s what may happen to-morrow?

LORD CHESTERFIELD

'Buy good books and read them; the best books are the commonest, and
the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not
blockheads.' So wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son, that
highly-favoured and much bewritten youth, on March 19, 1750, and his
words have been chosen with great cunning by Mr. Charles Strachey as a
motto for his new edition of these famous letters.[A]

[Footnote A: Published by Methuen and Co. in 2 vols.]

The quotation is full of the practical wisdom, but is at the same
time--so much, at least, an old book-collector may be allowed to
say--a little suggestive of the too-well-defined limitations of their
writer's genius and character. Lord Chesterfield is always clear and
frequently convincing, yet his wisdom is that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman,
and not only never points in the direction of the Celestial City, but
seldom displays sympathy with any generous emotion or liberal taste.
Yet as we have nobody like him in the whole body of our literature, we
can welcome even another edition--portable, complete, and cheap--of
his letters to his son with as much enthusiasm as is compatible with
the graces, and with the maxim, so dear to his lordship's heart, _Nil
admirari!_

What, I have often wondered, induced Lord Chesterfield to write this
enormously long and troublesome series of letters to a son who was not
even his heir? Their sincerity cannot be called in question. William
Wilberforce did not more fervently desire the conversion to God of his
infant Samuel than apparently did Lord Chesterfield the transformation
of his lumpish offspring into 'the all-accomplished man' he wished to
have him.

'All this,' so the father writes in tones of fervent pleading--'all
this you may compass if you please. You have the means, you have the
opportunities; employ them, for God's sake, while you may, and make
yourself the all-accomplished man I wish to have you. It entirely
depends upon the next two years; they are the decisive ones' (Letter
CLXXVII.).

It is the very language of an evangelical piety applied to the
manufacture of a worldling. But what promoted the anxiety? Was it
natural affection--a father's love? If it was, never before or since
has that world-wide and homely emotion been so concealed. There is a
detestable, a forbidding, an all-pervading harshness of tone
throughout this correspondence that seems to banish affection, to
murder love.