[Illustration:  DR. JOHNSON AT LORD CHESTERFIELD’S.]

Such are the leading points of this famous and lasting controversy.  It is amusing to know that Lord Chesterfield was not always precise as to directions to his letters.  He once directed to Lord Pembroke, who was always swimming ’To the Earl of Pembroke, in the Thames, over against Whitehall.  This, as Horace Walpole remarks, was sure of finding him within a certain fathom.’

Lord Chesterfield was now admitted to be the very ‘glass of fashion,’ though age, and, according to Lord Hervey, a hideous person, impeded his being the ‘mould of form.’  ‘I don’t know why,’ writes Horace Walpole, in the dog-days, from Strawberry Hill, ’but people are always more anxious about their hay than their corn, or twenty other things that cost them more:  I suppose my Lord Chesterfield, or some such dictator, made it fashionable to care about one’s hay.  Nobody betrays solicitude about getting in his rents.’  ‘The prince of wits,’ as the same authority calls him—­’his entrance into the world was announced by his bon-mots, and his closing lips dropped repartees that sparkled with his juvenile fire.’

No one, it was generally allowed, had such a force of table-wit as Lord Chesterfield; but while the ‘Graces’ were ever his theme, he indulged himself without distinction or consideration in numerous sallies.  He was, therefore, at once sought and feared; liked but not loved; neither sex nor relationship, nor rank, nor friendship, nor obligation, nor profession, could shield his victim from what Lord Hervey calls, ’those pointed, glittering weapons, that seemed to shine only to a stander-by, but cut deep into those they touched.’

He cherished ‘a voracious appetite for abuse;’ fell upon every one that came in his way, and thus treated each one of his companions at the expense of the other.  To him Hervey, who had probably often smarted, applied the lines of Boileau—­

    ’Mais c’est un petit fou qui se croit tout permis,
     Et qui pour un bon mot va perdre vingt amis.’

Horace Walpole (a more lenient judge of Chesterfield’s merits) observes that ’Chesterfield took no less pains to be the phoenix of fine gentlemen, than Tully did to qualify himself as an orator.  Both succeeded:  Tully immortalized his name; Chesterfield’s reign lasted a little longer than that of a fashionable beauty.’  It was, perhaps, because, as Dr. Johnson said, all Lord Chesterfield’s witty sayings were puns, that even his brilliant wit failed to please, although it amused, and surprised its hearers.