when I aimed at being facetious, I quoted Martial; and when I
had a mind to be a fine gentleman, I talked Ovid. I was convinced that
none but the ancients had common sense; that the classics contained
everything that was either necessary, useful, or ornamental to men; and
I was not even without thoughts of wearing the toga virilis of the
Romans, instead of the vulgar and illiberal dress of the moderns.'

Thus, again, when in Paris, he caught the manners, as he had acquired
the language, of the Parisians. 'I shall not give you my opinion of the
French, because I am very often taken for one of them, and several have
paid me the highest compliment they think it in their power to
bestow--which is, "Sir, you are just like ourselves." I shall only tell
you that I am insolent; I talk a great deal; I am very loud and
peremptory; I sing and dance as I walk along; and, above all, I spend an
immense sum in hair-powder, feathers, and white gloves.'

Although he entered Parliament before he had attained the legal age,
and was expected to make a great figure in that assembly, Lord
Chesterfield preferred the reputation of a wit and a beau to any other
distinction. 'Call it vanity, if you will,' he wrote in after-life to
his son, 'and possibly it was so; but my great object was to make every
man and every woman love me. I often succeeded: but why? by taking great
pains.'

According to Lord Hervey's account he often even sacrificed his interest
to his vanity. The description given of Lord Chesterfield by one as
bitter as himself implies, indeed, that great pains were requisite to
counterbalance the defects of nature. Wilkes, one of the ugliest men of
his time, used to say, that with an hour's start he would carry off the
affections of any woman from the handsomest man breathing. Lord
Chesterfield, according to Lord Hervey, required to be still longer in
advance of a rival.

'With a person,' Hervey writes, 'as disagreeable, as it was possible for
a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following many
women of the first beauty and the most in fashion. He was very short,
disproportioned, thick and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured,
ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus. One
Ben Ashurst, who said a few good things, though admired for many, told
Lord Chesterfield once, that he was like a stunted giant--which was a
humorous idea and really apposite.'

Notwithstanding that Chesterfi