Chapter I: Front Matter

(Philip Dormer Stanhope).]

LETTERS, SENTENCES
AND MAXIMS

By LORD CHESTERFIELD

WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY CHARLES SAYLE
AND A CRITICAL ESSAY BY C. A. SAINTE-BEUVE,
DE L’ACADEMIE FRANCAISE

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Castalian spring.”

POPE.

A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS,
NEW YORK

“Viewed as compositions, they appear almost unrivalled for
a serious epistolary style; clear, elegant, and terse,
never straining at effect, and yet never hurried into
carelessness.”--LORD MAHON, 1845.

“In point of style, a finished classical work; they contain
instructions for the conduct of life that will never be
obsolete. Instinct with the most consummate good sense and
knowledge of life and business, and certainly nothing can be
more attractive than the style in which they are set before
their readers.”--_Quarterly Review_, vol. lxxvi., 1845.

“Lord Chesterfield’s letters are, I will venture to
say, masterpieces of good taste, good writing, and good
sense.”--JOHN WILSON CROKER, 1846.

PREFATORY NOTE.

BY CHARLES SAYLE.

It is a singular fate that has overtaken Lord Chesterfield. One of the more important figures in the political world of his time; one of the few Lord-Lieutenants of Ireland whose name was afterward respected and admired; the first man to introduce Voltaire and Montesquieu to England; and the personal acquaintance of men like Addison and Swift, Pope and Bolingbroke; the ally of Pitt and the enemy of three Georges; though he married a king’s daughter and took up the task of the world’s greatest emperor; yet the record of his actions has passed away, and he is remembered now only by an accident.

Lord Chesterfield lives by that which he never intended for publication, while that which he published has already passed from the thoughts of men. It is one more example of the fact that our best work is that which is our heart’s production. We have Lord Chesterfield’s secret, and it bears witness to the strength of that part of him in which an intellectual anatomist has declared him to be deficient--a criticism which is but another proof of that which has been somewhere said of him, that he has had the fate to be generally misunderstood. Yet nothing is more certain than that Lord Chesterfield did not mean to be anything but inscrutable. “Dissimilation is a shield,” he used to say, “as secrecy is armor.” “A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether he really be so or not.” It is still worth while attempting to solve the problem which is offered to us by his inscrutability, not only on its own account, but because Lord Chesterfield is a representative spirit of the eighteenth century.[1]