"P. S. I believe it may not be amiss for us to communicate to each other, from time to time, our gradations of increase or decrease towards the desired medium, in which, I presume, two or three pounds more or less, on either side, ought not to be considered "

Yet, though his essays are all of them pleasing specimens of delicate humor, they would not of themselves have redeemed his memory from oblivion. For this he is indebted entirely to the letters to his son, which, as specimens of a particular style of writing, though not always perfectly correct, are not exceeded in their way by any thing in the language. Their principal merits are their perspicuity and elegance, without a shadow of affectation. In them will be found a great sum of worldly wisdom upon the minor morals, conveyed in the most direct and intelligible shape. Even Dr. Johnson admitted their merit, although he very justly put his seal of reprobation on their tendency. We cannot, for instance, too highly approve of a passage like the following upon the employment of time.

"You have, it is true, a great deal of time before you; but in this period of your life, one hour usefully employed may be worth more than four-and-twenty hereafter; a minute is precious to you now, whole days may possibly not be so forty years hence. Whatever time you allow, or can snatch, for serious reading (I say snatch, because company and a knowledge of the world is now your chief object), employ it in the reading of some one book, and that a good one, till you have finished it; and do not distract your mind with various matters at the same time. In this light I would recommend to you to read tout de suite Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis, translated by Barbeyrac, and Puffendorf's Jus Gentium, translated by the same hand. For accidental quarters of hours, read works of invention, wit, and humor, of the best, and not of trivial authors, either ancient or modern.

"Whatever business you have, do it the first moment you can; never by halves, but finish it without interruption, if possible. Business must not be sauntered and trifled with; and you must not say to it, as Felix did to Paul, 'At a more convenient season I will speak to thee.' The most convenient season for business is the first; but study and business, in some measure, point out their own times to a man of sense; time is much oftener squandered away in the wrong choice and improper methods of amusement and pleasures.

"Many people think that they are in pleasures, provided they are neither in study nor in business. Nothing like it; they are

doing nothing, and might just as well be asleep. 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 go to be either the scene of quick and lively pleasures, or the school of your improvements; let every company you go into either gratify your senses, extend your knowledge, or refine your manners. Have some decent object of gallantry in view at some places; frequent others, where people of wit and taste assemble; get into others, where people of superior rank and dignity command respect and attention from the rest of the company; but pray frequent no neutral places, from mere idleness and indolence. Nothing forms a young man so much as being used to keep respectable and superior company, where a constant regard and attention is necessary. It is true, this is at first a disagreeable state of 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. What you said some time ago was very true, concerning le Palais Royal; to one of your age the situation is disagreeable enough; you cannot expect to be much taken notice of; but all that time you can take notice of others; observe their manners, decipher their characters, and insensibly you will become one of the company."— Vol. 11., Pp. 227, 228.

There is not in this extract, it is true, any intimation of the higher purposes for which time should be improved. The idea, as usual with his Lordship, is limited within narrow and selfish bounds; yet, so far as it goes, it is sound and well conveyed. No man had a greater contempt than he for the vagabond fops who have since affected to quote him as authority for their idleness and their indifference. He understood the truth of the maxim, that a man, in order to make himself respectable, must try to be employed. Neither did he imagine, like many of his rank in England, that a title and wealth excused him from the duty of exertion in something more respectable than the mere search after pleasure. His great defect was, that he did not rest his notions of that duty upon a basis sufficiently broad. They all come back to the benefit to be gained in some form or other of personal advantage. They looked forth neither upon society, nor upon one's country, nor upon one's God. They were of a kind which wither under the approach of age. Thus it happened to himself, that at fifty-four he retreated from the public ser

vice, not again to return to it, though invited more than once. He retired to cultivate cabbages and pine-apples, and to wear out the patience of both medical men and quacks in unavailing experiments to remedy the infirmities of his constitution. There is no cheerfulness nor dignity in the scene of his old age. His views of life are narrow, cold, and gloomy. So early as 1755, or nearly twenty years before his end, he indulges in the following strain of reflection, when addressing his friend, the Bishop of Waterford.

"My deafness grows gradually worse, which in my mind implies a total one, before it be long. In this unhappy situation, which I have reason to suppose will every day grow worse, I still keep up my spirits tolerably; that is, I am free from melancholy, which, I think, is all that can be expected. This I impute to that degree of philosophy which I have acquired by long experience of the world. I have enjoyed all its pleasures, and consequently know their futility, and do not regret their loss. I appraise them at their real value, which in truth is very low; whereas those who have not experienced always overrate them. They only see their gay outside, and are dazzled with their glare; but I have been behind the scenes. It is a common notion, and like many common ones a very false one, that those who have led a life of pleasure and business can never be easy in retirement; whereas I am persuaded that they are the only people who can, if they have any sense and reflection. They can look back, oculo irretorto, upon what they from knowledge despise; others have always a hankering after what they are not acquainted with. I look upon all that has passed as one of those romantic dreams that opium commonly occasions, and I do by no means desire to repeat the nauseous dose for the sake of the fugitive dream. When I say that I have no regret, I do not mean that I have no remorse; for a life of either business, or still more, pleasure, never was nor never will be a state of innocence. But God, who knows the strength of human passions and the weakness of human reason, will, it is to be hoped, rather mercifully pardon, than justly punish, acknowledged errors.". Vol. iv., pp. 149, 150.

This letter was written to one of those whom his Lordship somewhere else is pleased to designate as a species of constables "appointed by the sovereign power of a country to keep up decency and decorum in the church." This may account for the unusual approximation to a religious feeling which we find in the extract. Yet what does this

amount to? His Lordship, satiated with the pleasures of life, looks back upon them with much the same feeling that a man in the morning has about his last night's debauch. He has no warming sense of services rendered to others; of duty performed, perhaps imperfectly, but yet with an earnest and hearty will; of mutual kindness cultivated between himself and others; of humble resignation to the will of God! No! the scene, as he looks back upon it, is cold and wintry, showing marks only of scorching desolation from the heat of summer passions. And the present enjoyment, such as it is, proceeds from vacuity. Nor yet does he make it very clear, that his own history disproves the correctness of the common notion which he condemns. His retirement will scarcely furnish encouragement to any who may be anxious to leave the busy world in quest of ease. His letters form

one continued lament, partly owing to his increasing deafness, partly to disappointment as to his son's success, but most of all to the absence of all the nobler motives of action in life. This is the grand defect of his whole theory. The man is liable to outlive the system, and then the world becomes a dreary blank. Cut off from society, from public life, from the domestic affections, and from the consolations of a religious faith, Chesterfield was as much isolated at sixty as the blasted oak in the centre of a barren heath. Yet over all this wretchedness, there still remained, like a coat of steel upon a skeleton, the glazed and polished surface of good-breeding which his Lordship had laid on thick to conceal the deep defects of his early years. Even upon the bed of death, "Give Dayrolles a chair," were the last expressed thoughts of this worldly earl. Not a single exalted sentiment fell from him, at that moment, to counteract the chill of a long career. He was indeed, what he describes himself, one hackneyed in the ways of life. We have endeavoured to show in his history the nature and the advantages of such a training. Let those who are inclined to be fascinated by his example take warning by his fate.

In the view which we have taken, it will be seen that we have not dwelt upon the moral tendency of the advice to be found in the present work. This has already been so much descanted upon in many former publications, as well as in the pages of this Journal, that little can be added. We shall therefore, avoiding the grosser passages, simply content our

selves with extracting from the maxims addressed by his Lordship to his son such of them as seem most briefly to embody the character of the author.

"In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds; make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business."

"It is always right to detect a fraud, and to perceive a folly; but it is often very wrong to expose either. A man of business should always have his eyes open, but must often seem to have them shut."

"If you would be a favorite of your king, address yourself to his weaknesses. An application to his reason will seldom prove very successful."

"A cheerful, easy countenance and behaviour are very useful at court; they make fools think you a good-natured man; and they make designing men think you an undesigning one."

"Flattery, though a base coin, is the necessary pocket-money at court; where, by custom and consent, it has obtained such a currency, that it is no longer a fraudulent but a legal payment." "The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man's general expense, as it does upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all.". Vol. 11., pp. 322 - 326.

It would seem, by the care which his Lordship bestowed upon the sketches of the principal persons of his time, as if he must have meditated some extensive work of an historical kind, in which they would naturally have found a place. Had the whole been executed with any portion of the spirit to be found in these fragments, the author would have earned a still higher reputation than he is likely now to hold. Among them, one of the most curious is the article relating to Lord Bute, which Dr. Maty, or his successor, thought proper to suppress, whilst he published in his edition most of the rest. The portraits of Sir Robert Walpole, of Lord Hardwicke, of the elder Pitt, of the Duke of Newcastle, and of Lord Bolingbroke, will continue for ever valuable to those who wish to understand the history of the early Brunswick princes. Chesterfield's habits made him a keen observer of the virtues and vices, the merits and the follies, of other men; whilst his judgment was not warped, as that of many is apt to be, by any excess of sympathy with or of hostility