This formidable personage was born in London on the 2nd day of September, 1694.  It was remarkable that the father of a man so vivacious, should have been of a morose temper; all the wit and spirit of intrigue displayed by him remind us of the frail Lady Chesterfield, in the time of Charles II.[23]—­that lady who was looked on as a martyr because her husband was jealous of her:  ‘a prodigy,’ says De Grammont, ‘in the city of London,’ where indulgent critics endeavoured to excuse his lordship on account of his bad education, and mothers vowed that none of their sons should ever set foot in Italy, lest they should ’bring back with them that infamous custom of laying restraint on their wives.’

Even Horace Walpole cites Chesterfield as the ‘witty earl:’  apropos to an anecdote which he relates of an Italian lady, who said that she was only four-and-twenty; ‘I suppose,’ said Lord Chesterfield, ’she means four-and-twenty stone.’

By his father the future wit, historian, and orator was utterly neglected; but his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax, supplied to him the place of both parents, his mother—­her daughter, Lady Elizabeth Saville—­having died in his childhood.  At the age of eighteen, Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.  It was one of the features of his character to fall at once into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown.  One can hardly imagine his being ‘an absolute pedant,’ but such was, actually, his own account of himself:—­’When I talked my best, I quoted Horace; 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.’