of Fashion.--Lord Scarborough's Friendship
for Chesterfield.--The Death of Chesterfield's Son.--His
Interest in his Grandsons.--'I must go and Rehearse my
Funeral.'--Chesterfield's Will.--What is a Friend?--Les
Manieres Nobles.--Letters to his Son.

The subject of this memoir may be thought by some rather the modeller of
wits than the original of that class; the great critic and judge of
manners rather than the delight of the dinner-table: but we are told to
the contrary by one who loved him not. Lord Hervey says of Lord
Chesterfield that he was 'allowed by everybody to have more conversable
entertaining table-wit than any man of his time; his propensity to
ridicule, in which he indulged himself with infinite humour and no
distinction; and his inexhaustible spirits, and no discretion; made him
sought and feared--liked and not loved--by most of his acquaintance.'

This formidable personage was born in London on the 2nd day of
September, 1694. It was remarkable that the father of a man so
vivacious, should have been of a morose temper; all the wit and spirit
of intrigue displayed by him remind us of the frail Lady Chesterfield,
in the time of Charles II.[23]--that lady who was looked on as a martyr
because her husband was jealous of her: 'a prodigy,' says De Grammont,
'in the city of London,' where indulgent critics endeavoured to excuse
his lordship on account of his bad education, and mothers vowed that
none of their sons should ever set foot in Italy, lest they should
'bring back with them that infamous custom of laying restraint on their
wives.'

Even Horace Walpole cites Chesterfield as the 'witty earl:' apropos to
an anecdote which he relates of an Italian lady, who said that she was
only four-and-twenty; 'I suppose,' said Lord Chesterfield, 'she means
four-and-twenty stone.'

By his father the future wit, historian, and orator was utterly
neglected; but his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax, supplied to
him the place of both parents, his mother--her daughter, Lady Elizabeth
Saville--having died in his childhood. At the age of eighteen,
Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall,
Cambridge. It was one of the features of his character to fall at once
into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown. One
can hardly imagine his being 'an absolute pedant,' but such was,
actually, his own account of himself:--'When I talked my best, I quoted
Horace;