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And here comes, fortunately, to break the train of my melancholy reflections, the proof of my East India Speech from Hansard; so I must put my letter aside, and correct the press. Ever yours To Hannah M. Macaulay. London: August 2, 1833. My dear Sister, I agree with your judgment on Chesterfield's Letters.
John filled both cheeks dutifully, but kept them so, unchanged, while the present came forth. Then he looked confused and turned to his mother. Her eyes were on her husband in deep dejection, as her hand rose to receive the book from the servant. She took it, read the title, and moaned: "Oh! Judge March, what is your child to do with 'Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son?"
As far as politics go there is profound truth in Lord Chesterfield's axiom, that "the world must judge of you by what you seem, not by what you are". The world knows what you seem; it does not know what you are. An assembly a revising assembly especially which does not assemble, which looks as if it does not care how it revises, is defective in a main political ingredient.
Thus, my Lords, from the precedent before us, we may, we shall be induced, nay, we can find no reason for refusing to lay the press under a general license, and then we may bid adieu to the liberties of Great Britain." There was a great deal of force and of justice in Chesterfield's reasoning.
But he now began to keep house himself, and every day invited two friends to dine with him, and upon any little festival from five to eight; for he was a punctual observer of Lord Chesterfield's rule that his dinner party, himself included, should not fall below the number of the Graces nor exceed that of the Muses.
As a surgeon we were proud of him; but as a man or rather, I should say, as a gentleman we could only shake our heads over his name and himself, and wished that he had read Lord Chesterfield's Letters in the days when his manners were susceptible of improvement.
It is as though we bound up Lord Chesterfield's letters in a volume with Hume's essays, and called them the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It might be true, but it would certainly be absurd. There might be those who regard the letters as philosophical, and those who would so speak of the essays; but their meaning would be diametrically opposite.
I do not care much for Lord Chesterfield's correspondence; he was eternally posing with an eye on the future perhaps on the very immediate future. As Johnson sternly said, "Lord Chesterfield wrote as a dancing-master might write," and he spoke the truth.
It was the ambition of Lord Chesterfield's life that this young man should be a paragon of learning and manners.
See the "Citizen of the World," Letter 55. Reference has often been made to Lord Chesterfield's prediction of the French Revolution. But I am not aware that any one has remarked on the equally acute foresight of Goldsmith. Letter of April 16th, 1771, Arneth, i., p. 148. Arneth, i., p. 186. Maria Teresa to Marie Antoinette, July 9th, and August 17th, Arneth, i., p. 196.
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