which he termed the ‘finest room in London,’ was furnished and decorated by him.  ’The walls,’ says a writer in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ ’are covered half way up with rich and classical stores of literature; above the cases are in close series the portraits of eminent authors, French and English, with most of whom he had conversed; over these, and immediately under the massive cornice, extend all round in foot-long capitals the Horatian lines:—­

    ’Nunc . veterum . libris .  Nunc . somno . et . inertibus .  Horis. 
     Lucen . solicter . jucunda . oblivia . vitea.

’On the mantel-pieces and cabinets stand busts of old orators, interspersed with voluptuous vases and bronzes, antique or Italian, and airy statuettes in marble or alabaster of nude or semi-nude opera nymphs.’

What Chesterfield called the ‘cannonical pillars’ of the house were columns brought from Cannons, near Edgeware, the seat of the Duke of Chandos.  The antechamber of Chesterfield House has been erroneously stated as the room in which Johnson waited the great lord’s pleasure.  That state of endurance was probably passed by ‘Old Samuel’ in Bloomsbury.

In this stately abode—­one of the few, the very few, that seem to hold noblesse apart in our levelling metropolis—­Chesterfield held his assemblies of all that London, or indeed England, Paris, the Hague, or Vienna, could furnish of what was polite and charming.  Those were days when the stream of society did not, as now, flow freely, mingling with the grace of aristocracy the acquirements of hard-working professors; there was then a strong line of demarcation; it had not been broken down in the same way as now, when people of rank and wealth live in rows, instead of inhabiting hotels set apart.  Paris has sustained a similar revolution, since her gardens were built over, and their green shades, delicious, in the centre of that hot city, are seen no more.  In the very Faubourg St. Germain, the grand old hotels are rapidly disappearing, and with them something of the exclusiveness of the higher orders.  Lord Chesterfield, however, triumphantly pointing to the fruits of his taste and distribution of his wealth, witnessed, in his library at Chesterfield House, the events which time produced.  He heard of the death of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and of her bequest to him of twenty thousand pounds, and her best and largest brilliant diamond ring, ’out of the great regard she had for his merit, and the infinite obligations she had received from him.’  He witnessed the change of society and of politics which occurred when George II. expired, and the Earl of Bute, calling himself a descendant of the house of Stuart, ’and humble enough to be proud of it,’ having quitted the isle of Bute, which Lord Chesterfield calls ‘but a little south of Nova Zembla,’ took possession, not only of the affections, but even of the senses of the young king, George III., who, assisted by the widowed Princess of Wales (supposed to be attached to Lord Bute), was ’lugged out of the seraglio,’ and ‘placed upon the throne.’