness
and vigor preserve and invite attachments, but at
the same time let your manner hinder the enemies
of your friends and dependents from becoming
yours; let your enemies be disarmed by the gentle-
ness of your manner, but let them feel at the same
time the steadiness of your just resentment, for there
Is a great difference between bearing malice, which
is always ungenerous, and a resolute self-defense
which is ever prudent and justifiable.

In negotiations with foreign Ministers remem-
The ifodern Chesterfield 195

 

ber the fortiter in re; give up no point, accept no
expedient, till the utmost necessity reduces you to
it, and even then dispute the ground inch by inch;
but while you are contending with the Minister
fortiter in re, remember to gain the man by the
suaviter in modo. If you engage his heart you
have a fair chance for prevailing upon his under-
standing and bending his will. ‘Tell him in a frank
and gallant manner that your ministerial wrangles
do not lessen your personal regard for his merit,
but, on the contrary, his zeal and ability in the
service of his master increase it, and that above all
things you desire to make a good friend of so good
a servant. By these means you create _a_ little
_happiness, and you may and will often be a gainer:
you never can be a loser.

Some people cannot be easy and civil to those
who are their rivals, competitors, or opposers,
though, independently of those accidental circum-
stances, they would like and esteem them. ‘They
betray shyness and awkwardness in company with
them, and catch at any little thing to expose them,
and so, from temporary and only occasional oppo-
nents, make them personal enemies. ‘This is exceed-
ingly weak and detrimental, as indeed is all ill
humor in business, which can only be carried on
successfully by unadulterated good policy and right
reasoning.

In such situations I would be particularly civil,
easy, and frank with the man whose designs I
traversed; this is commonly received as generosity
and magnanimity, but is, in truth, good sense. The
 

196 The Modern Chesterfield

 

manner is often as important as the matter, some-
times more so; a favor may make an enemy, and an
injury may make a friend, according to the manner.
The countenance, the address, the words, the enun-
ciation, the Graces, add great efficacy to the suaviter
in modo, and great dignity to the fortiter in re;
consequently they deserve the utmost attention.
The Modern Chesterfield 197

 

LVI

London, March 18, O. S., 1751.
AIy DEAR FRIEND:

On February 25th I brought into the House of
‘Lords a bill for correcting and reforming our
present calendar, which is the Julian, and for adopt-
ing the Gregorian.

I will now give you a particular account of the
affair, from which reflections will naturally occur
to you that I hope may be useful, and which I fear
you have not as yet made.

Tt is well known that the Julian calendar is
erroneous, and has overcharged the solar year with
eleven days. Pope Gregory XIII corrected this
error: his reformed calendar was immediately re-
ceived by all the Catholic Powers of Europe, and
was afterwards adopted by all the Protestant ones
except Russia, Sweden, and England.

It was not, in my opinion, very honorable for
England, as she has done for over a century and a
half, to remain in a gross and avowed error, especial-
ly in such company: the inconvenience of it, more-
over, has been felt by all who have foreign corres-
pondence, whether political or mercantile, and those
opposed to the change have been moved merely by
prejudice against adopting a calendar devised by a
Pope.

Any error so long established is hard to dislodge,
but I determined to attempt the reformation; I
consulted the best lawyers and the most skilled
 

 

198 The Modern Chesterfield

 

astronomers. Mr. Davall, a barrister versed in
astronomy, made the original draft of the bill to-
gether with most of the explanatory tables which
were appended to it. Mr. Folkes, the president
f the Royal Society, and Mr. Bradley, the royal
stronomer at Greenwich, carefully examined the
ork of Mr. Davall. Others were consulted,
among them the Duke of Newcastle, who was
actually alarmed at so daring an undertaking, and
asked me not to stir up a thing that had so long
been. quiet. Our bill therefore was backed by
Specialists, whereby we gained the golden weight of
prestige.

But then my difficulty began: I was to bring
in the bill, which was necessarily composed of law
jargon and astronomical calculations, and to both I
am an utter stranger. It was absolutely necessary,
however, to make the Lords think I knew some-
thing of the matter, and also to make them believe
that they knew something of it themselves, which
they do not. For my part, I could just as well
have talked Celtic or Slavonian to them as astron-
omy, and they would have understood me fully as
well, so I resolved to do better than speak to the
purpose, and to please instead of informing them.

I gave them therefore merely an historical ac-
count of calendars, from the Egyptian down to the
Gregorian, and, according to my custom, amusing
them now and then with pungent anecdotes, and
emphasizing by repetition, but I was particularly
attentive to the choice of my words, to the harmony
and roundness of my periods, to my elocution, to my
 

The Modern Chesterfield 199

 

action. This succeeded, and ever will succeed:
they thought that I informed them, because I
pleased them; and many of them said that I made
the whole very clear to them, when, God knows,
I had not even attempted it.

Lord Macclesfield, who had the greatest share
in forming the bill as finally presented, who is one
of the greatest mathematicians and astronomers in
Europe, and who will himself be chosen president
of the Royal Society next year, greatly aided the
cause by a speech of profound knowledge, setting
forth the facts with all the clearness of which so
intricate a matter admits; his speech was in truth
worth a thousand of mine, but as his words, his
periods, and his utterance were not nearly as good
as mine, the preference has been unanimously,
though most unjustly, given to me. This will
always be the case; every numerous assembly is a
mob, whosoever the individuals who compose it.
Mere reason and good sense are never to be talked
to a mob: their passions, their sentiments, their
senses, and their seeming interests are mainly to be
applied to. Understanding, collectively, they have
none, but they have ears and eyes, which must be
flattered and seduced, and this can only be done by
eloquence, tuneful periods, graceful action, and all
the various parts of oratory.

I must make known to you, however, another
element of my small triumph: your father has
always held himself free from the jobbery so com-
mon in public office here and now, and has built
up a reputation for probity in official life, which is
 

200 The Modern Chesterfield

 

really more potent than even care and felicity of
speech, for without a good character, or at least a
good reputation, the Graces do not count, after all.
I have always held that a public trust demands a
higher standard of honor than private affairs, and
by living up to this sentiment have gained a corres-
ponding reputation, with its enormous value, es-
pecially helpful in establishing me as one of the
leaders of my party in the House of Lords. I do
not take great credit to myself, however, for Nature.
did not provide me with avarice, nor in fact with
that other great, prevailing spring of action—ambi-
tion.

The bill passed second reading today and is, of
course, that much nearer to becoming a law of the
kingdom, but bear in mind that causes like this
are won not merely by a few words spoken in a
legislative body, important as such an aid may be.
Recognizing this fact, I have not been remiss in
promoting a sentiment favorable to the project. For
some time I have been diligently writing on the
subject, and already several articles from my pen
have appeared in the magazines; I shall keep up the
crusade until it wins, for win ultimately it must.
Where you have so manifestly meritorious a cause,
it is only a question of agitation—that great lever
which moves mountains.

There is another phase of this incident with
which you must be made acquainted, and to which,
by the way, I refer without any jealousy what-
ever. A number of my colleagues have insisted
that Lord Macclesfield’s speech be prepared for pub-
 

The Modern Chesterfield 201

 

lication as a part of the permanent historical record,
and this will be done, so that his words will reach
posterity while the destination of mine is oblivion.
But this is a fair division of the glory—he will be-
come immortal by what he said and I by what I
accomplished. Good-bye, my dear child.
 

202 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LVII

THE ORIGINAL IN FRENCH
Translated by Eugenia Stanhope.

London, April 15, O. S., 1751.
My Dear FRIEND:

What success have you had with the Graces,
and in the accomplishments, elegancies, and all those
little nothings so indispensably necessary to make
you beloved? Do you make progress in them?
The great secret is the art of pleasing, and that
art is to be attained by every man who has a good
fund of common sense. ‘To be liked by women, you
must be esteemed by men; and to please men, you
must be acceptable to women.

Vanity, unquestionably the ruling passion in
women, is much flattered by the attentions of a
man who is generally esteemed by men; when his
merit has received the stamp of men’s approbation,
women make it current, that is to say, put him in
fashion.

On the other hand, if a man has not received
the last polish from women, he may be estimable
among men, but beloved he will never be. ‘The
concurrence of the two sexes is as necessary to the
perfection of our being as to the formation of it.
Go among women with the good quality of your
sex, and you will acquire from them the softness and
the graces of theirs. Jen will then add affection to
 

The Modern Chesterfield 203

 

the esteem which they have for you. Women are
the only refiners of the merit of men; they may not
add weight, but they polish and give luster to it.

Young men will surely seek the companionship
of women. It is an immutable law. And it fol-
lows that if they are not with good women they
will be with bad ones. Don’t think you can reverse
the order of Nature or the application I make of it.
If I find you do not seek among women the society
of the worthy I shall know you consort with the
vicious. In self-defense therefore I trust you will
be found in the company of good women, And so
we wish you a good-night.
 

204 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LVIII

London, June 24, O. 5., 1751.
My Dear FRIEND:

Air, address, manners, and graces are of such
infinite advantage to those who. have them, and so
peculiarily and essentially necessary for you, that
now, as the time of our meeting draws near, I
tremble for fear I shall not find you possessed of
them, and, to tell you the truth, I doubt that you
are yet sufficiently convinced of their importance.

As I open myself, without the least reserve,
whenever I think that my doing so can be of any
use to you, I will give you a short account of myself
when I first came into the real world, at your
present age. At the university I was an absolute
pedant; 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 con-
tained everything that was necessary, useful, or
ornamental; and I was not without thoughts of
wearing the toga virilis of the Romans, instead of
the vulgar and illiberal dress of the moderns.

With these excellent notions, I went first to The
Hague, where, by the help of several letters of
recommendation, I was introduced into the best
company, and where I soon discovered that I was
totally mistaken in almost every notion I had en-
tertained. Fortunately I had a strong desire to
 

The Modern Chesterfield 205

 

please, the mixed result of good nature and vanity,
by no means blamable, and I was sensible that I
had nothing but the desire. I therefore resolved to
acquire also the means. I studied attentively and
minutely the dress, the air, the manner, the address,
the turn of conversation, and even the hand-shake
of those I found to be the most generally ac-
knowledged as pleasing. I imitated them as well
as I could; I addressed myself to the most fashion-
able ladies, and laughed with them at my own
awkwardness and rawness, recommending myself as
an object for them to try their skill in reforming.
With a passionate desire to please everybody, I
came by degrees to please some, and I can assure
you that what little figure I have made in the world
has been due more to the desire to please than to
intrinsic merit or to any sound learning of which I
may have been master.

My passion for pleasing was so strong that I
wished to cause every man and woman [| met to
admire me, and I cannot conceive how it is possible
for any man of good nature and good sense to be
without it. Does not good nature incline us to
please all those with whom we converse, of what-
ever rank or station they may be? And do not
good sense and common observation show of what
infinite use it is to please? Oh; but one may please
by the good qualities of the heart, and by learning,
without that fashionable air, address, and manner,
which is mere tinsel! I deny it. A man may be
esteemed and respected, but I ‘defy him to please
without the Graces. Moreover, at your age, I did
 

206 The Modern Chesterfield

 

not content myself with barely pleasing; I wanted
to shine and to distinguish myself in the world. And
that ambition or vanity, call it what you will, was
proper; it hurt nobody and made me exert whatever
talents I had. It is the spring of a thousand
worthy and good things.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 207

 

LIX

London, December 19, O. S., 1751.
My Dear FRIEND:

You have now entered upon a scene of business
where I hope you will one day make a figure. The
first thing necessary in writing letters of business is
extreme clearness and perspicuity; every paragraph
should be so clear and unambiguous that the dullest
fellow in the world may not be able to mistake it,
and need not read it twice in order to understand
it. This necessary clearness implies a correctness
without excluding elegance of style.

Tropes, figures, antitheses, epigrams, would be
as misplaced in letters of business as they are some-
times, if judiciously used, proper and pleasing in
familiar letters. In business an elegant simplicity,
the result of care, not of labor, is required.
Business must be well, not affectedly, dressed, and
by no means negligently. Let your first attention
be to clearness; read over every paragraph after
you have written it, in the critical view of discover-
ing whether it is possible that anyone can mistake
the true sense of it.

Business strictly requires the usual terms of
politeness and good breeding, such as, I have the
honor to acquaint your Lordship; Permit me to
assure you; If I may be allowed to give my opinion,
for the Minister abroad who writes to the Minister
at home addresses his superior—possibly his patron,
or at least one whom he desires to become so.

¢
 

208 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Letters of business are the better for certain
graces, but they must be scattered with a sparing
and skillful hand; they must fit their place exactly.
They must decently adorn and not encumber; they
must modestly shine and not glare. But I would
not advise you to attempt these embellishments until
you have first laid your foundation well.

Carefully avoid all Greek and Latin quotations,
and bring no precedents from the virtuous Spartans,
the polite Athenians, or the brave Romans. Leave
all that to futile pedants. But there is dignity of
style absolutely necessary for good letters of busi-
ness: attend to it carefully. Let your periods be
harmonious without being labored; and let them
not be too long, for that always occasions a degree
of obscurity.

I should not mention correct orthography but
for the fact that you often fail in that particular,
which will bring ridicule upon you, for no man
is allowed to spell ill; it is no credit to spell correctly
but a disgrace not to. Paes

I wish, too, that your handwriting were much
better, and I cannot conceive why it is not, since
every man, as I have so often said, may certainly
write whatever hand he pleases.

Neatness in folding up, sealing, and directing
your packets is by no means to be neglected, though
I dare say you think it may. ‘There is something
in the exterior, even of a packet, that may please
or displease, and consequently the point is worthy
of some attention.

 
The Modern Chesterfield 209

 

You say that your time is well employed, and so
it is, though as yet only in the outlines and first
routine of business. “They are necessary to be
known; they smooth the way for parts and dexterity.
Business requires no conjuration nor supernatural
talents, as people unacquainted with it are likely to
think. Method, diligence, and discretion will carry
a man of good, strong common sense much higher
than the finest parts without them.

Be upon your guard against the pedantry and
affectation of business, which young people are prone
to fall into. They ‘look thoughtful, complain of
the weight of business, throw out mysterious hints,
and seem big with secrets which they do not possess.
Do you on the contrary never talk of business but
to those with whom you are to transact it, and learn
to seem at ease when it presses the most.
210 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LX

London, January 6, O. 5., 1752.
My Dear FRIEND:

I have recommended to you some inquiries into
the constitution of that famous society, the Sor-
bonne. It was founded by Robert de Sorbon, in
the year 1252, for sixteen poor students of divinity
at the University of Paris, of which it formed a part;
since then it has been much extended and enriched,
especially by the liberality and pride of Cardinal
Richelieu, who built a magnificent building for
six-and-thirty Doctors of that Society to live in.

This society has been long famous for theolog-
ical knowledge, in which the unintelligible points
are debated with passion though they can never be
determined by reason. In those sacred places
logical subtleties set common sense at defiance, and
mystical refinements disfigure and disguise the native
beauty and simplicity of true, natural religion; wild
imaginations form systems which weak minds adopt
implicitly, and which sense and reason oppose in
vain; their voice is not strong enough to be heard
in schools of divinity; political views are by no
means neglected, and questions are agitated and de-
cided according to the degree of regard, or rather
submission, which the Sovereign is pleased to show

the Church.

But there is another religious society, of which
the minutest circumstance deserves attention and
*

The Modern Chesterfield 211

 

 

furnishes matter for useful reflections. You easily
guess that I mean the Jesuits, established. in the
year 1540 by a Bull of Pope Paul III.

Its progress, and I may say its victories, were
more rapid than those of the Romans, for within
the same century it governed all Europe, and in the
next it extended its influence over the whole world.

Its founder was an abandoned, profligate Spanish
officer, Ignatius Loyola, who, in the year 1521, was
wounded at the siege of Pamplona. During his
confinement he read the lives of the saints. Con-
sciousness of guilt, a fiery temper, and a feverish
mind furnished the other common ingredients of
enthusiasm, which turned to religion. He went
to the Holy Land, from whence he returned to
Spain, where he began to learn Latin and philoso-
phy at three-and-thirty years old, so that no doubt
he made great progress in both. The better to
carry his designs, he chose disciples, or rather apos-
tles. He then composed the rules and constitution
of his order, under which the interests of the individ-
ual were completely surrendered to the Society.

Ignatius died in 1586, thirty-five years after his
conversion, and sixteen years after the establishment
of his society. He was beatified and canonized,
and is doubtless now a saint in heaven.

If the religion and moral principles of the Jesuits
are to be detested, as they justly are, the wisdom
of their political principles is as greatly to be ad-
mired,
 

212 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Suspected, collectively as an order, of the great-
est crimes, and convicted of many, they have either
escaped punishment, or triumphed after it, as in
France, in the reign of Henry IV.

They have, directly or indirectly, governed the
consciences and the councils of all the Catholic
princes of Europe; they almost governed China in
the reign of Shun-chi; and they are now actually in
possession of Paraguay, pretending but paying no
real obedience to the crown of Spain. As a collec-
tive body they are detested even by Catholics, not
excepting the clergy, and yet, as individuals, they
are loved and respected, and they govern wherever
they are.

Two things, I believe, chiefly contribute to their
success.

The first is the passive, implicit, unlimited obe-
dience to their General, and to the Superiors of
their several houses appointed by him. ‘This obe-
dience is observed by all of them to a most astonish-
ing degree; and I believe there is no other society
in the world in which so many members sacrifice
their private interests to the general welfare of the
Society itself.

The second is the education of youth, which
they have in a manner appropriated. In this they
seize the first impressions, which are the lasting
ones, as I have so often said.

I have known many Catholics educated by the
Jesuits, who, from reason and knowledge, detested
the Society, yet, from habit and prejudice, always
remained attached to it. The Jesuits better than
 

The Modern Chesterfield 213

 

any set of people in the world know the importance
‘of the art of pleasing; they become all things to all
men, in order to gain—not a few, but many. In
Asia, Africa, and America they become more than
half pagans in order to convert the pagans to be
less than half Christians. In private families they
begin by insinuating themselves as friends, they grow
to be favorites, and they end directors. "Their man-
ners are not like those of any other Regulars in the
world, but gentle, polite, and engaging. They are
carefully bred up to that particular destination to
which they seem to have a natural turn; for this
reason most Jesuits excel in some particular thing.

Inform yourself minutely of everything concern-
ing this extraordinary establishment: go into their
houses, become acquainted with individuals, hear
some of them preach.

Upon the whole, this is certain—that a society
of which so little good is said, and so much ill
believed, and that still not only subsists but flour-
ishes, must be a very able one. It is always men-
tioned as a proof of the superior abilities of Cardinal
Richelieu that, hated by all the nation, and still
more by his master, he kept his power in spite of
both.

Good-bye, child.
 

214 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LXI

London, March 5, O. S., 1752.
My Dear FRIEND:

Whatever business you have, do it at the first
practicable moment, never by halves, and finish it
without interruption. Business must not be trifled
with; you must not say to it, as Felix did to Paul,
“When I have a convenient season, I will call for
thee.” The most convenient season for business is
the first, but study and business in some measure
point their own times to a man of sense.

Time is often squandered in the wrong choice,
and in improper methods, of amusement and pleas-
ure. Many people think that they are in pleasures
provided they are neither in study nor business.
They contract habitudes from laziness, and they
only frequent those places where they are free from
all restraints and attentions.

Be upon your guard against this idle profusion
of time, and let every place you frequent be either
the scene of quick and lively pleasures, or the school
of your improvement. Let every company you go
into either gratify your senses, extend your knowl-
edge, or refine your manners. Have some worthy
object of adoration in view at some places; visit
others where people of wit and taste assemble; seek
still others where people of superior rank and dignity
command respect and attention; but, pray, never
choose neutral places from mere indolence. Nothing
forms a young man so much as being used to keep-
The Modern Chesterfield 215

 

ing approved and superior company, in which con-
stant attention is necessary. It is true that this is
at first a disagreeable restraint, but it soon grows
habitual and consequently easy, and you are amply
paid for it by the improvement you make and the
credit it gives you.

All this I went through myself when I was your
age. I have sat hours in company without being
taken the least notice of, but I took notice of the
others, and learned how to behave better myself,
till by degrees I became part of the best companies.
But I exercised great care not to lavish my time
on those companies where neither quick pleasures
nor useful improvements were to be expected. And
so we heartily bid you good-night.
 

216 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LXII

London, May 31, O. S., 1752.
My Dear FRrRienp:

The world is a book, and the only one to which,
at present, I would have you apply yourself; the
thorough knowledge of it will be of more use to
you than all the books that ever were read. Lay
aside the best book whenever you can go into the
best company, and depend upon it you change for
the better.

However, as the most tumultuous life, whether
of business or pleasure, leaves daily some vacant
moments in which a book may well be the refuge
of a rational being, I mean now to point out to you
the method of employing those moments in the
most advantageous manner.

Throw away none of your time upon those
trivial books published by idle or necessitous authors
for the amusement of ignorant readers; such books
swarm and buzz about one every day; flap them
away.

Have some one object for leisure moments; pur-
sue that object invariably until you have attained
it, and then take some other. For instance, con-
sidering your destination, I would advise you for
the present to single out the most remarkable and
interesting era of modern history, and confine your
reading to that. If you pitch upon the Treaty of
Minster, do not interrupt it by dipping and deviat-
ing into other books unrelated to it, but consult
 

The Modern Chesterfield 217

 

only the most authentic histories, memoirs, and
negotiations relative to that great transaction, read-
ing and comparing them with all the caution and
distrust which Lord Bolingbroke recommends to
you in a better manner and in better words than I
can.

I do not mean that you should plod for hours
together in researches of this kind; you may employ
your time more usefully; but I mean that you
should make the most of the moments you do em-
ploy by the pursuit of one single object at a time.

This advice may be reduced to two or three
plain principles: First, you should now read very
little, but converse a great deal; Second, you should
read no useless, unprofitable books; Third, those
which you do read should all tend to a certain object
and be related to one another. By this method
half an hour’s reading every day will carry you a
great way.

People seldom know how to employ their time
to the best advantage till they have too little left
to employ; but if, at your age, in the beginning of
life, you would but consider the value of it and
make every moment count, it is incredible what an
additional fund of learning such an economy would
bring in.
 

218 The Modern Chesterfield

LXIII

London, September 29, 1752.
\Jy Dear FRIEND:

There is nothing more difficult for you young
fellows than to behave prudently towards those
whom you do not lke. Your passions are warm
and your heads are light; you hate all those who
oppose your views, either of ambition or love; and a
rival in either is almost a synonymous term for an
enemy. Whenever you meet such a man you are
awkwardly cold to him at best, but often rude, and
always desirous to give him some indirect slap.

This is unreasonable; one man has as good a
right as another to pursue an employment or a love
affair; but it is into the bargain extremely impru-
dent, because you commonly defeat your own pur-
pose by it. I grant you that the situation is irksome;
a man cannot help thinking as he thinks nor feeling
what he feels, and it is a very tender and sore
point to be thwarted; but prudence and _ abilities
must check the effects though they cannot remove
the cause. Both pretenders may make themselves
disagreeable to a common lady-love when they spoil
the company by their pouting, or their sparring,
whereas if one of them has outward command
enough of himself to be cheerful, gay, and easily
and unaffectedly civil to the other, as if there were
no manner of competition between them, the lady
will certainly like him the better.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 219

 

It is the same in business, where he who can
best command his temper and his countenance will
always have an advantage over the other. To fight
without quarreling is a useful art which you may
learn from the lawyers.

 

 
 

220 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LXIV

Bath, October 4, 1752.
My Dear FRIEND:

I consider you now as at the Court of Augustus,
where the desire of pleasing must animate you. You
will see there, full as well, I dare say, as Horace
did at Rome, how States are defended by arms,
adorned by manners, and improved by laws. Nay,
you have a Horace there, as well as an Augustus;
I refer to Voltaire, who, by the way, is my junior
in age by only two months. I have lately read
over all his aa ‘that are published, hot I had
read them more than once before. I was induced
to do this by his History of Louis XIV’, which I
have as yet read but four times; I wish to forget
it a little before I read it a fifth. J thought myself
fairly conversant with the history of the reign of
Louis XIV by means .of those innumerable
histories, memoirs, and anecdotes relative to that
period which I have read in the past, but Voltaire
has convinced me that I was mistaken, and had
upon the subject confused ideas in many respects,
and_false ones in others. In re-reading his works,
With more attention, 1 suppose, than before, my
former admiration of him, I own, is turned into
astonishment. ‘There is no kind of writing in which
he has not excelled.

You are so severe a Classic that I question
whether you will allow me to call his Henriade an
epic poem, for want of the proper number of gods,
 

The Modern Chesterfield 221

 

devils, witches, and other absurdities requisite for
the machinery. But whether you do or not, I de-
clare, though possibly to my own shame, that I
never read an epic poem with as much pleasure.
I have grown old, and have possibly lost a great
deal of that fire which formerly made me love fire,
in others at any rate, however attended with smoke:
but now I must have all sense, and cannot for the

sake of five righteous lines forgive a thousand
absurd ones.

In such a disposition of mind, judge whether I
can read Homer through continuously. I admire
his beauties, but, to tell you the truth, when he
slumbers I sleep. Virgil, I confess, is all sense, and
therefore I like him better than his model, but

he is often languid, especially in his last five or six
books.

But what will you say when I tell you truly
that I cannot possibly read our countryman, Milton!
I acknowledge that he has some sublime passages,
some prodigious flashes of light, but then you must
admit that light is often followed by darkness
visible, to use his own expression. Besides, I have
not the honor of being acquainted with any of the
individuals in his poem except the man and the
woman, so the characters and speeches of a dozen
or two angels, and of as many devils, are as much
above my reach as beyond my entertainment. Keep
this secret for me; if it should be known I should
be abused by every tasteless pedant and every solid
divine in England.
 

222 The Modern Chesterfield

 

I long to read Voltaire’s Rome Sauvée, which
I am sure I shall like, for I will at any time give
up a good deal of regularity for a great amount of
the brilliant, and for the brilliant surely nobody is
equal to Voltaire. I admire him exceedingly as an
epic, a dramatic, or a lyric poet, or as a prose
writer. His Henriade is all sense from the begin-
ning to the end, often adorned by the most lively
and just reflections, the most beautiful descriptions,
the noblest images, and the most exalted sentiments,
not to mention the harmony of the verse, in which
Voltaire undoubtedly excels all the French poets:
should you insist upon an exception in favor of
Racine, I must insist, on my part, that he at least
equals him.

I could expatiate as much upon all his different
works. How delightful is his history of that
Northern brute, Charles XII, of Sweden! I cannot
call him a man, and I should be sorry to have him
pass for a hero, out of regard for those true heroes,
such as Julius Caesar, Titus, Trajan, and the
present King of Prussia, who have cultivated and
encouraged arts and sciences, whose animal bravery
has been accompanied by the tender and social senti-
ments of humanity, and who have had more pleasure
in improving than in destroying their fellow crea-
tures. What can be more touching or more in-
teresting, what more nobly thought or more happily
expressed, than all Voltaire’s dramatic pieces?
What can be more clear and rational than all his
philosophical letters? And what is so graceful and
gentle as all his little poetical trifles?
a

The Modern Chesterfield 223

 

On the other hand, ten years ago at, Brussels, he
recifed to me several passages from his Alahomet, in
which I found beautiful lines, and some thoughts
more brilliant than just; but I perceived at once
that he attacked Jesus Christ under the character
of Mahomet, and I was surprised that this had
been overlooked at Lille, where it was played just
before I passed through there. I even found at
Lille a good Catholic, whose zeal surpassed his pene-
tration, extremely edified by the manner in which
that impostor and enemy of Christianity was por-
trayed. I doubt very much that it is justifiable for
a man to write contrary to the creed of his country
even if honestly convinced that it is erroneous, on
account of the trouble and disorder that he might
cause; but I am very certain that it is by no means
permissible to attack the foundations of morality,
and to break bonds so necessary, which are already
too weak to hold men to their duty.

You are fortunately in a position to verify, by
your knowledge of the man, all that I have said of
his works.

Good-night to you, child, for I am going to bed
just at the hour when I suppose you, in Berlin, are
beginning to live.
 

224 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LXV

London, January 15, 1753.
My Dear FRIEND:

Young men are as wont to think themselves
wise as drunken men are to think themselves sober.
They look upon spirit to be a much better thing
than experience, which they call coldness.

They are but half mistaken; though spirit with-
out experience is dangerous, experience without
spirit is languid and defective. Their union, which
is rare, is perfection: you may join the two if you
please, for all my experience is at your service, and
I do not desire one grain of your spirit of youth
in return. Use them both, and let them recipro-
cally animate and check each other. I mean by
spirit of youth only the vivacity and presumption
of youth, which hinders one from seeing the difficul-
ties or dangers of an undertaking; I do not mean the
silly, vulgar spirit which makes one captious, jealous
of his rank, suspicious of being undervalued, and
tart in repartee upon the slightest occasion. ‘This
is an evil which should be driven out.

A man of honor is one who peremptorily affirms
himself to be so, and will cut anybody’s throat that
questions it, though upon the best grounds. He is
infinitely above the restraints which the laws of
God or man lay upon the vulgar; he knows no
other ties but those of honor, of which word he is
the sole expounder. He must strictly adhere to
the denomination of a party, though he may be
*

The Modern Chesterfield 225

 

 

utterly regardless of its principles. His expense
should exceed his income considerably, not for the
necessaries but for the superfluities of life, that the
debts he contracts may do him honor. ‘There should
be a haughtiness and insolence in his deportment,
which is supposed to result from conscious honor.
If he be choleric, and wrong-headed into the bar-
gain, with a good deal of animal bravery, he acquires
the glorious character of a man of nice and jealous
honor, and if all these qualifications are duly season-
ed with the choicest vices, the man of honor is
complete, anything his wife, children, servants, or
tradesmen may think to the contrary notwith-
standing.

A seeming ignorance is very often a necessary
part of worldly knowledge. It is, for example,
commonly advisable to seem ignorant of what people
offer to tell you, and to let them go on, though
you know the tale already. Some have pleasure
in telling because they think that they tell well,
and maybe you can pick up a point from them;
‘others have a pride ‘inate so, like that of a saga-
cious discoverer.

Always seem ignorant, unless to your most inti-
mate friends, of all matters of private scandal and
defamation, though you should hear them a thou-
sand times. This seeming ignorance should be
joined to thorough and extensive private informa-
tion: and, indeed, this is the best method of procur-
ing it, for most people have such a vanity in show-
ing a superiority of information, though in the
merest trifles, that they will tell you what they

 
 

220 The Alodern Chesterfield

 

ought not to rather than fail to show that they can
tell you what you do not know.

Fish for facts, and take pains to be well informed
of everything that passes, but fish judiciously, and
not always, nor indeed often, in the shape of direct
questions, which are _a breach of taste, which put
people on their guard, provoke falsehoods, and, often
repeated, grow tiresome.

These necessary arts of the world require con-
stant attention, presence of mind, and coolness.

Achilles, though invulnerable, always went to
battle completely armed. Courts are to be the
theaters of your wars, where you should ever be
completely armed, even with the addition of a
heelpiece. The least inattention, the least distrac-
tion, may prove fatal. I would fain see you what
Pope, you remember, calls all-accomplished: you
have the means in your power; add the will, and
you can bring it about.

No letter from you! Are you not well?
 

The Modern Chesterfield 227

 

LXVI

London, May 27, O. S., 1753.
My Dear FRIEND:

Today I have been tired, jaded, nay, tormented,
by the company of a most worthy, sensible, and
learned man, but not a wise man, a near relation,
who dined and passed the evening with me; he has
no knowledge of the world, no manners, no address;
he only talks by books.

He has formed in his own closet, from books,
certain systems of everything, argues tenaciously
upon those principles, and is both surprised and
angry at whatever deviates from them.

His theories are good but, unfortunately, im-
practicable. Why? Because he has only read, and
not conversed. He is acquainted with books but is
an ‘absolute stranger to men. Laboring with his
matter, he is delivered of it with pangs; he hesi-
tates, stops in his utterance, and always expresses
himself inelegantly. His actions are ungraceful, so
that, with all his merit and learning, I would
rather converse six hours with the most frivolous
tittle-tattle woman who knows something of the
world than with him.

The preposterous notions of a systematic man
who does not know the world try the patience of a
man who does. It would be endless to correct
his mistakes, nor would he take it kindly, for he
has considered everything deliberately and is sure
that he is right.
228 The Modern Chesterfield

 

Impropriety is a characteristic of such persons,
and a never-failing one. Regardless, because ignor-
ant, of customs and manners, they violate them at
every turn. They often shock though they never
mean to offend, attending neither to the general
character, nor the particular, distinguishing circum-
stances of the people to whom they talk.

Study the characters and manners of men and
women, not only those which are outward, and con-
sequently guarded, but the interior and domestic,
and consequently less disguised. Take your notions
of things, as by observation and experience you find
they really are, and not as they should be, for they
never are quite what they should be. For this pur-
pose do not content yourself with general and com-
mon acquaintances, but, wherever you can, establish
yourself with a kind of domestic familiarity in good
houses.

Whenever any person of worth invites you to
pass a few days at his country-house, accept the
invitation. ‘These visits will necessarily give you a
versatility of mind, and a facility to adopt various
manners and customs, for everybody desires to please
those in whose house he is, and people are only to be
pleased in their own way. Nothing is more engag-
ing than a cheerful and easy conformity to people’s
manners, habits, and even weaknesses. When you
are shown the fine hospitality of an invitation to a
private home, be sure that you conform in all
respects to the customs of the family; especially
respecting hours for dining, which must be promptly

} observed. I would learn all games as they spring
The Modern Chesterfield 229

 

up, would master all forms of popular diversion,
and avoid whims of diet, so that you may prove
what I term an easy visitor, which makes you ever
a welcome one.

A young fellow should be, for good purposes,
what Alcibiades was commonly for bad ones, a Pro-
teus, assuming with ease, and wearing with cheer-
fulness, any shape. Heat, cold, luxury, abstinence,
gravity, ceremony, easiness, learning, trifling, busi-
ness, and pleasure are modes which he should be
able to take, lay aside, or change occasionally with
as much ease as he would take or lay aside his hat.

All this is only to be acquired by experience,
keeping a great deal of company, analyzing every
character and insinuating one’s self into the fami-
larity of various acquaintances. A right, generous
ambition to make a figure in the world necessarily
gives the desire of pleasing; the desire of pleasing
points out to a great degree the means of doing it;
and the art of pleasing is, in truth, the art of
rising, of making a figure and a fortune in the world.

Everyone should do his own drudgery. Thus
distributed the burden falls Hghtly on each. It
;takes but a few moments a day to put away things
when you have done with them, and to run the
small errands arising out of your minor wants.
Many people go through life asking others to be
their errand-boys; it makes life easier for them, and
saves their time; they accomplish their purpose in
general, but at the loss of their friends, for people
resent injustice in small matters even more than in
greater ones; these little impositions rankle because
 

230 The Modern Chesterfield

 

they offend the pride. At all events one ought to
go through the world making others as little trouble
as possible.

You are now of an age when most of your
countrymen are at the University. You have great-
ly the start of them in learning; if you can get the
start of them in knowledge and the manners of the
world you may be sure of outrunning them in
Court and Parliament. They set out upon their
travels unlicked cubs, and they only lick one another,
for they seldom go into company. They know
nothing but the English world, and generally very
little of language apart from English.

The care which has been taken of you has left
you nothing to acquire but knowledge of the world,
manners, address, and the exterior accomplishments.
But they are great and necessary acquisitions to
those who have sense enough to know their true
value, and acquiring them before you enter upon
the active and shining scene of life will give you
such an advantage over your contemporaries that
they cannot overtake you; they must be distanced.

Oil yourself therefore and be both supple and
shining for that race, if you would be first, or
early, at the goal. In the contest women, too, will
most probably have something to say, and those
who stand highest with them will probably stand
highest in the world at large.

Labor over this great point, my dear child,
indefatigably; attend to the smallest parts, the
minutest graces, the most trifling circumstances that
can possibly concur in forming the character of a
 

.

The Afodern Chesterfield 231

 

complete gentleman, a man of business and
pleasure. In this view observe the effective part of
every man who is liked and esteemed; attend to and
imitate that particular accomplishment for which
you hear him chiefly celebrated and distinguished ;
then collect those various parts and make yourself a
mosaic of he whole, dominated, however, by your
own individuality, as I have said before.

No one possesses everything, and almost every-
body possesses some one thing worthy of imitation;
choose your models well, and, in order to do so,
choose by your ear more than by your eye. The
best model is always that which is most univer-
sally allowed to be the best, though in strictness
it may possibly not be so. We must take most
things as they are; we cannot take them as we
would, nor often as they should be; and where
moral duties are not concerned it is more prudent
to follow than to attempt to lead.
 

232 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LXVII

London, February 26, 1754.
My Dear FRIEND:

I look upon myself now as emeritus in business,
in which I have been engaged continuously for
nearly forty years; I give it up to you; apply your-
self to it as I have done for two score years, and
then I consent to a philosophical retirement among
your friends and your books.

Statesmen and beauties are rarely sensible of
the gradations of their decay, and, too sanguinely
hoping to shine on in their meridian, often set with
contempt and ridicule. I retired in time, as Pope
says:

before a sprightlier age
Comes titt’ring on, and shoves you from the stage.

My only remaining ambition is to be the coun-
selor and Minister of your rising ambition. Let
me see my own youth revived in you; let me be
your mentor, and, with your parts and knowledge,
I promise you shall go far. You must bring activ-
ity and attention, and I will point out to you the
proper objects for them.

I own that I fear but one thing for you—what
we generally have the least reason to fear from a
young man of your age; I mean your laziness,
which, if you indulge it, will make you stagnate in
contemptible obscurity all your life.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 233

 

Men of affairs rank the cardinal requisites for
success in the following order: integrity, industry,
ability. It may surprise you to find industry rated
above ability, but so it is.

I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the
Man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites
of the Brute survive.

Accustom yourself therefore to be alert and dili-
vent in your little concerns: never procrastinate,
do not put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day ;
never do two things at a time; pursue your object.
be it what it may, steadily and indefatigably; and
let any difficulties rather animate than slacken your
endeavors. Perseverance produces surprising effects.

I wish you would form the habit of translating
every day three or four lines from some book in
any language into the most correct and elegant
English that you can think of; you cannot imagine
how it will insensibly form your style and give you
an habitual elegance: it would not take more than
a quarter of an hour a day. So good-night.
 

234 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LXVIII

London, March 16, 1759.
My Dear FRIEND:

Your letter of the twentieth is before me; you
make use of Spanish words very properly. If I
were you I would learn the language if there is a
Spaniard at Hamburg who can teach it; then you
will be master of all the European tongues that are
useful; and, to my mind, it is very convenient, if
not necessary, for a public man to understand them
all, and not to be obliged to have recourse to a
translator for those papers that chance or business
may throw in his way.

I learned Spanish when I was older than you
are now. I realized that it would be an easy task
for one who has mastered Latin; | knew it was
likely to be of advantage to anyone residing in a
land having relations with Spanish-speaking coun-
tries; and I was convinced by experience that in
everything possible it would be better for me to
trust myself rather than any other person, for
translators are sometimes unfaithful, and still more
often incorrect, puzzling, or blundering.

Let it be your maxim through life to know all
you can know yourself, and never to trust implicitly
to the information of others, but, in reason, to
verify it, This rule has been of infinite service to
me in the course of my life.

Take care of your health; to be, or not to be,
is a question of much less importance, in my mind,
 

The Modern Chesterfield 235

 

than to be or not to be well; or, inthe words of
Major Russell, “It is not so important to live a long
while as to be comfortable while you do live.”

Our habits with respect to eating have much to
do with our thinking. Regularity in alimentation
and elimination are the accompaniments of clear
and accurate mental processes, and proper nourish-
ment of the body enriches the mind, especially when
both are developing in the yet imperfect man.

The sayings of Lucullus have been long for-
gotten while the words of Plato are immortal; the
reason is not hard to find—one was renowned for
his feasts; the other was noted for his simple
manner of living.

Louis Cornaro, whose life was despaired of at
forty—so nearly was he destroyed by high and
fast living—adopted a simple regimen and lived
to be nearly a hundred years old. He has left an
account of his manner of living which I hope you
will consider.

Climate, occupation, and environment should be
reckoned with in determining diet. No exact rules
can be laid down but one must learn for himself
what best suits his own system. Alcohol in what-
ever form has no nutritive value. Wine stimulates
digestion for a time only; in the end it clogs the
liver and impairs the intellect.

Endeavor not to eat alone. There is an element
in sociability not explained in science which gives
to food a vitality we ought not to ignore. The
recorded sayings of our Lord were largely made
 

236 The Afodern Chesterfield

 

at meals. Dining and talking have gone hand in
hand down the ages. In combination each exalts
the other.

And so we heartily bid you Farewell.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 237

LXIxXx

London, April 27, 1759.
My Dear FRIenp:

I have your recent letters, and I will begin my
answer to them by observing to you that a wise
man, without being a stoic, in all misfortunes that
befall him considers their best side as well as their
worst; for everything has a better and a worse side;
I have strictly observed this rule for many years,
and have found by experience that some comfort
is to be extracted by considering adversity in every
light, instead of dwelling, as people do, upon the
gloomy side.

Do not think that all I have said is the conso-
lation of a metaphysical old fellow, almost insensible
to pleasure or pain, offered to a young fellow who
has quick sensations of both. No; it is the rational
philosophy taught by experience and knowledge of
the world which I have practiced for over thirty
years. I have always made the best of the best,
and have never made bad worse by fretting, which
has enabled me to go through the various scenes
of life in which I have been an actor with more
pleasure and less pain than would most people.

You will say, perhaps: “One cannot change his
nature; if a person is born with a very sensitive,
gloomy temper, and sees things in the worst light,
he cannot help it, nor new-make himself.”

I will admit it to a certain degree; we cannot
totally change our natures, but we’ may in a great
 

238 The Modern Chesterfield

 

measure correct them by reflection and philosophy,
and some philosophy is a necessary companion in
this world, where, even for the most fortunate, the
chances are greatly against happiness. Good-night!
Be neither transported nor depressed by the acci-
dents of life.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 239

 

LXX

London, December 27, 1765.
My Dear FRIEND:

I arrived here from Bath last Monday, rather
better than when I went thither.

You have had from the office an account of
what Parliament did, or rather did not do, the
day of its meeting; I mean the affair of our Ameri-
can Colonies, relative to the lately imposed stamp
duty, which they absolutely refuse to pay.

The Administration are for some indulgence
and forbearance to those froward children of their
mother country: the opposition are for taking vigor-
ous measures, as they call them, but I call them
violent, and to have the tax collected by the troops.

For my part, I never saw a froward child mend-
ed by whipping, and I would not have the mother
country become a stepmother.
 

240 The Modern Chesterfield

 

LXXI

Blackheath, August 1, 1766.

AMIy DEAR FRIEND:

The curtain was at last drawn up the day
before yesterday and disclosed the new actors, to-
gether with some of the old ones. Pitt, who had
carte blanche given him, named every one of them:
but for what position would you think he named
himself? Lord Privy Seal, and (what will astonish
you, as it does every mortal here) Earl of Chatham.
The joke here is that he has had a fall up stairs
and he has done himself so much hurt that he will
never be able to stand upon his legs again. Every-
body is puzzled how to account for this step, which
to my mind had one of two causes; either he means
to retire from business, or he has been the dupe of
Lord Bute and a great lady. The latter seems to
me more probable; it would surely not be the first
time that great abilities have been duped by low
cunning.

Be it what it will, he is now certainly only Earl
of Chatham, and no longer Mr. Pitt in any respect
whatever. Such an event, I believe, was never
heard of before. “To withdraw, in the fullness of
his power, and in the utmost gratification of his
ambition, from the House of Commons, which
procured him his power, and which alone could
insure it to him, and to go into that Hospital of
Incurables, the House of Lords, is a measure so
 

——

The Modern Chesterfield 241

 

é

unaccountable that nothing but proof positive could
have made me believe it; but true it is.

God bless you!
MAXIMS OF
LORD CHESTERFIELD
 

MA X IM § O F
LORD CHESTERFIELD

 

PREPARED FoR His Son JANUARY 15, 1753
Selectcd and Edited

A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able
men; mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cun-
ning ones.

If a fool knows a secret, he tells it because he
is a fool; if a knave knows one, he tells it whenever
it is to his interest to tell it. But women and
young men are prone to tell what secrets they know,
from the vanity of having been trusted. Put con-
fidence in none of these.

Inattention to the present business, be it what
it will—the doing one thing and thinking at the
same time of another, or attempting to do two
things at once—is the never-failing sign of a little,
frivolous mind.

A man who cannot command his temper, his
attention, ‘and his countenance should not think of
being a man of business. The weakest man in the
world can avail himself of the passion of the wisest.
The inattentive man cannot know business, and
consequently cannot do it. And he who cannot
command his countenance may as well tell his
thoughts.

Distrust those who love you extremely upon a
slicht acquaintance, and without any visible reason.

245
246 The Alodern Chesterfield

 

Be upon your guard, too, against those who confess
as their weaknesses all the cardinal virtues.

In your friendships let your confidence, and in
your enmities let your hostilities, have certain
bounds: make not the former dangerous, nor the
latter irreconcilable. “There are strange vicissitudes
in business.

Smooth your way to the head through the heart.
The way of reason is a good one; but it is commonly
somewhat longer, and perhaps not so sure.

Spirit is now a fashionable word: to act with
spirit, to speak with spirit, means only to act
rashly, to talk indiscreetly. An able man shows
his spirit by gentle words and resolute actions:
he is neither hot nor timid.

When a man of sense happens to be in that
disagreeable situation in which he is obliged to ask
himself more than once, What shall I do? he will
answer, Nothing. When his reason points out to
him no good way, or at least no one way less bad
than another, he will stop short and wait for light.
A little, busy mind runs on at all events, must be
in motion, and, like a blind horse, fears no dangers
because it perceives none.

Patience is a most necessary qualification in
business; many a man would rather you would
hear his story than to grant his request. One must
seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petu-
lant, unmoved; and the tedious details of the dull,
 

The Modern Chesterfield 247

 

untired. That is the least price that a man should
be willing to pay for a high station.

It is always right to detect a fraud and to per-
ceive a folly, but it is often wrong to expose either.
A man of business should always have his eyes open,
but must often seem to have them shut.

In Courts, nobody should be below your manage-
ment and attention: the links that form the Court-
chain are innumerable and inconceivable. You must
hear with patience the dull grievances of a gentle-
man usher, or a page of the back-stairs, for he
probably has confidential relations with the favorite
maid, with the favorite Minister, or perhaps with
the king himself, and who, consequently, may do
you more dark harm or indirect good than the
first man of quality.

One good patron at Court may be sufficient,
provided you have no personal enemies; and, in
order to have none, you must sacrifice, as the Indians
do to the Devil, most of your passions and much
of your time to the numberless evil beings that
infest royal places.

As kings are born like other men, it is to be
presumed that they are of the human species; and
perhaps had they the same environment they might
prove to be like other men. But, flattered from:
their cradles, their hearts are corrupted and their
heads are turned, so that they seem to be a species
by themselves. Flattery cannot be too strong for
them; drunk with it from their infancy, like old
 

248 The Modern Chesterfield

 

drinkers they require drams. They prefer a per-
sonal attachment to a public service, and reward
it better. They are vain and weak enough to
look upon it as a free-will offering to their merit,
and not as a burnt-sacrifice to their power.

If you would be a favorite of your king, address
yourself to his weaknesses. An application to his
reason will seldom prove successful.

In Courts, bashfulness and timidity are as prej-
udicial on the one hand as impudence and rash-
ness on the other. A steady assurance and a cool
intrepidity, with an exterior modesty, are the true
and necessary medium.

Never apply for what you see little probability
of obtaining; for you will, by asking improper or
unobtainable things, accustom the Ministers to re-
fuse you, and they will then find it easy to refuse
the most proper and reasonable requests. It is a
common rule at Court to ask for everything in
order to get something, but it is a mistake; you
do get something by it, it is true, but that something
is refusals and ridicule.

There is a Court jargon, a chit-chat, a small
talk, which turns singly upon trifles, and which, in
a great many words, says little or nothing. It
stands fools instead of what they cannot say, and
men of sense instead of what they should not say.
It is the proper language of levees, drawing-rooms,
and antechambers: it is an art of which a foreign
Minister ought to be a master; it is a kind of
 

The Modern Chesterfield 249

 

political badinage which prevents or removes a
thousand difficulties to which he is exposed in mixed
conversations.

At Court, whatever else a man is, he must be
gentle and well-bred ; that cloak covers many follies.

Character is as necessary in business as in trade.
No man can deceive often in either.

At Court, people embrace without acquaintance,
serve without friendship, and injure without hatred.
Interest, not sentiment, is the growth of that soil.

A difference of opinion, though in the merest
trifles, alienates little minds, especially of high rank.
It is fully as easy to commend as to blame a great
man’s cook, or his tailor: it is shorter too; and the
objects are no more worth disputing about than the
people are worth disputing with. It is impossible
to inform, but easy to displease them.

A cheerful, easy countenance and behavior are
useful at Court; they cause fools to think you a
good-natured man, and designing men to think you
disinterested.

Ceremony is necessary in Courts, as the out-
work and defense of manners.

If a Minister refuses you a reasonable request,
and either slights or injures you, and you have not
the power to gratify your resentment, have the
wisdom to conceal it. Seeming good-humor on your
 

250 The Modern Chesterfield

 

part may prevent rancor on his, and perhaps set
things right again; but if you have the power to
hurt, hint modestly that if provoked you may possi-
bly have the will also. Fear, at Courts, when
real and well-founded, is perhaps a more prevailing
motive than love.

Awkwardness is more of a disadvantage than it
is generally thought to be: it often occasions ridi-
cule; it always lessens dignity.

A man’s own good breeding is his best security
against other people’s ill manners.

Good breeding carries with it a dignity that is
respected by the most petulant. II] breeding in-
vites and authorizes the familiarity of the most
timid. No man ever said a pert thing to the Duke
of Marlborough; no man ever said a civil one,
though many a flattering one, to Sir Robert Walpole.

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplish-
ments give luster; and many more people see than
weigh.

Most arts require long study and application,
but the most useful art of all, that of pleasing,
requires only the desire. It is to be presumed that
a man of common sense who does not desire to
please desires nothing at all, since he must know that
he cannot obtain anything without it.

A skillful negotiator will by his manners and
address endeavor at least to make his public adver-
 

The Modern Chesterfield 251

 

saries his personal friends. He will never alienate
people’s minds from him by wrangling for points
either absolutely unobtainable or not worth obtain-
ing.

A foreign Minister who is concerned in great
affairs must necessarily have spies in his pay; but
he must not too easily credit their informations,
which are never exactly true and often false. His
best spies will always be those whom he does not
pay, but whom he has engaged in his service by
dexterity and address, and who think themselves
nothing less than spies.

A foreign Minister should be a most exact econo-
mist; an expense proportioned to his appointments
and fortune is necessary; but, on the other hand,
debt is inevitable ruin to him. It sinks him into
disgrace at the Court where he resides, and into
the most servile and abject dependence on the Court
that sent him. As he cannot resent ill usage he is
sure to have enough of it.

The Duc de Sully observes justly in his Mem-
oirs that nothing contributed more to his rise than
that prudent economy which he had observed from
his youth, and by which he had always a sum of
money at hand to use in case of emergencies.

Take care always to form your establishment
so much within your income as to have a sufficient
fund for unexpected contingencies and prudent
liberality. There is hardly a year in any man’s
life in which a small sum of ready money may
not be employed to great advantage.
 

252 The Modern Chesterfield

 

It is difficult to fix the particular point of econo-
my; the better error of the two is on the parsi-
monious side. “That may be corrected; the other
cannot.

Reputation for generosity is to be purchased
cheaply; it does not depend so much upon a man’s
general expense as it does upon his giving liberally
where it is proper to give at all. A man, for in-
stance, who should give a servant four shillings
would pass for stingy, while he who gave him a
crown would be reckoned generous; so that the
difference between those two opposite reputations
turns upon a shilling.
LORD CHESTERFIELD’S
SPEECHES ON THE GIN ACT
LORD CHESTERFIELD’S
SPEECHES ON THE GIN ACT

 

I

FEBRUARY 21, 1743
My Lorps:

The Bill now under consideration appears to
deserve a much closer regard than seems to have
been paid to it in the other House, through which
it was hurried with the utmost precipitation, and
where it passed almost without the formality of a
debate.

The law before us seems to be the effect of
that practice of which it is intended to be the cause,
and to be dictated by the liquor of which it so
effectually promotes the use, for surely it never
before was conceived by any man entrusted with the
administration of public affairs to raise taxes by
debauching the people.

The destruction of all the most laborious and
useful part of the nation can alone be expected from
the license which is now proposed to be given to
drunkenness.

Nothing is more absurd than to assert that the
use of spirits will be hindered by the Bill now
before us, or indeed that it will not be in a very
great degree promoted by it. For what produces
all kinds of wickedness but the prospect of impunity
on the one part, or the solicitation of opportunity on
the other? Either of these has too frequently been
sufficient to overpower the sense of morality, and
even of religion, and what is not to be feared from

255
 

256 The Modern Chesterfield

 

them when they shall unite their force and operate
together, when temptations shall be increased and
terror taken away?

It is acknowledged by those who have hitherto
disputed on either side of this question that the
people appear obstinately enamored of this new
liquor; it is admitted that it corrupts the mind,
enervates the body, and destroys vigor and virtue
at the same time that it makes those who drink it
too idle and too feeble for work, and, while it
impoverishes them by the present expense, disables
them from retrieving its ill consequences by subse-
quent industry.

It might be imagined that those who had thus
far agreed would not easily find any occasion for
dispute; nor would any man, unacquainted with the
motives by which parliamentary debates are too
often influenced, suspect that after the pernicious
qualities of this liquor, and the general inclination
among the people to the immoderate use of it, had
been generally admitted, it could be afterwards
inquired whether it ought not to be made more
common, whether this universal thirst for poison
ought not to be encouraged by the Legislature, and
whether a new statute ought not to be made to
secure drunkards in the gratification of their
appetites.

To pretend, my Lords, that the design of this
Bill is to prevent or diminish the use of spirits is to
trample upon common sense, and to violate the rules
of decency as well as of reason. For when did any
man hear that a commodity was prohibited by
The Modern Chesterfield 257

 

licensing its sale, or that to offer and refuse is the
same action?

It is indeed pleaded that it will be made dearer
by the tax which is proposed, and that the increase
of the price will diminish the number of the pur-
chasers, but it is at the same time expected that this
tax will supply the expense of a war. It is asserted
therefore that the consumption of spirits will be
hindered, and yet that it will be such as may be
expected to furnish from a very small tax a revenue
sufficient for the support of armies, for the re-
establishment of the Austrian family, and the re-
pression of the attempts of France.

Surely these expectations are not consistent, nor
can it be imagined that they are both formed in
the same head, though they may be expressed by the
same mouth. It is undoubtedly false that this tax
will lessen the consumption of spirits, and it is cer-
tainly true that it will produce a very large revenue,
a revenue that will not fail. except with the people
from whose debaucheries it arises.

Luxury is to be taxed, but vice prohibited, let
the difficulties in executing the law be what they
will. Would you lay a tax upon a breach of the
Ten Commandments? Would not such a tax be
scandalous? And would it not imply an indulgence
to everyone who could pay the tax? Was not the
principle involved the chief cause of the Reforma-
tion? And will you follow a precedent which
brought reproach and ruin upon those who intro-
duced it? This is the very case now before us.
You \propose to lay a tax, and consequently to in-
 

258 The Afodern Chesterfield

dulge a sort of drunkenness which almost necessarily
produces a breach of every one of the Ten Com-
mandments.

May I be allowed to congratulate my country-
men and fellow-subjects upon the happy times now
approaching, in which no man will be disqualified
from the privilege of being drunk; when all dis-
content and disloyalty will be forgotten, and the
people shall acknowledge the leniency of that
government under which all restraints are taken
away?

To a Bill for such desirable purposes it would
be proper, my Lords, to prefix a preamble, in which
the kindness of our intentions should be more fully
explained, that the nation may not mistake our
indulgence for cruelty, nor consider their bene-
factors as their persecutors. If therefore this Bill
be considered in committee, I shall humbly insist
that it shall be proposed in this manner:

Whereas, The designs of the present Minis-
try, whatever they are, cannot be executed with-
out a great number of mercenaries who cannot
be hired without money; and

Whereas, The present disposition of this
nation to drunkenness inclines us to believe
that the subjects will pay more cheerfully for
the undisturbed enjoyment of distilled liquors
than for any other concession that can be made
by the government;

Be it enacted by the King’s Most Excellent
Majesty, That no man shall hereafter be denied
 

 

The Modern Chesterfield 259

the right of being drunk on the following
conditions.

Such, my Lords, to trifle no longer, is the proper
preamble to this Bill, which contains only the con-
ditions on which the people of this kingdom are to
be allowed henceforward to riot in debauchery—
in debauchery licensed by law and countenanced by
the magistrates. For there is no doubt that those
on whom the inventors of this tax shall confer au-
thority will be directed to encourage the consumption
of that liquor from which such large revenues are
expected, and to multiply without end those licenses
which are to pay a yearly tribute to the Crown.

By such unbounded license the price will be
lessened, for the number of retailers will lessen the
price, as in all other cases, and lessen it more than
this tax will increase it. Besides, is is to be con-
sidered that at present the retailer expects to be
paid for the danger which he incurs by pursuing
an unlawful trade, and will not trust his reputation
or his purse to the mercy of his customer without a
profit proportioned to the hazard.

The specious pretense on which this Bill is
founded, and indeed the only pretense that deserves
to be termed even specious, is the propriety of tax-
ing vice, but this maxim of government on this
occasion has been either mistaken or perverted. Vice
is not properly to be taxed, but suppressed; and
heavy taxes are sometimes the only means by which
that suppression can be attained. Luxury, or the
excess of that which is pernicious only by its excess,
260 The Modern Chesterfield

 

may very properly be taxed, that such excess, though
not strictly unlawful, may be made more difficult.
But the use of those things which are simply hurt-
ful—hurtful in their own nature, and in every
degree—is to be prohibited. No one ever heard
in any nation of a tax upon theft or adultery,
because a tax implies a license granted for the use
of that which is taxed, to all who shall be willing
to pay it.

Drunkenness is universally and under all circum-
stances an evil, and therefore ought not to be taxed
but punished, and the means of it not to be made
easy by a slight impost, which none will feel, but
to be removed out of the reach of the people, and
secured by the heaviest taxes, levied with the utmost
rigor. I hope those to whose care the religion
of the nation is particularly consigned will unani-
mously join with me in maintaining the necessity,
not of taxing vice, but suppressing it, and unite for
the rejecting of a Bill by which the future, as well
as the present, happiness of thousands must be
destroyed.
 

The Afodern Chesterfield 261

II
FEBRUARY 24, 1743

My Lorps:

The noble Lord has been pleased to excite us to
an unanimous concurrence with himself and_ his
associates in the Ministry, in passing this excellent
and wonder-working Bill, which is to lessen the
consumption of spirits without lessening the quan-
tity which is distilled, which is to restrain drunk-
ards from drinking by setting their favorite liquor
always before their eyes; which is to conquer habits
by continuing them. But such is my obstinacy, or
such my ignorance, that I cannot yet comply with
his proposal, nor can I prevail upon myself either
to concur in a measure so apparently opposed to
the public interest, or to hear it vindicated without
declaring how little I approve.

During the course of this long debate I have
endeavored to recapitulate and digest the argu-
ments which have been advanced, and have con-
sidered them both separately and jointly, but find
myself at the same distance from conviction as when
I first entered the House.

In vindication of this Bill we have been told that
the present law is ineffectual; that the manufacture
of the liquor is not to be destroyed; that the secur-
ity offered by the present Bill has induced great
numbers to subscribe to the war fund; that it has
262 The Modern Chesterfield

been approved by the Commons; and that if it be
found ineffectual it may be amended at another
session.

All these arguments I shall endeavor to
examine.

With a very strong desire, though with no
great hope, of finding the Ministry in the right, I
venture to begin my inquiry, and engage in the
examination of their first assertion that the present
law against the abuse of strong liquors is without
effect.

I hope it augurs well for my inquiry that the
first position which I have to examine is true, and
it may therefore be expected that, having agreed
with the Ministers in their fundamental proposi-
tion, I should concur with them in the conclusion
which they draw from it; and, having acknowledged
that the present law is ineffectual, should admit
that another is necessary.

But in order to discover whether this conse-
quence is necessary, it must first be inquired why
the present law is of no force? For it will be
found upon reflection that there are certain degrees
of corruption that may hinder the effect of the best
laws. The magistrates may be vicious and forbear
to enforce a law by which they themselves are con-
demned; they may be indolent, and inclined rather
to connive at wickedness by which they are not
injured themselves than to repress it by a laborious
exercise of their authority; or they may be timorous,
and, instead of awing the vicious, may be awed by
them.
 

The Modern Chesterfield 263

 

In any of these cases the law is not to be con-
demned for its inefficacy, since it only fails by the
defect of those who direct its operations. The best
and most important laws will contribute very little
to the security or happiness of a people if no judges
of integrity and spirit can be found among them.

I am therefore yet doubtful whether the ineffi-
cacy of the law now subsisting necessarily obliges
us to provide another, for those that declared it to
be useless owned at the same time that no man
endeavored to enforce it; so that perhaps its only
defect may be that it will not execute itself.

Great use has been made of the inefficacy of the
present law, to decry the proposal of laying a high
duty upon these pernicious liquors. High duties, as:
we are informed, have already been tried without
advantage; high duties are at this hour imposed
upon liquors which are retailed, yet we see them
every day sold in the streets without the payment
of the tax required, and therefore it will be folly to
make a second essay of means which have been
found unsuccessful for many years.

It has been granted on all sides in this debate,
nor was it ever denied on any other occasion, that
the consumption of any commodity is most easily
hindered by raising its price, and that its price is to
be raised by the imposition of a duty. This, my
Lords, which is, I suppose, the opinion of every man,
of whatever degree of experience or understanding,
appears likewise to have been thought of by the
authors of the present law; and therefore they
imagined that they had effectually provided against
264 The Modern Chesterfield

the increase of drunkenness by laying upon that
liquor which should be retailed in small quantities a
duty which none of the inferior classes of drunkards
would be able to pay.

Thus they conceived that they had reformed the
common people without infringing the pleasures of
others, and applauded the happy contrivance by
which spirits are to be made dear only to the poor,
while every man who can afford to purchase two
gallons is at liberty to riot at his ease, over a full,
flowing bumper, and look down with contempt upon
his former companions, now ruthlessly condemned
to disconsolate sobriety.

But this intention was frustrated, and the proj-
ect, ingenious as it was, fell to the ground, for
a plain reason. ‘Though they laid a tax, they un-
happily forgot that it would make no addition to
the price unless it was paid, and that it would not be
paid unless some means were provided to collect it.

Here was the difficulty; those who made the law
were inclined to lay a tax from which they them-
selves should be exempt, and therefore would not
charge the liquor as it issued from the still; and
when once it was dispersed in the hands of petty
dealers, it was no longer to be found without the
assistance of informers; and informers could not
carry on the business of prosecution without the
consent of the people.

It is not necessary to dwell at greater length
upon the law the repeal of which is proposed, since
it appears already that it failed only from a partiality
 

The Modern Chesterfield 265

 

not easily defended, and from the omission to collect
the duty from the still-head.

If this method be followed there will be no
longer any need of informations, or of any rigorous
or new measures; the same officers who collect a
smaller duty may levy a greater; nor can they be
easily deceived with regard to the quantities that are
made; the deceits that can be used are in use
already; they are easily detected and suppressed,
nor will a larger duty enable the distillers to elude
the vigilance of the officers with more success.

Against this proposal therefore the inefficacy of
the present law can be no objection. But it is
urged that such duties would destroy the trade of
distilling; and a noble Lord has been pleased to
express great tenderness for a manufacture so bene-
ficial and extensive. That a large duty levied at
the still would destroy or very much impair the
trade of distilling is certainly supposed by those
who defend it, for they devised it only for that
end; and what better method can they propose
when they are called to deliberate upon a Bill for
the prevention of the excessive use of distilled
liquors?

The noble Lord has been pleased kindly to in-
form us that the trade of distilling is very extensive,
that it employs great numbers, and that they have
arrived at exquisite skill, and therefore—note well
the consequence—the trade of distilling is not to be
discouraged.

Once more allow me to wonder at the different
conceptions of different understandings. It appears
 

266 The Modern Chesterfield

 

to me that since the spirits which the distillers
produce are acknowledged to enfeeble the limbs and
vitiate the blood, to pervert the heart, and to obscure
the intellect, that the number of distillers should
be no argument in their favor; for I never heard
that a law against theft was repealed or delayed
because thieves were numerous. It appears to me,
my Lords, that if so formidable a body are con-
federated against the virtues or the lives of their
fellow-citizens, it is time to put an end to the havoc,
and to interpose while it is yet in our power to stop
the destruction.

So little am I affected with the merit of the
wonderful skill which the distillers are said to have
attained that, in my opinion, it is not a faculty
of great use to mankind to prepare palatable poison;
nor shall I ever contribute my influence for the re-
prieve of a murderer because he has, by long prac-
tice, obtained great dexterity in his trade.

If the liquors are so delicious that the people
are tempted to their own destruction, let us secure
them from these fatal draughts by bursting the
vials that contain them; let us crush at once these
artists in slaughter who have reconciled their
countrymen to sickness and ruin, and have spread
over the pitfalls of debauchery such baits as cannot
be resisted.

I cannot yet discover why a reprieve of a year,
as suggested, is desired for this manufacture, nor
why the present year is not equally propitious for
the reformation of mankind with any that may
succeed it. It is true that we are at war, but war
 

The Modern Chesterfield 267

 

may be better prosecuted without money than with-
out men; and we but little consult the military glory
of our country if we raise supplies for paying our
armies by the destruction of those armies that we
are contriving to pay.

The ready compliance of the Commons with
the measures proposed in this Bill has been mention-
ed here with a view, I suppose, of influencing us,
but surely by those who had forgotten our inde-
pendence, or resigned their own. It is not only
the right but the duty of each House to deliberate
without regard to the determinations of the other:
for how should the nation receive any benefit from
the distinct powers that compose the Legislature
unless the determinations are without influence upon
each other? If either the example or the authority
of the Commons can divert us from following our
own convictions we are no longer a part of the
Legislature; we have given up cur honors and our
privileges; and what then is our concurrence but
slavery, or our suffrage but an echo?

The only argument therefore that now remains
is the expediency of gratifying those by whose ready
subscription the present exigencies have been sup-
ported, and of continuing the security by which they
have been encouraged to such liberal contributions.

Public credit, my Lords, is indeed of very great
importance, but public credit can never be long
supported without public virtue; nor indeed, if the
government could mortgage the morals and health
of the people, would it be just and rational to con-
firm the bargain. If the Ministry can raise money
 

268 The Modern Chesterfield

 

only by the destruction of their fellow-subjects, they
ought to abandon those schemes for which money is
necessary; for what calamity can be equal to un-
bounded wickedness?

In conclusion, when I consider, my Lords, the
tendency of this Bill, I find it calculated only for the
propagation of disease, the suppression of industry,
and the destruction of mankind. I find it the most
fatal engine that ever was pointed at a people; an
engine by which those who are not killed will be
disabled, and those who preserve their limbs will be
deprived of their senses.
SCHEDULE OF NEW MATTER

Matter of substance has been interpolated as
indicated by the schedule appended. It may be
understood by the aid of the following examples:

21: 1,1-. Thisindicatesthat matter is added
on page 21 from line 1, word 1, being the first
word of the letter proper, to the end of the page.

29: 1,1-3,7;4,6-6,7. Thisindicates that mat-
ter is added on page 29 from line 1, word 1, to line
3, word 7, inclusive, of the letter proper, and from
line 4, word 6, to line 6, word 7, inclusive.

Figures in italics indicate words of Chester-
field borrowed from his other writings.

217 1,1—. 42: 7, 1-14,8.
24: 10, 1-. 23, 5-24, 2.
28: 6, 1-19, 10. 44: 11, 3-12,9.
29: 1, 1-38, 7. 45: 1,8-13,1.
4, 6-6, 7. 32, 1-32, 2.
30: 3,4-4, 3. 49: 21, 1-.
18, 1-19, 3. 50: 1,1-16,8.
24, 6-. 18, 5-18, 7.
31: 1,1-8, 7. 21, 1-21, 2.
32: 2,9-3, 3. 24, 7-27, 4.
33: 12,9-18, 1. 52: 18,1-.
34: 2,6-5, 4. 53: 1,1-.
24, 1-26, 1. 54: 1, 1-.
35: 18, 7-20,6. 64: 1, 1-3, 2.
36: 1,1-. 6, 1-8, 1.
39: 7,7-. 16, 1-21, 4.
 

 

270 The Modern Chesterfield
65: 12,6-17,5. 3, 6-4, 1
67: 4, 6-5, 5. 4, 2-.

12, 9-13, 3. 138: 3, 7-4, 1.
24, 5-. 140: 9, 1-19, 7.
68: 21,1-. 20, 1-21, 8.
69: 1,1-. 21, 4-22, 5.
7h. 3,7-0,0: 22, 6-24, 8.
82: 25, 3-26, 2. 24,9-.
83: 17, 1-. 142: 7, 1-25, 2
84: 1,1-7,1. 25, 3-80, 1
86: 18, 2-15, 6. 144: 14,4-22,5
32, 1l-. 146: 11, 1-22,5
Si: 1,1 147: 4, 10--8, 1
95: 12,1-18,4. 8,5-9, 1
97: 23,8-25,7 149: 2,6-3.8
99: 3, 7-8, 5. 13, 8-14,7
100: 18, 10-20, 1. 152: 25, 1-.
101: 20, 7-27, 4. 153: 13, 1-17, 10.
31, 1-. 156: 9, 1-14, 6.

102: 1, 1-8, 6. 26, 1-.

22, 2-22, 4. 1572 Ly lta,

109: 12,1-. 158: 19,4-.

110: 1,1-1,7. 160: 4, 1-.

1138: 6, 2-6, 7. 161: 1,1-13,6.

115: 14, 8-15, 6. 165: 12,5-14,8.

116: 2,6-5,7. 166: 1, 1-S,7.

119: 4,1-. L7, 2=19,.3;

131: 10,3-15, 5. 168: 4, 9-6, 5.

133: 12,3-14,8. 20, 3-.

28, 1-23, 5. 173: 9,4-10, 6.
265, 4- 11,4-11,7
134: 1, 1-3, 23, 3-24, 2
 

 

The Modern Chesterfield 271

1lv4: 12, 9- 208: 20,6-21, 3.
175: 1,1-. 219: 3,s-.
17S: 1,9-2,5. 220: 7, 5-8, 6.
180: 7, 2-10, 1. 18, 10-20, 5.
189: 9,1-17,5. 223: 1, 1-1, 4.

31,553 1, d=, %
190: 1,1-. 1,8-19,8.
191: 4,6-5,6. 224: 20, I-.

195: 15, 7-16, 2. 225: 1,1-14,1.
197: 1,1-1,3. 21,1-21, 10.
21,5-24,1. 226: 6, 2-6,6

198: 1, 2-7, 7. 228: 27, 6-.
8, 1-11, 2. 229: 1,1-4,5
11,3=13,-1. 22, 1-.
199: 9, 2-10, 6. 230 1128.2.
28, 1-. 231: 7,5-8, 7.
200: 1, 1-10,8. 233: 1, 1-4, 6.
10, 9-13, 1. 234: 12,3-16,1
14, 1-. 23,6-24,2
201: 1,1-6,1. 235: 1,9-9, 8.
203: 4,1-12,8. 15, 1-.
205: 6, 5-6, 8. 2362. 1 13,2