eld, when young, injured both soul and
body by pleasure and dissipation, he always found time for serious
study: when he could not have it otherwise, he took it out of his sleep.
How late soever he went to bed, he resolved always to rise early; and
this resolution he adhered to so faithfully, that at the age of
fifty-eight he could declare that for more than forty years he had never
been in bed at nine o'clock in the morning, but had generally been up
before eight. He had the good sense, in this respect, not to exaggerate
even this homely virtue. He did not rise with the dawn, as many early
risers pride themselves in doing, putting all the engagements of
ordinary life out of their usual beat, just as if the clocks had been
set two hours forward. The man in ordinary society, who rises at four in
this country, and goes to bed at nine, is a social and family nuisance.
Strong good sense characterized Chesterfield's early pursuits. Desultory
reading he abhorred. He looked on it as one of the resources of age, but
as injurious to the young in the extreme. 'Throw away,' thus he writes
to his son, 'none of your time upon those trivial, futile books,
published by idle necessitous authors for the amusement of idle and
ignorant readers.'

Even in those days such books 'swarm and buzz about one:' 'flap them
away,' says Chesterfield, 'they have no sting.' The earl directed the
whole force of his mind to oratory, and became the finest speaker of his
time. Writing to Sir Horace Mann, about the Hanoverian debate (in 1743,
Dec. 15), Walpole praising the speeches of Lords Halifax and Sandwich,
adds, 'I was there, and heard Lord Chesterfield make the finest oration
I have ever heard there.' This from a man who had listened to Pulteney,
to Chatham, to Carteret, was a singularly valuable tribute.

Whilst a student at Cambridge, Chesterfield was forming an acquaintance
with the Hon. George Berkeley, the youngest son of the second Earl of
Berkeley, and remarkable rather as being the second husband of Lady
Suffolk, the favourite of George II., than from any merits or demerits
of his own.

This early intimacy probably brought Lord Chesterfield into the close
friendship which afterwards subsisted between him and Lady Suffolk, to
whom many of his letters are addressed.

His first public capacity was a diplomatic appointment: he afterwards
attained to the rank of an ambassador, whose duty it is, according to a
witticism of Sir Henry Wotton's '