ch the late Lord Carnarvon so recently gave to the world. They are a
valuable addition to our knowledge of the last century, a valuable
addition to our knowledge of the man who wrote them. And knowledge about
Lord Chesterfield is always welcome. Few of the famous figures of the
last century have been more misunderstood than he. The world is too
ready to remember Johnson's biting letter; too ready to remember the
cruel caricatures of Lord Hervey. Even the famous letters have been
taken too much at Johnson's estimate, and Johnson's estimate was
one-sided and unfair. A man would not learn the highest life from the
Chesterfield letters; they have little in common with the ethics of an A
Kempis, a Jean Paul Richter, or a John Stuart Mill. But they have their
value in their way, and if they contain some utterances so unutterably
foolish as those in which Lord Chesterfield expressed himself upon Greek
literature, they contain some very excellent maxims for the management
of social life. Nobody could become a penny the worse for the study of
Chesterfield; many might become the better. They are not a whit more
cynical than, indeed they are not so cynical as, those letters of
Thackeray's to young Brown, which with all their cleverness make us
understand what Mr. Henley means when in his "Views and Reviews" he
describes him as a "writer of genius who was innately and irredeemably a
Philistine". The letters of Lord Chesterfield would not do much to make
a man a hero, but there is little in literature more unheroic than the
letters to Mr. Thomas Brown the younger.

It is curious to contrast the comparative enthusiasm with which the
Whartons write about Horace Walpole with the invective of Lord Macaulay.
To the great historian Walpole was the most eccentric, the most
artificial, the most capricious of men, who played innumerable parts and
over-acted them all, a creature to whom whatever was little seemed great
and whatever was great seemed little. To Macaulay he was a
gentleman-usher at heart, a Republican whose Republicanism like the
courage of a bully or the love of a fribble was only strong and ardent
when there was no occasion for it, a man who blended the faults of Grub
Street with the faults of St. James's Street, and who united to the
vanity, the jealousy and the irritability of a man of letters, the
affected superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton. The Whartons
over-praise Walpole where Lord Macaulay under-rates him; the t