Chesterfield’s fame is in curious antithesis to Johnson’s.  He was a man of great abilities, and seems to have deserved high credit for some parts of his statesmanship.  As a Viceroy in Ireland in particular he showed qualities rare in his generation.  To Johnson he was known as the nobleman who had a wide social influence as an acknowledged arbiter elegantiarum, and who reckoned among his claims some of that literary polish in which the earlier generation of nobles had certainly been superior to their successors.  The art of life expounded in his Letters differs from Johnson as much as the elegant diplomatist differs from the rough intellectual gladiator of Grub Street.  Johnson spoke his mind of his rival without reserve.  “I thought,” he said, “that this man had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.”  And of the Letters he said more keenly that they taught the morals of a harlot and the manners of a dancing-master.  Chesterfield’s opinion of Johnson is indicated by the description in his Letters of a “respectable Hottentot, who throws his meat anywhere but down his throat.  This absurd person,” said Chesterfield, “was not only uncouth in manners and warm in dispute, but behaved exactly in the same way to superiors, equals, and inferiors; and therefore, by a necessary consequence, absurdly to two of the three. Hinc illae lacrymae!”

Johnson, in my opinion, was not far wrong in his judgment, though it would be a gross injustice to regard Chesterfield as nothing but a fribble.  But men representing two such antithetic types were not likely to admire each other’s good qualities.  Whatever had been the intercourse between them, Johnson was naturally annoyed when the dignified noble published two articles in the World—­a periodical supported by such polite personages as himself and Horace Walpole—­in which the need of a dictionary was set forth, and various courtly compliments described Johnson’s fitness for a dictatorship over the language.  Nothing could be more prettily turned; but it meant, and Johnson took it to mean, I should like to have the dictionary dedicated to me:  such a compliment would add a feather to my cap, and enable me to appear to the world as a patron of literature as well as an authority upon manners.  “After making pert professions,” as Johnson said, “he had, for many years, taken no notice of me; but when my Dictionary was coming out, he fell a scribbling in the World about it.”  Johnson therefore bestowed upon the noble earl a piece of his mind in a letter which was not published till it came out in Boswell’s biography.

“My Lord,—­I have been lately informed by the proprietor of the World that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public, were written by your lordship.  To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.