eading and research--to any man of a decent acquaintance
with literature, it is unnecessary now to vindicate the character of the
Earl of Chesterfield. He was unequaled in his time for the solidity and
variety of his attainments; for the brilliancy of his wit; for the
graces of his conversation, and the polish of his style. His embassy to
Holland marks his skill, his dexterity, and his address, as an able
negotiator; and his administration of Ireland indicates his integrity,
his vigilance, and his sound policy as a statesman and as a politician.
He was at once the most accomplished, the most learned, and the most
far-seeing of the men of his day; and in our own, these is not one
public man to compare with him. He foresaw and foretold, in 1756, that
French Revolution whose outbreak he did not live to witness. In 1744 he
was admitted into the cabinet, on his own terms, and was soon after
intrusted with a second embassy to Holland, in which his skill and
dexterity were universally admitted. He was not more remarkable for a
quick insight into the temper of others, than for a command of his own.
In history, in literature, in foreign languages, he was equally a
proficient. With classical literature he had been from his boyhood
familiar. He wrote Latin prose with correctness, ease, and purity; and
spoke that tongue with a fluency and facility of the rarest among
Englishmen, and not very common even among foreigners. In the House of
Lords his speeches were more admired and extolled than any others of the
day. Horace Walpole had heard his own father, had heard Pitt, had heard
Pulteney, had heard Wyndham, had heard Carteret; yet he in 1743
declared, as is recorded by Lord Mahon, that the finest speech he had
ever listened to was one from Chesterfield.

For the diplomatic career, Chesterfield prepared himself in a manner not
often practiced in his own, and never practiced by Englishmen in our
day. Not content, as an undergraduate of Cambridge, with assiduously
attending a course of lectures on civil law at Trinity Hall, he
applied--as the laws and customs of other countries, and the general
law of Europe, were not comprehended in that course--to Vitriarius, a
celebrated professor of the University of Leyden and, at the
recommendation of the professor, took into his house a gentleman
qualified to instruct him. Instead of pirouetting it in the _coulisses_
of the opera, or in the Redouten Saal of Vienna, instead of graduating
at the