Chesterfield’s frankness in so many confessions of sharp practice almost merits his canonization as a minor saint of society.  Dr. Johnson has indeed placed him on a Simeon Stylites pillar, an immortality of penance from which no good member of the writers’ guild is likely to pray his deliverance.  He commends the fine art and high science of dissimulation with the gusto of an apostle and the authority of an expert.  Dissimulate, but do not simulate, disguise your real sentiments, but do not falsify them.  Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and mouth mostly shut.  When new or stale gossip is brought to you, never let on that you know it already, nor that it really interests you.  The reading of these Letters is better than hearing the average comedy, in which the wit of a single sentence of Chesterfield suffices to carry an act.  His man-of-the-world philosophy is as old as the Proverbs of Solomon, but will always be fresh and true, and enjoyable at any age, thanks to his pithy expression, his unfailing common sense, his sparkling wit and charming humor.  This latter gift shows in the seeming lapses from his rigid rule requiring absolute elegance of expression at all times, when an unexpected coarseness, in some provincial colloquialism, crops out with picturesque force.  The beau ideal of superfineness occasionally enjoys the bliss of harking back to mother English.

Above all the defects that can be charged against the Letters, there rises the substantial merit of an honest effort to exalt the gentle in woman and man—­above the merely genteel.  “He that is gentil doeth gentil deeds,” runs the mediaeval saying which marks the distinction between the genuine and the sham in behavior.  A later age had it thus:  “Handsome is as handsome does,” and in this larger sense we have agreed to accept the motto of William of Wykeham, which declares that “Manners maketh Man.”  Oliver H. G. Leigh

LETTER I

Bath, October 9, O. S. 1746

Dear boy:  Your distresses in your journey from Heidelberg to Schaffhausen, your lying upon straw, your black bread, and your broken ‘berline,’ are proper seasonings for the greater fatigues and distresses which you must expect in the course of your travels; and, if one had a mind to moralize, one might call them the samples of the accidents, rubs, and difficulties, which every man meets with in his journey through life.  In this journey, the understanding is the ‘voiture’ that must carry you through; and in proportion as that is stronger or weaker, more or less in repair, your journey will be better or worse; though at best you will now and then find some bad roads, and some bad inns.  Take care, therefore, to keep that necessary ‘voiture’ in perfect good repair; examine, improve, and strengthen it every day:  it is in the power, and ought to be the care, of every man to do it; he that neglects it, deserves to feel, and certainly will feel, the fatal effects of that negligence.