ld, and sometimes accused of being
nothing else, to make himself intelligible and agreeable to young--at
first very young--boys. In his letters to older folk, both men and
women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise--the
thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite
different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"[15]
worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real
Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all
these letters--though most attractively in those to his son--a power of
literary expression which would have made the fortune of any
professional writer of the time. If Chesterfield's literary taste was
too often decided by the fashionable limitations of this time, it was,
within those limitations, accomplished: and it was accompanied, as mere
taste very often is not, by no small command of literary production. He
could and did write admirable light verse; his wit in conversation is
attested in the most final fashion by his enemy Horace Walpole, and some
of the passages in the letters where he indulges in description or even
dialogue are by no means unworthy of the best genteel comedy of the
time. But he could also, as was said of someone else, be "nobly
serious," as in his "character" writing and elsewhere. His few
contributions to the half-developed periodical literature of his day
show how valuable he would have been to the more advanced Review or
Magazine of the nineteenth century: and if he had chosen to write
Memoirs they would probably have been among the best in English.[16] Now
the Memoir and the Letter are perhaps the most straitly and intimately
connected forms of literature.

[Sidenote: HORACE WALPOLE]

Horace Walpole--like his two contemporaries, fellow-members of English
aristocratic society, acquaintances and objects of aversion just
discussed--has been the subject of very various opinions. Johnson (of
whom he himself spoke with ignorant contempt and who did not know his
letters, but did know some of his now half-forgotten published works)
dismissed him with good-natured belittlement. Macaulay made him the
subject of some of the most unfortunately exaggerated of those
antitheses of blame and praise which, in the long run, have done the
writer more harm than his subjects. To take one example less likely to
be known to English readers, the wayward and prejudiced, but often very
acute French critic already m