making finished gentlemen statesmen, luckily for them, was entirely over. The Earl reserved his last words of advice more suitably for the heir of his title, a distant connection by a collateral branch, whom he also made, to the exclusion of these grandchildren, heir to his estates.

Lord Chesterfield's system made him neither a good, a happy, nor a successful man. Such being the result in his own person, we see no reason why it should be further held up to the imitation of posterity. Yet there is something in the man, invested as he appears to us with all the authority of wealth, dignity, rank, and title, calculated to impose upon the multitude. There is still more in the elegance of his style, conveying as it does just thoughts in a most clear and forcible way. There was a strange union about him, too, of the loosest general notions, formed from his experience of the corruption of his times, and the most strict adherence in his own case to personal integrity. Early in his career, when he was appointed to succeed Lord Townshend as Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard, that nobleman advised him to make the place more profitable than he himself had done, by disposing of the places in his gift. "I rather, for this time," adroitly and properly replied Chesterfield, “wish to follow your lordship's example than your advice." He never sold a commission. The same spirit appears to have followed him throughout in the administration of official power. He had a thorough detestation of the jobbing temper so common in England, and not by any means unknown in the United States, among political men. There is another point in his history which is highly creditable to him. He took no presents from any one, nor did he approve of them when taken by others. There is a passage in his parting

letter to his godson upon this subject, which, both as illustrative of his own character and as full of sound doctrine, we can not resist the temptation to transcribe:

If you should ever fill a great station at court, take care above all things to keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices that may accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck; for, as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life. I call corruption the taking of a sixpence more than the just and known salary of your employment, under any pretense whatsoever. Use what power and credit you may have at court in the service of merit rather than of kindred, and not to get pensions and reversions for yourself or your family; for I call that also, what it really is, scandalous pollution, though of late it has been so frequent that it has almost lost its name (vol. iv., p. 431).

Yet strange indeed are the inconsistencies of man. The same mind which in this passage seems to catch a glimpse of something above the cold and mercenary level of ordinary life, in another part of these letters treats of one of the most sacred of human relations in the following thoroughly business-like manner:

Do not be in haste to marry, but look about you first, for the affair is important. There are but two objects in marriage, love or money. If you marry for love, you will certainly have some very happy days, and probably many very uneasy ones. If for money, you will have no happy days, and probably no uneasy ones; in this latter case, let the woman at least be such a one that you can live decently and amicably with, otherwise it is a robbery; in either case, let her be of an unblemished and unsuspected character, and of a rank not indecently below your own (vol. ii., p. 427).

Very surely it could not have been the love of moral excellence which prompted the sentiment in the first extract, or even any very refined estimate of human duty. We much fear that we must resolve it into temperament. Avarice was not one of his lordship's vices. He was above the low arts to which it naturally resorts, and the dirty crimes to which it leads. But he was above them, not because he scorned them as wrong, but as mean; not because he admired purity of purpose and singleness of heart, but because he deemed it unbecoming in a gentleman to put himself in the power of people that were beneath him. With him it was scandalous pollution to trade in pensions and reversions for himself at court, but it was right enough to trade with a woman for money in the article of marriage. Yet, if we closely analyze the moral principle involved in the two operations, it will be scarcely practicable to lay down a rule of action which would justify his lordship's discrimination.

Passing from this subject, let us bring the present article to a close by a brief review of the various claims which his lordship has made upon the attention of posterity, whether as an orator, a scholar, a patron of letters, a statesman, a writer, or a gentleman. Few of England's nobility have tried to shine so variously; and, if he did not equally succeed in everything, it is surely creditable in him that he made the attempt.

We have already mentioned the circumstances attending his first appearance upon the floor of the House of Commons; how carefully he had prepared himself, and how all his preparation was defeated by the inopportune ridicule of a member who was a mimic. This incident is deserving of notice, because it lets us into a pretty accurate idea of his

level as a speaker. With a highly artificial manner it is probable that his lordship united the amount of wit and practical good sense which we see in the productions he left behind him. These qualifications made him an agreeable and an elegant speaker, but they did not raise him above the reach of vulgar efforts at imitation. There was wanting in him either great intellectual, or that moral superiority, based upon solid and noble views of man's duties, which commands the respect and fastens the attention even of the most scornful. We have never heard that the elder or the younger Pitt, Burke, or even Fox, in spite of defects of manner, was in any degree embarrassed by the attacks that were made upon him. Some of these, and most particularly Lord Chatham, were remarkable for peculiarities not a little striking and easy to be taken off. Yet they continued to exercise their powers with effect, placing ridicule at defiance. From this we are unavoidably led to infer that Lord Chesterfield's own account of his oratory is not an underestimate, and that he owed the greater part of his success in it to his polish. That success was established after he had reached a congenial spot for the exercise of his faculty in the House of Lords. Yet very few of his speeches have been handed down to us to give us the means of judging of his style. Horace Walpole, no very friendly critic by the way, speaks of one of them as the finest speech he ever listened to, which is saying a good deal for a man who witnessed the Parliamentary struggles of half a century-from the great Walpolean battle downward. It not infrequently happens, however, that this remark is made by a person just fresh from hearing a well-delivered address, the greatest merit of which, after all, comes from the effect it momen

tarily produces. Very certainly the specimens which Dr. Maty furnishes, in his edition of his lordship's works, will not sustain any similar rate of commendation. They are in no respect above the level of middling performances, and sometimes sink even below it. For example, in the second speech upon the gin act, a species of temperance question, almost the same with that which agitated Massachusetts a few years since, what sort of force is there in the following extract, if considered as a piece of invective?—

This bill, therefore, appears to be designed only to thin the ranks of mankind, and to disburden the world of the multitudes that inhabit it, and is perhaps the strongest proof of political sagacity that our ministers have yet exhibited. They well know, my Lords, that they are universally detested, and that, whenever a Briton is destroyed, they are freed from an enemy; they have therefore opened the flood-gates of gin upon the nation, that, when it is less numerous, it may be more easily governed.

Surely this is not the tone which would overthrow a ministry. It wants force and sincerity. We can see at once that it was only a pleasant literary exercise for the amusement of the auditors. It would do to make even the Duke of Newcastle himself, at whom it was directed, laugh very heartily. But, as to any effect which it was likely to produce in staying the passage of the bill itself, he might as well have hoped to get it by talking in an unknown tongue. Yet his lordship was doubtless in earnest in his speech. Temperance in drinking was one of his leading virtues. He detested drunkenness because it was a coarse and vulgar vice. He constantly laments, in his correspondence, the extent to which his Irish friends were addicted to it. Yet, instead of treating it in the broad and noble way by which its evils can