Enjoy The Road

Letters to His Son

Lord Chesterfield

The ideas

30 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

The book in short

What it is

A man sends his young son more than 300 letters over 22 years, trying to teach him how to get along with people, use his time, and keep control of himself. The son dies, and the last letters are to the two grandsons the man hadn’t known about.

Who it’s for

A teenager who feels awkward around people, or any reader who wants to see a father’s love come out as nagging. Good for ages 13 and up.

The big ideas

Things to try

Handle with care

Some of the earl’s advice belongs to his time and class. He held that women were to be flattered and not consulted, and he told his son to praise people where the praise would be repeated to them. Both are his opinions, not facts. He also told his son that his love would be in proportion to the boy’s merit, and that one serious quarrel would never be forgiven. His belief that a good voice beats good facts rests on the one scene he tells himself.

If you want more

The full collection has hundreds more letters, including long ones on history, on how to speak, on friendship, and on the old man’s retirement and illness.

In plain words

Have you ever walked into a room full of strangers and not known what to do with your hands? Everyone else seems to know the rules. You are sure they are all watching, and you can’t tell what you did wrong.

A man in 1746 sat down to help his son with exactly that. He thought it could be learned, and he had a lot to say.

A letter after a broken carriage

His son was riding across Europe in a broken carriage. He slept on straw and ate black bread. The roads were bad and the inns were worse, and he wrote home about it.

His father was an English earl named Lord Chesterfield. The earl wasn’t sorry. Bad roads and bad inns, he said, are practice for the bigger troubles of life.

Then he gave the boy a picture to hold on to. Your mind, he said, is the carriage that has to carry you through your whole life. Some carriages are strong. Some are falling apart. The trip goes better or worse depending on which one you have. So keep yours in good repair. Look it over every day and make it stronger.

That was the first letter. The earl would send more than 300 of them over the next 22 years. The boy’s name was Philip. He was growing up to be a diplomat, a person who speaks for his country in other countries, and his father meant to get him ready.

The earl had looked his son over carefully. He found nothing wrong with his heart or his head. But he did find laziness, not paying attention, and not caring.

So the first rule was about attention. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, the earl said, and nothing is done well without attention. He carried that all the way down to the smallest things, even dancing and clothes.

The boy who dropped his knife

A man named Sir Charles Williams had seen Philip in company, and he gave the earl a report. The good news came first. The boy knew a great deal. Everyone said so.

Then the earl asked about the other things, and the answers got worse. In company, the boy was often far away in his head. He came into a room awkwardly. At dinner he kept knocking knives, forks, napkins and bread onto the floor. And he didn’t seem to care what he wore.

The earl’s answer was long and very angry. I would rather sit with a dead man than an absent one, he told his son. The dead man at least doesn’t make me feel small. The absent man tells me, without a word, that I’m not worth his attention. And people never forget being treated that way.

Then he gave a warning. If you walk into my room with your head somewhere else, I’ll leave it. If you saw at a chicken wing for half an hour with your sleeve in another dish, I’ll have to get up from the table.

In the same letter he said he was glad the diamond buckles he had sent for Philip’s shoes had arrived. He asked only that they end up on the boy’s feet, where people could see them, and not hidden under his stockings.

What the earl wanted had a name. He called it the Graces. It meant ease: a good walk, a clear voice, a face that isn’t sour or scared, and a way of making people feel you are glad to be there.

Nobody is born with it, the earl said. You can pick it up by copying. He knew, because he had done it himself.

At 19 he left university sure he knew everything. At parties he quoted old Roman poets. In The Hague, in the Netherlands, he found that nearly every idea he had was wrong. So he began to watch the people everyone liked. He studied how they dressed and how they talked. He copied the ones who seemed easy and friendly. And he asked fine ladies to train him, laughing at how awkward he was.

Years later, he said that wish to please people had done more for him than anything he knew.

How to make someone glad you came

The earl had a lot of rules for pleasing people. Most are about noticing.

Treat people the way you’d want to be treated. It was the surest method he knew. Then get specific. Find out what each person likes, and have it ready. If a friend is coming to dinner, remember the dish he liked last time and have it on the table. When it arrives, say, I noticed you liked this one, so I made sure we had it.

The smaller the thing, the better it works, said the earl. It shows you were thinking about him. In the same way, if someone can’t stand cats, or cheese, don’t laugh at him, and don’t let a cat come near him if you can help it.

Above all, he said, don’t talk about yourself. Everyone wants to be praised, so people brag. Some brag straight out. Some brag by pretending to complain. Nobody believes either kind. The earl gave an example. One man said he had ridden 100 miles in 6 hours. If that’s true, said the earl, he’d make a good post rider, and that’s all. Bragging makes your flaws easier to see and your good points harder. If you stay quiet about yourself, the praise you deserve will find its own way to you.

Keep your stories short too. Tell one only when it fits the talk, and use few words. And never grab someone by the button of his coat to make him stay. If people don’t want to listen to you, you’d do better to hold your tongue than to hold them.

Most serious of all was the rule about looking down on people. People forgive being hurt sooner than they forgive being looked down on. Even when you’re right that someone is a fool, the earl said, hide it. He called copying people to make fun of them the favorite game of little minds. Don’t do it, and don’t clap for someone who does.

The man who read poetry in the bathroom

Once the earl knew a man who was so careful with his time that he wouldn’t waste even the minutes everyone else wastes.

He kept a cheap copy of the poet Horace. He tore out a couple of pages at a time, carried them to the bathroom, read them there, and threw them away. Little by little, he got through all the Latin poets.

The earl told the story to his son and told him to try it. Then he turned the idea into one line. He had once known a stingy man who liked to say, take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves. That’s a fine saying for a man who loves money, said the earl. Here is mine, for something worth more:

I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves.

Many people lose two or three hours every day, he said, just by ignoring the small leftover bits. Add them up and you have more time than you think.

He made the boy a deal. If you do everything I ask until you are 18, I’ll do everything you ask afterward. Whatever you don’t learn before 18, he said, you’ll never really master. Knowledge planted when you’re young gives shade when you’re old.

The earl also gave plain advice that worked. Pick one day a week for your accounts. Keep your papers sorted so you can find any one of them. Get up at the same hour every morning, even after a late night. After a month of this, he said, you’ll find it harder to stop than to keep going.

He knew what he was talking about, because he had wasted time himself. When he looked back at his youth, he didn’t regret the fun. He didn’t regret the hard work either. What he regretted, and always would, was the time he lost doing nothing at all.

Who told you that?

There was another mistake the earl wanted his son to skip. He had made it himself, and it was about fun.

When he was young, he said, he believed in a kind of person called a man of pleasure. That man drank wine, gambled and swore, and he was the sort of fine gentleman everyone wanted to be.

So the earl did all of it. He hated drinking, but he drank anyway. Cards cost him 30 of the best years of his life, and he didn’t even need the money. For a while, he swore too. His health and his money both paid for it.

And all of it, he said, came from one thing. He took his idea of fun from the people around him, and never asked himself what he actually enjoyed.

So he told Philip to choose his own pleasures. Real ones are reading, good company, and the dinners and dances where you can relax while your manners get polished. Those are the fashionable ones too, said the earl. Nobody wants to invite a man who is falling-down drunk.

Friends worked the same way. Real friendship grows slowly, he said. If a stranger tells you he is your best friend after a few days, be polite and a little careful. A friendship made by drinking and carrying on usually ends the minute something scatters the group. But he added one thing. Don’t make an enemy of someone just because you don’t want him as a friend. Fools and tricksters come in large numbers, and it’s easier to keep the peace.

He liked a Spanish saying: tell me who you spend your time with, and I’ll tell you who you are. So spend time with people who are better than you in the things that count.

Then he told his son not to believe things just because they’re in books, or because friends say so. For years, he explained, he had picked up opinions that way without once checking them. Only later did he start to ask himself, Is this true? Is it even mine?

Use your own reason, he told Philip. It can be wrong. But it is wrong less often than any other guide you have. And watch how people get stuck. They say a thing at first because somebody else said it. Then they keep saying it because they’ve said it before.

The speech nobody understood

The earl had spoken often in the House of Lords, and he told his son about a job where he had to talk his way through something he didn’t understand.

England at the time still used an old calendar. By then it was 11 days off from the one most of Europe used. The earl thought that was embarrassing. He worked with lawyers and astronomers on a new law to fix it. Then he had to explain it to the House of Lords.

The law was full of legal words and star math, and he knew none of it. He said he could have spoken to the lords in a foreign language and they’d have understood him as well.

So he did something else. He gave them a history of calendars, starting with the Egyptians, with a few little stories along the way. Every word was chosen with care, the sentences were made to flow, and he took pains over how he spoke and how he moved.

It worked. The lords thought he had made it all clear, when he hadn’t even tried. Then a lord who had helped write the law stood up. He was one of the best astronomers in Europe. He spoke more clearly than the earl, and he knew far more. But the lords liked the earl’s words better.

That was how the earl told it, and he used it as proof of his own idea: a good voice and good words can win a room. He told Philip to work on both. Say a hard sound millions of times until it comes out right. Read out loud, even when you’re alone. Write a clear, quick hand.

That last part was a sore spot. Philip’s handwriting was bad. Once a bill for 90 pounds came in with Philip’s name on it, and the writing was so poor that the earl could hardly believe it was his son’s. He paid anyway, but said he’d almost rather lose the money than see that signature be Philip’s. Another time a payment came signed in a very good hand. The earl told his son that proved a good hand could be written without any help from magic.

A hot temper and a soft voice

There was one more thing the earl asked of Philip, and it was harder than everything else. He asked him to hold back his temper.

He had a short rule in Latin for it. It meant: be gentle in how you act, and firm in what you want. The two halves need each other. Gentleness alone turns into giving in to anyone. Firmness alone turns into bullying. If you order a servant to bring you wine in a rough, rude way, he said, don’t be surprised if some of it ends up on your coat.

And when you feel your temper rising, say nothing until you can say it softly. Don’t let your face show what you feel. The earl said that being able to hide your feelings from your face was a great help in any kind of business.

He had a story about it. In 1744 he went to The Hague, in the Netherlands, to ask the Dutch to join a war. The French had sent a clever man to stop him, so the two of them were on opposite sides.

They couldn’t even visit each other. So the earl had himself introduced at a place that belonged to neither side. He said they were enemies because of their countries, but he hoped they could be friends as men. The Frenchman answered just as politely.

Two days later, the earl went early to see some Dutch leaders, and the Frenchman was already there. The earl smiled. Gentlemen, he said, I’m sorry to find my enemy here. I already know how good he is. He got here first. But I’ll make sure I get the last word.

The Dutch leaders smiled. The Frenchman was pleased by the joke, stayed a few minutes, and left. And the earl got what he came for.

He told his son there are only two ways to treat someone who is against you: be very polite, or knock him down. If a man insults you on purpose, you may have to knock him down. If he only works against you, be very polite and work against him just as hard. But the earl drew one line. Being polite is fine. Pretending to be a person’s friend when you aren’t is not.

And that led to the hardest rule. You may stay silent. You may refuse to answer a question. If a foreign leader asks what your orders are, you can say, I’m surprised you ask, and I think you know I can’t tell you. But never tell a lie. A lie that is found out ends your credit, and people won’t believe you again.

What a father keeps writing

The earl said why he kept writing the same advice again and again. Letters got lost on the way, so he repeated himself on purpose. He was afraid of leaving something out. He was never afraid of saying something twice.

Under all of it was something he said plainly. Nineteen fathers in twenty, he told his son, would have ruined a boy they loved even half as much as he did. So he had been strict while the boy was young, to make sure that someday Philip would understand how strong the love underneath had been.

As the years passed, the earl went deaf and his body ached. He joked about his doctors. One year he said he owed his health not to them but to an ass and a cow. In the morning the ass gave him milk, and at night the cow did.

Philip grew up and worked in the cities of Europe. In 1768 he died. The news came from his wife. The earl hadn’t known Philip had a wife. Philip had married in secret, and they had two small boys.

The earl took over the cost of the boys. He wrote to their mother: from now on, the two boys will not cost you a single shilling. He played with them so long that he forgot to talk about school. When it was time for school, he asked her to try not to fuss, because a mother’s tears would only scare them.

In the end the carriage came back. It was the earl’s own coach, sent to carry the boys and their mother, and all their enormous pile of bags, to their new school.

Of all the letters, the last was to the boys themselves. They had written to him, and the earl said they were the best-written letters he had ever seen. He wasn’t surprised by Charles, who loved books. But the other boy? You lazy rogue, how did you learn to write so well? And he’d heard that the other boy had a nickname at school, because of a friend called Strangeways. Was that true?

There was no advice in that letter. Nothing about standing up straight, or time, or temper. He used an old way of saying from here: from hence. Then he asked them what they wanted. The earl put it this way:

Tell me what you would have me bring you both from hence, and I will bring it you, when I come to town.

The long read

A boy is somewhere between Heidelberg and Schaffhausen in October 1746. He sleeps on straw, eats black bread, and rides in a broken berline, a heavy traveling carriage. A man at Bath hears about it and finds it useful. These distresses, he says, are proper seasonings for the greater fatigues ahead, samples of the accidents, rubs and difficulties that every man meets on his journey through life. In that journey the understanding is the carriage that must carry you. It can be stronger or weaker, more or less in repair, and the trip goes better or worse accordingly. Keep it in good repair, examine it and strengthen it every day.

The man is Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield. The boy is his son Philip. Over the next 22 years the father writes some 310 letters, and then, after the son’s death, a few more to the widow and the grandsons. The letters carry Old Style dates, the English calendar of the time, which ran some 11 days behind the one used on the Continent. A gap of two years opens in 1759 where the correspondence is missing. What survives is the father’s side, and the son’s replies appear only as the father answers them.

The plan behind the letters is stated early and never changes. The boy is meant for diplomacy and for the House of Commons. He is to be what the father calls l’homme universel, the whole man, equally at home with the learned and with the polite. Learning is half of that plan, and the father considers it nearly finished by 1749. The other half is manner, and that half takes up the rest of the correspondence, because the son is bad at it and the father cannot let it go.

He starts with one rule, and it is about attention. In truth, whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well; and nothing can be done well without attention. So he carries the need for attention down to the lowest things, to dancing and to dress. Custom makes dancing necessary for a young man, and therefore he should mind it while he learns it, so that he is not ridiculous even in a ridiculous act. The first fault he names in the son is laziness, inattention and indifference. These are faults pardonable in old men who have earned their tranquility, and in a young man they are a refusal to try. Behind all of it is a claim about ability: any man of common understanding may, by proper culture, care and labor, make himself whatever he pleases, except a good poet.

Inattention takes a particular form in a man who is absent-minded in company. The father is hard on him. He is either a weak man or an affected one, a man who cannot hold more than one object in his mind, or one who wants the room to think him absorbed in great matters. Newton and Locke may have had a right to absence, together with five or six others since the creation of the world, and a young man with no such work to plead should have the right turned into an involuntary absence by being excluded from company. The point behind the scorn is practical. An absent man tells everyone near him, without a word, that they are not worth his attention. People remember that and repay it. A little later in the same letter the father gives the opposite instruction in its positive form. Show a man that he is the object of your attention, and make it specific. If a man has an aversion to cats or to cheese, do not laugh at him and do not let the thing come in his way. Care of that kind makes him your friend more surely than a larger service would, because it flatters his vanity, the small vanity that every person has.

Each subject comes back many times, and the father says why. Letters to the Continent go astray and arrive late or not at all, so he repeats the same advice by every post. He is afraid of omitting something, he says, and never afraid of repeating it. At the end of 1749 he even imagines the son’s reaction when the letters reach the parts on eloquence and politeness, What, will he never have done upon those two subjects?, and he does not stop.

His first large subject is pleasure, and he treats it as the thing a young man is most likely to get wrong. Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon, he says. They launch out with crowded sails and no compass. The usual error is to take the idea of pleasure from the people around you, and the people around a young man call drinking, gambling and swearing by that name. The father confesses without being asked that he did this himself. Though he hated drinking, he drank, because he thought it a necessary part of being a fine gentleman. Cards cost him 30 of the best years of his life, by his own count, in which he was solidly uneasy over a game he had no need to play for money. For a while he even swore, to complete the shining character he was putting on, and his fortune and his health, he says, paid the price. The advice that follows is to choose pleasures for yourself, to follow nature and not fashion, and to weigh each pleasure against its consequences. The father says he does not mean to preach against pleasure like a parson or snarl at it like a Stoic, and he recommends it like an Epicurean. His list of real pleasures is reading, good company above you, and mixed society of men and women of fashion, which unbends the mind and polishes the manners. They are also the fashionable ones, since a man who is reeling drunk is not welcome in good company.

The same distinction returns in a sharper form when the son reaches Paris. A rake, he says, is made of all the lowest vices, and a footman can make as good a rake as a man of the first quality. A man of pleasure, even when he is less careful than he should be, refines his pleasures with taste, accompanies them with decency and enjoys them with dignity. Few men can be men of pleasure, and any man can be a rake. The father’s own claim here is that in the wildest part of his youth he never was a rake. He also says that his fortune and his constitution paid for playing the man of pleasure, and the two statements sit side by side.

Friendship comes next. The young have an unguarded frankness that makes them easy prey for the artful, and they take every knave or fool who calls himself their friend at his word. Real friendship is a slow grower and never thrives unless engrafted upon a stock of known and reciprocal merit. A quick friendship between young men thrown together by drink and riot is a conspiracy against morals and good manners, and the father says it deserves the magistrate’s attention more than the name of friendship. He gives a Spanish proverb, tell me who you live with and I will tell you who you are, because people will judge the son by his companions. His advice has two edges. Decline the friendship of knaves and fools, and do not make enemies of them either, because their numbers are large. Be civil to all and trusting of almost none. Have a real reserve with almost everybody and a seeming reserve with almost nobody, since it is disagreeable to seem reserved and dangerous not to be.

The choice of company matters as much. Keep company above you, the father says, and he means above you in merit and in the world’s opinion of them, not in birth. He remembers being in company with Addison and Pope, and feeling as if he were in the company of all the princes of Europe. Low company is the company of those who are insignificant and contemptible themselves, and who think they are honored by yours. They flatter every vice you have in order to keep you. The pride of being first in the room is common and ruinous, and a man who sinks into bad company for that reason is trading his character for a small superiority.

Out of all this comes the art of pleasing, which the father calls necessary and difficult, and says can hardly be reduced to rules. The first rule is to do as you would be done by. Observe what pleases you in others and give it to them. Take the tone of the company and do not pretend to give it. Never tell a story unless it is short and fits the moment, banish your own concerns from conversation, and do not display your own excellences. If they are real they will be discovered, and with more effect. In an argument, give your view coolly and, if it is not working, change the subject with good humor.

The method then becomes more calculating. He tells the son to find a person’s predominant excellence and prevailing weakness, and to do justice to the one and more than justice to the other. Cardinal Richelieu was the ablest statesman of his time and wanted to be thought the best poet, and the men who flattered him well said little of his statecraft and a great deal of his verses. Sir Robert Walpole, the father says, wanted most to be thought a gallant man, and had less gallantry than anyone living, and that was where he was reached. The father then draws a line he repeats afterward. Flatter nobody’s vices or crimes, and abhor and discourage them. But there is no living in the world without a complaisant indulgence for people’s weaknesses and innocent vanities. Complaisance here means the willingness to go along with others for the sake of ease. If a man wants to be thought wiser or a woman handsomer than they are, the error is a comfortable one for them and harmless to anyone else, and the father would rather make them friends by indulging it than enemies by trying to undeceive them.

He closes the letter by calling these some of the arcana, the secrets, necessary for initiation into the great society of the world. He paid for them, he says, with 53 years, and he will not grudge the price if the son reaps the advantage.

Time is the next large subject, and it gets its own letters. There is nothing he more wishes the son to know, he says, and fewer people know it, than the true use and value of time. Every fool who wastes his hours can quote some commonplace about the fleetness of time, and the sundials all over Europe carry mottoes to the same effect, so nobody wastes time without being told. He argues from the particular period of the boy’s life. Whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation of before 18 you will never master while you breathe. Knowledge is a shelter in old age, and if it is not planted young it gives no shade when the man is old. Up to that age he proposes a bargain: if the son does everything the father asks until 18, the father will do everything the son asks afterward.

He gives an example. A gentleman he knew was so good a manager of his time that he would not lose the small portion of it that nature obliges a man to pass in the necessary-house, a privy. He went through all the Latin poets in those moments, tearing a couple of pages at a time out of a cheap Horace, reading them there and sending them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina, the Roman goddess of the sewers. The father recommends the practice. Books of science must be read with continuity, but there are many useful ones, he says, that can be read by snatches, and dictionaries are good for the idle intervals that everybody has between studies and pleasures.

The next saying is an adaptation. A covetous, sordid man he once knew used to say, take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves. That was a just reflection in a miser, says the father, and he recommends the same idea turned toward the thing he values. I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves. Many people lose two or three hours every day by not taking care of the minutes. In a later letter the saying is credited to Old Mr. Lowndes, the famous Secretary of the Treasury, and the arithmetic of time is spelled out: a man who has a call to make at noon and finds nobody at home at eleven should write a letter or open a book, and in a year that habit makes fifty percent of the time that others make three or four percent of.

Method follows from this. Dispatch, meaning the prompt carrying out of business, is the soul of business, he says, and nothing contributes more to it than method. Lay down a method for everything. Fix one day a week for accounts, and dock and tie up letters and papers in their classes so that any one can be found at once. Read in a consecutive course instead of in scraps. Get up at the same hour every morning, however late you sat up. He says youth will object that this is dull and restricts a noble spirit, and he denies it. After a month of method it is troublesome to lay it aside, and it brings more taste for pleasure, not less, because a ball or a play affects a man who has employed his day more than one who has lost it. Idleness, he says, is only the refuge of weak minds and the holiday of fools.

In 1757, in retirement, he says he has so little to do that he wonders how he finds time to write so often. He calls it an undoubted truth that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, he says, and procrastinates, and can do the thing whenever one will, and so seldom does it at all.

Learning is the next subject, and the father wants it without its usual vices. Every excellence, he says, has its kindred vice, and generosity runs into profusion, economy into avarice and courage into rashness. Great learning that is not accompanied by good judgment runs into pedantry, and he lists the pedants. Some scholars pronounce judgment without appeal. Others talk of the ancients as more than men and of the moderns as less. A third kind draws maxims for public life from parallel cases in the old historians, without noticing that no two cases were ever exactly parallel, and the father says that such a man, with the country at war with the Gauls, would propose keeping geese in the Tower because geese once saved the Capitol. The communicative pedants decorate every sentence with Greek and Latin, and call Horace that sly rogue and Virgil Maro. His rule for all of them is plain. The more you know, the more modestly you should speak. Where you are sure, seem doubtful, and to convince others seem open to conviction yourself. Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry. Then comes the line about the watch. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one. If someone asks the time, tell it, and do not announce it hourly like the watchman.

Under this advice is a confession, and the father makes it more than once. He went from Cambridge a pedant. When he talked his best he quoted Horace, when he wanted to be funny he quoted Martial, and when he wanted to be a fine gentleman he talked Ovid. He thought the ancients alone had common sense, and he was half inclined to wear a toga. He arrived at The Hague at 19 with letters of introduction and was introduced into the best company, where he found himself mistaken in almost every notion he had. Having a strong desire to please and no means of it, he set about getting the means. He studied the dress, air, manner and talk of the people in fashion, copied the ones reckoned genteel, and asked fine ladies to take him on as a pupil. What little figure he has made in the world, he says, owes much more to that passionate wish to please than to merit or knowledge.

The same history appears from the other side in a letter about prejudice. He says it is not many years since he presumed to reflect for himself. Till 16 or 17 he reflected on nothing, and for years afterward he made no use of what he had. His first prejudice was a classical enthusiasm, the belief that there had been no common sense for 1,500 years. He now believes human nature is always the same, that Achilles was a brute and a scoundrel, and that the devil is the hero of Milton’s poem. He gives equal disrespect to the religious prejudice, the idea that no honest man could be saved outside the Church of England, and then to the prejudice of the beau monde, the fashionable world, which holds that the genteel vices are necessary. His conclusion is to use and assert your own reason. It will not always prove an unerring guide, but it will prove the least erring that you can follow, and of all the troubles, do not decline the trouble of thinking.

Then the letter turns against what it has just said. The herd of mankind, he adds, can hardly be said to think, and he believes it is better that way, since common prejudices contribute more to order than their own separate reasonings would. We have, he says, many useful prejudices in this country which he would be sorry to see removed. He gives two examples. The conviction that the Pope is Antichrist protects England from popery better than all of Chillingworth’s arguments. And the story that the Pretender was brought into the queen’s bed in a warming pan, which he calls as destitute of probability as of foundation, has done more harm to Jacobitism than everything Locke wrote. The letter holds both positions and does not choose between them: the boy is to think for himself, and the crowd is to be steered by what it believes.

The letters also set the son a second curriculum, in history and politics. He is to know the present state of every power in Europe, in strength, revenue and commerce, and the father puts to him questions he cannot answer himself. Can the Elector of Saxony put a subject to death for treason without a public trial? Can he imprison one without trial, banish one, or tax the country without the consent of its estates? What troops does he keep, and what is his revenue? The son is his German oracle, he says, who has the advantage over the oracles of old that he is only consulted about the past and the present.

History is to be read with the same suspicion the father brings to opinion. In April 1748 he takes the Reformation as an example. Luther, an Augustinian monk enraged that the Dominicans had been let into a share of the profitable trade in indulgences, turned reformer, and the father thinks that disappointment and resentment, more than religious zeal, caused the great event, though the effect was good all the same. Most historical events, traced to their true causes, would be little nobler than Luther’s disappointed avarice, he fears, and he looks with some contempt on the historians who give every event a deep political cause. People are made up of inconsistencies. A light supper, a good night’s sleep and a fine morning have made a hero of a man who, with an indigestion, a restless night and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward. He doubts even the facts. No recent fact is told twice in the same way by the several eyewitnesses, and a man who took part in a transaction will not write it fairly, and a man who did not cannot. History still has to be known, he adds, because the best histories are taken for granted in conversation, and he would be ashamed not to know that Caesar’s ghost appeared to Brutus, though he is convinced it did not.

Another letter takes the Cardinal de Retz’s memoirs as a text. Things we see in our own time surprise us less than things we read of in the past, the cardinal says, though they are no less extraordinary, and the people of Rome, he adds, were not greatly surprised when Caligula made his horse a consul, since they had been prepared by a gradual run of extravagances from the same quarter. The father’s own example is a boy of 18 executed in 1718 for planning to shoot the king, who would have been pardoned had he shown any sorrow, and who said instead that he would try again, as a duty to his country. Reason puts the boy level with Regulus, the father says, but prejudice and the recency of the fact make him a common malefactor and Regulus a hero. The lesson is to analyze one’s notions and see whether habit and prejudice are their principal parts. People capable of reasoning live and die in errors out of laziness, he says. They say things at first because others have said them, and then they persist because they have said them themselves.

Institutions get the same hard look. The son is told to study the Jesuits, a society of which, as the father puts it, so little good is said and so much ill believed, and which still not only subsists but flourishes, and so must be a very able one. If its religious and moral principles are to be detested, as he says they justly are, the wisdom of its political principles is as justly to be admired.

On women he says things that need to be read carefully. The son must please them, because their opinions go a long way in making a man’s character in the fashionable world, and so the father promises to let him in on certain arcana, which he must conceal and never seem to know. Women, then, are only children of a larger growth, he says, with an entertaining tattle and sometimes wit, and he never knew in his life one who reasoned or acted consequentially for 24 hours together. A man of sense trifles with them, humors them and flatters them as he would a sprightly forward child, and neither consults them about serious matters nor trusts them with them, though he often makes them believe he does both. No flattery is too high or too low for them. If a woman is indisputably beautiful or indisputably ugly, flatter her on her understanding, and if she is in between, flatter her on her beauty. In the same letter he says one may safely flatter any woman from her understanding down to the taste of her fan, and in another that women have but two passions, vanity and love. In another letter he says that reputation for chastity is less necessary for a woman than veracity is for a man, because a woman’s slips are bodily frailties and a man’s lie is a vice of the heart.

Alongside this there is a practice that cuts against the doctrine. The son is told to spend his evenings with women of fashion, whose company smooths the manners and gives a habit of attention. A woman who has always pleased and often been pleased, he says of one of them, can best teach the art of pleasing. Lady Hervey, a friend, he calls a pleasing Falstaff, who not only pleases but causes pleasing in others, and he declares her responsible to him for his son’s pleasing.

The father’s rules for conversation come in a letter from Bath in October 1748. Talk often, but never long, so that if you do not please you at least do not tire. Pay your own reckoning but do not treat the whole company. Tell stories very seldom, and only where they are very apt and very short. Never hold anybody by the button or the hand to make them hear you out, because if they do not want to hear you, you had better hold your tongue than them. Long talkers pick one unlucky neighbor and pour words into his ear, which is ill-bred and a kind of fraud, since conversation is joint property. If a long talker takes hold of you, hear him with patience if he is worth obliging. Take the tone of the company, avoid argumentative conversations, and, if one heats up, end it with some genteel levity. He once quieted a hubbub by saying that he could not answer for the discretion of the passers-by in the street, who must hear everything.

Above all things and on all occasions, avoid speaking of yourself. Vanity breaks out even in the best men in every shape. Some speak advantageously of themselves abruptly and without pretext. Others say they hate to talk of themselves and then do. Others confess to the cardinal virtues by first degrading them into weaknesses, saying they cannot see anyone suffer without helping, cannot help speaking the truth though they know how imprudent it is, and that they are therefore unfit for the world. People angle for praise where none is to be caught. One man says he rode 100 miles in 6 hours, and the father’s comment is that, if true, he is a good post-boy. Another says he drank six or eight bottles at a sitting, and the father believes he is a liar, out of charity, because otherwise he would have to think him a beast. Nobody takes a man’s word for his own virtues. Silence on the subject lets the praise you deserve arrive. Waller said it of another subject, and the father applies it here: Make the wretch the most despised, Where most he wishes to be prized.

He adds a handful of smaller rules. Do not seem mysterious, since people who are mysterious with others find others mysterious with them. Look people in the face when you speak. To learn what people really think, he trusts his eyes more than his ears, because they can say whatever they like but can seldom help looking what they do not mean you to know. Neither retail nor receive scandal, since the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief. Do not mimic. A man of the world must, like the chameleon, be able to take every different hue, which is by no means criminal or abject but a necessary complaisance, because it concerns manners and not morals. Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things, since true wit and good sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. A man of parts is therefore only seen to smile.

He closes the letter with a last rule. All the rest lose half their effect if unaccompanied by the Graces. The Graces, in the Greek and Roman picture the father uses, were the goddesses who went with Venus and gave charm, and he means by the word the whole manner of a person: air, address, voice, bearing, and the pleasing ease that cannot be defined and is recognized at once. They are not inexorable ladies, he says, and may be had if properly and diligently pursued. After this, letter after letter ends with them. The son is told to sacrifice to the Graces, and without them ogni fatica e vana, all labor is vain. When a man’s first approach strikes him and wins him over, the father says, the son should stop and analyze it. He will find modesty without embarrassment, respect without timidity, an unaffected bearing, an open and cheerful face, and a dress neither negligent nor foppish, and all of it can be acquired by use and imitation, since we are, he says, more than half what we are by imitation. Dress is one of the ingredients. The son should be dressed as the generality of people of fashion are, fine where others are fine and plain where others are plain, so that he is distinguished by being well dressed and not finely dressed.

In a letter of November 1749 the father reviews the plan itself. From the time the son had life, he says, his favorite object has been to make him as perfect as the imperfections of human nature allow, convinced that education, more than nature, is the cause of the great difference between the characters of men. While the son was a child he formed his heart by habit to virtue and honor, and he now considers that object attained. The next was sound learning, and that too has more than answered his expectations. What remains is manner, and here the doctrine is stated at full strength. Good manners are to particular societies what good morals are to society in general, their cement and their security, and the ill-bred man who disturbs the quiet of private life is as justly banished from society as the thief is hanged. The deepest learning, he says, without good-breeding is unwelcome and tiresome pedantry, of use only in a man’s own closet. Good-breeding itself he defines, in a definition he takes from a friend, as the result of much good sense, some good nature and a little self-denial for the sake of others, with a view to obtaining the same indulgence from them. A man who is not perfectly well-bred is unfit for good company and unwelcome in it, will dislike it soon, then renounce it, and be reduced to solitude or, what is worse, to low company. In a second letter on the subject he says that mere common civility, bowing to those who bow, is negative good-breeding, only not being a brute, as it would be a poor commendation of a man’s cleanliness to say that he did not stink. What he asks is active, cheerful, seducing good-breeding that anticipates people’s tastes. A host, for example, who remembers a guest’s favorite dish should say, you seemed to me to give this dish a preference, and therefore I ordered it. This, the father argues, is half the son’s profession, because once the heart is engaged the understanding is easily duped, and dupe is his word. The letter closes with a comparison: good-breeding is to all worldly qualifications what charity is to all Christian virtues.

A second picture in the same letter is drawn from architecture. The Tuscan is the strongest and most solid of the architectural orders, and also the coarsest and clumsiest. A whole building built in the Tuscan order attracts no eyes and stops no passengers, but a Tuscan base with the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian rising on it seizes the most incurious eye. The son’s fabric, he says, has more of the Tuscan than of the Corinthian, and the whole front must change or nobody will knock at the door. The letter ends, without qualification, on the consequence. Without these accomplishments you will be nobody, and with them you may be anything.

The father does not leave the son’s failings to a general rule. In September 1749 he repeats a report from Sir Charles Williams, who praised the boy’s learning and then, being pressed on manner, gave worse news. The son is frequently provokingly inattentive, absent and distrait, presents himself awkwardly in a room, throws down knives, forks, napkins and bread at table, and neglects his dress. The father’s answer is long and very angry. He would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one, because the dead man at least shows no contempt. He will not keep a Flapper, the servant in Swift’s Laputa whose job is to flap the face of an absorbed philosopher to bring him back. If the son arrives absent in mind, the father gives notice, he will soon be absent in body, and if the son hacks the wing of a chicken for half an hour with his sleeve in another dish, the father must leave the table to escape the fever. The father expects him well dressed and graceful. If not, they will not converse much, because awkwardness would endanger the father’s health. Later in the same letter he says he would rather have the boy a fop than a sloven, and he thanks him for receiving the diamond buckles he sent, asking only that they be buckled upon the son’s feet and not hidden by his stockings.

In July 1750 the father sums the son up as a ledger. On one side are the son’s credits: French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, logic, ethics, history, the law of nature and nations, and public law. On the other are the debits: English, enunciation and manners. A man who owes so little, he says, can clear his account in a short time, and a prudent man will. The man who owes a great deal by long negligence despairs of paying and never looks at his account at all. Part of the encouragement is that the son is closer to what the father calls perfection, meaning being very near as well as the best, than most people at his age. Another part is that the difficulties he has already passed through were much greater than those left, which are mixed with roses.

On speech and handwriting the father is just as specific. The son’s enunciation has a hitch or hobble, and when he speaks fast he is sometimes unintelligible. Speaking is his trade, in public and in private, and the manner is full as important as the matter, since more people have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge. If you will persuade, you must first please. He tells the son to utter any difficult consonant millions and millions of times until he gets it right, and to read aloud even when alone. Handwriting is another trouble. The son writes a bad hand, and the father says every man with the use of his eyes and right hand can write whatever hand he pleases. When a bill for 90 pounds arrives drawn in the son’s name and he cannot see the signature he expects, he pays it at a venture, though he would almost rather lose the money than that such a signature should be the son’s. A later draft arrives signed in a very good hand, and the father remarks that this proves a good hand can be written without the assistance of magic.

Style and eloquence take up several letters in 1749, written when the son is in Italy. Style, he says, is the dress of thoughts, and a good thought in homely, coarse language is received as ill as a person, however well proportioned, would be in rags. As a specimen he gives an imagined business letter full of bad English, and observes that a dispatch with half those faults would blow the writer up forever. It is not every understanding that can judge of matter, but every ear judges of style. Constant experience, he says, has shown him that great purity and elegance of style, with a graceful elocution, cover a multitude of faults in a speaker or a writer. He says that a speaker who mutters or stammers out the sense of an angel, deformed by barbarism and solecisms, will never get a second hearing from him if he can help it. Gain the heart, or you gain nothing, he adds, and the eyes and the ears are the only roads to the heart.

He describes his own parliamentary career as proof. For over 40 years, he says, he has not spoken or written a word without a moment’s consideration of whether a better one is available. Whatever reputation he has as a speaker is owing more to his attention to diction than to his matter, which is necessarily the same as other people’s. The vulgar, who are always mistaken, look at a speaker as at a comet. Strip him, the father says, of the plumes that his own pride and others’ ignorance have put on him and you find a man of good common sense who reasons justly and expresses himself elegantly. A man who speaks in the House of Commons says to 400 people what he would say round the fire to 14 better judges. Give them one or two round, harmonious periods that they will repeat, and they will go home as satisfied as people do from an opera, humming a favorite tune. Most people have ears but few have judgment, so tickle the ears and you will catch the judgments.

The proof he gives in 1751 is a scene. The Julian calendar had overcharged the solar year with eleven days, and he decided that England’s continued error was not honorable in company with the other Protestant states, and he brought a bill into the House of Lords to adopt the Gregorian reform. He consulted the best lawyers and astronomers, and they put together a bill, and then his trouble began. The bill was composed of legal jargon and astronomical calculations, to both of which he was an utter stranger. He needed the Lords to think he knew something of the matter and to believe that they knew something of it themselves. He could as soon have talked Celtic to them as astronomy. So he gave them an historical account of calendars from the Egyptian down, with a few episodes, and he took particular care over his words, the roundness of his periods, his elocution and his gesture. They thought he informed them because he pleased them, and many said he had made the whole clear. Lord Macclesfield, one of the greatest mathematicians and astronomers in Europe, who had the largest share in forming the bill, spoke afterward with infinite knowledge and all the clearness the matter would allow, and the preference was most unanimously and most unjustly given to the father, because his words and utterance were better. From this he draws a rule for every public room. Every numerous assembly is a mob, he says, and mere reason and good sense is never to be talked to a mob. He puts the consequence to the son in two sentences. Your sole business now is to shine, not to weigh. Weight without lustre is lead.

He follows it to its end. You had better talk trifles elegantly to the most trifling woman than coarse inelegant sense to the most solid man, he tells the son. You had better return a dropped fan genteelly than give a thousand pounds awkwardly, and refuse a favor gracefully than grant it clumsily. Manner is all, in everything. All your Greek will never advance you from secretary to envoy or from envoy to ambassador, but your address, your manner and your air may, and Marcel, the Paris dancing master, can be of much more use to the son than Aristotle. He says he would rather the boy had Bolingbroke’s style than all the learning of the Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society and the two universities together. The scene shows that the Lords preferred his delivery to the astronomer’s matter. It does not show that they were persuaded, and in this letter he does not report how the vote went. In another, a few weeks later, he says that whatever applause the speech met with was owing to the words and the delivery, and by no means to the matter, of which he was not master.

A letter on morals and honesty comes between the lessons on manner. The son’s moral character, he tells the boy, must be not only pure but, like Caesar’s wife, unsuspected. The least speck is fatal. He argues for the appearances of both religion and morality, as well as the reality, because every man is the worse looked upon for being thought to have no religion, and a wise atheist would pretend to some. Religion is a collateral security to virtue, and a prudent man sooner trusts two securities than one. He cites Colonel Chartres, the most notorious rascal of the day, who said he would not give a farthing for virtue but would give ten thousand pounds for a character, since he would get a hundred thousand by it. He asks whether an honest man can neglect what a wise rogue would pay so dear for.

Then he turns to lying, which he calls the only art of mean capacities and the only refuge of mean spirits. The prudence and necessity of concealing the truth, he says, insensibly seduce people into violating it. Concealing the truth on proper occasions is as prudent and as innocent as telling a lie on any occasion is infamous and foolish. He supposes the son employed at a foreign court and asked by the minister what his instructions are. The son must not lie, because the lie will be found out and his credit destroyed, and he must not tell the truth and betray his trust. He should answer with firmness that he is surprised at the question, that the minister cannot expect an answer, and that at all events he will not have one. The reply gives the minister confidence in the son, and the son may afterward turn that opinion to honest and fair advantage. He quotes Bacon on simulation and dissimulation, and he says the ablest men have a name for openness and veracity, and, like well-managed horses, know when to stop and turn. There are people, he says, who lie out of vanity, who have seen things that never existed, who are heroes of their own fables, and who get ridicule and contempt for it, because anyone who will tell a lie from idle vanity will tell a greater for interest.

A letter written in 1752 gives the same position in a sentence. Good manners to those one does not love are no more a breach of truth than your humble servant at the bottom of a challenge, because they are universally understood to be things of course. Truth, but not the whole truth, must be the invariable principle of every man, who hath either religion, honor, or prudence. Lies and perfidy are the refuge of fools and cowards. He sets the line in two places, at the lie and at the profession of friendship one does not feel. In the same letter he says that a man must often put on an easy, frank countenance on very disagreeable occasions, must seem pleased when he is much otherwise, and must be able to receive with smiles those whom he would rather meet with swords. In courts, he says, a man must not turn himself inside out. He says that all this may, and must, be done without falsehood and treachery.

He also teaches the art of flattering behind a person’s back. Speak advantageously of the best people at a court, he says, in company you have reason to think will repeat it, and he calls it an innocent piece of art. The same man who says that lying destroys credit tells the son to say flattering things where they will be carried back.

His rule for temper comes in a letter of early 1751. The father takes a Latin tag as a sermon text and parodies his own pulpit manner. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re means gentleness in the manner, firmness in the thing. The two halves need each other. Gentleness alone sinks into timid compliance and passivity, and firmness alone runs into impetuosity and brutality. The choleric man, with strong animal spirits, despises the first half and thinks he will carry everything by the second, and he succeeds only against weak and timid people and is generally hated. The cunning man, who becomes all things to all men and seems to have no opinion of his own, gets into the esteem of fools and is soon detected. Only the wise man joins the two. Commands given gently by a person in authority are obeyed cheerfully, and so well. A glass of wine ordered of a footman in a rough, insulting manner, the father says, would probably arrive with some of it spilled on him, and he would deserve it. A hasty temper should be watched, and the gentle manner called in to help. At the first impulse of passion, be silent till you can be soft. Get such command of your face that the feeling cannot be read in it. He concludes that gentleness of manners with firmness of mind is a short but full description of human perfection on this side of religious and moral duties.

A letter of April 1752 says what it takes. Having a man’s knowledge of the world, avoir du monde, which the father defines as having address and manners and knowing how to behave in all companies, teaches two things to which nature does not incline us, which are the command of our temper and the command of our countenance. A man who does not have it is inflamed with anger or annihilated with shame by every disagreeable incident, one making him talk like a madman and the other look like a fool. The man who has it seems not to understand what he cannot or ought not to resent. If he makes a slip, he recovers by coolness, instead of plunging deeper like a stumbling horse. People unused to the world have babbling countenances and show what they have sense enough not to tell. The father calls it the volto sciolto a pensieri stretti, an open face above closed thoughts. A learned parson rusting in a cell at Oxford, he adds, will analyze the passions of man and know nothing of man, because he has not lived with him, just as a man who studies the notation of dances will dance awkwardly if he has never seen others dance.

The scene he offers is from The Hague in 1744, where he had gone to engage the Dutch to join the war and to stipulate their quota of troops, and where the French had sent the Abbé de la Ville to prevent it. Hearing that the abbé had ability, temper and industry, he was sorry. They could not visit, since their masters were at war, so at a third place he had himself presented and said that though they were national enemies he hoped they might be personal friends, and the abbé answered as politely. Two days later he went early to see the Deputies of Amsterdam and found the abbé there before him. He told the Deputies, smiling, that he was very sorry to find his enemy with them, that he already knew enough of his capacity to fear him, and that if he had not had the first word that day, he would at least have the last. The Deputies smiled, the abbé was pleased with the compliment and its manner, stayed a quarter of an hour and left him with the Deputies. The father carried his point. He drew from it a general rule: there are but two procedures in the world for a gentleman and a man of parts, extreme politeness or knocking down. If a man designedly insults you, knock him down. If he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him in your outward behavior while you counterwork him, and return the compliment, perhaps with interest. This is not perfidy, he says, unless you also make professions of esteem and friendship, which he abhors. Only women and little minds pout and spar for the entertainment of a company that laughs at them and never pities them. He gives a second reason, which is the least flattering one: the person you are both courting, man or woman, will say you behaved very handsomely, and the world judges by appearances, which few are able or inclined to look behind.

In the same letter he says something about love and hate. Few people, especially the young, know how to love or how to hate. Their love is an unbounded weakness, fatal to the one they love, and their hate is a hot, rash and imprudent violence, always fatal to themselves. Then he turns to his own conduct as a father. Nineteen fathers in twenty, and every mother, who had loved you half as well as I do, would have ruined you; whereas I always made you feel the weight of my authority, that you might one day know the force of my love. His advice, he hopes, will now have the same weight from choice that his authority had from necessity. As for the tender passions, the son may manage them himself, but the father keeps the direction of all the others: ambition, figure and fortune.

The terms of his love are stated outright, and early. In December 1746 he thanks the son for the concern he showed during the father’s illness, remarks that gratitude is not universal, and says that the boy’s affection can only come from his experience of his father’s fondness, since to talk of natural affection is talking nonsense. He ends the letter by promising to love the son extremely while he deserves it, and not one moment longer. A year later he spells the position out. There is no such thing as natural affection, he says, because if there were, some inward sentiment would reveal parent and child to each other without any exterior indications. Nor is his affection that of a mother, whose object is health and life. His own object is to have the son fit to live, which, if he is not, he does not desire that he should live at all. The affection will be proportioned to the son’s merit, which is the only affection one rational being ought to have for another. If the son has knowledge, honor and probity, the marks of affection will reward them, and if not, his aversion will rise in proportion, and he will be under no further obligation than to supply the means of subsisting. If they ever quarrel, the son must not expect a reconciliation from any weakness in his nature. He will never quarrel with the boy except on an essential point, and then he will never forgive. The father calls this a declaration and not a threat. At the end of 1749 he starts addressing him as his dear friend, and says that he disclaims all titles which imply an authority the son, he is persuaded, will never give him occasion to exercise.

Money the father handles with a contract. In November 1750, before the son goes to Paris, he writes that money causes most quarrels between fathers and sons, the father thinking he cannot give too little and the son that he cannot have enough, both in the wrong. He names no allowance. He will first try the son’s drafts, by which he can judge his conduct, and if the money goes through proper channels the source shall not be scanty, and if it goes into dirty, muddy channels, the source will dry up. The son will have a coach, a valet de chambre, a footman and a valet de place, which is one servant more than the father had. The son will go to the theatre and play small games in mixed company, and the father will pay for it. Gambling debts he will not pay, and if the son says his honor is pawned, the answer will be that it was the son’s honor and not the father’s that was pawned, and the creditor may take the pawn for the debt. Prostitutes and their consequences, the surgeons, are not his to pay for, nor are singers, dancers and actresses. The arrangement is, he says, a subsidiary treaty: he will pay the subsidies as punctually as England did during the last war, and requires a more scrupulous execution of the treaty on the son’s part than England met with from its allies. The letter ends with a warning that he will know everything the son says or does at Paris, as if by magic, and with Seneca’s rule that a man should ask nothing of God which he would not be willing for men to know.

Vanity the father defends, and the defense is in a letter written from Bath in 1752. Vanity, he says, or to call it by a gentler name the desire of admiration and applause, is perhaps the most universal principle of human action. He does not say it is the best. It is sometimes the cause of foolish and criminal effects, but it is so much oftener the principle of right things that it should be encouraged. Where it is lacking, we are indifferent, listless, indolent and inert. He confesses that he had it to a prodigious degree, with an insatiable thirst for popularity, and without repentance. It made him attentive and civil to women he disliked and men he despised, in hopes of the applause of both, and it made him dress, look and talk his best. He took pains to make a woman fall in love with him for whose person he would not have given a pinch of snuff. Among men he tried to outshine the most shining man, and when he failed in the first rank, he shone in a second or third. With the men he was a Proteus, and assumed every shape to please them. To this principle which philosophers call a mean one, and he does not, he owes the figure he has made in life. He fears the son has too little of it. He tells him to put the best foot foremost, to practice all the arts that ever a coquette did, and to make every man admire and every woman fall in love with him. Nothing, he says, will carry him higher in the world.

A letter of February 1751 takes up an epigram of Martial’s, non amo te, Sabidi, I do not love you, Sabidius, and I cannot say why. In the father’s reading, Sabidius is worthy, learned and deserving, and simply not agreeable. He has no engaging manners and no graces, and no single fault can be named. The father knows such a man, whose moral character and learning he admires and whom he cannot love. His legs and arms are never where they ought to be and are constantly committing acts of hostility upon the Graces, and he throws his drink anywhere but down his throat.

From the early 1750s the son is moving from court to court and then taking posts, at Hanover, Hamburg, Ratisbon and Dresden, and the father’s letters fill with courts, ministers, wars and ministries, and with his own health. They carry Prince Ferdinand’s Garter, the movements of the Prussian army, who is in and out of the Cabinet, and the death of this or that peer. The lessons in them are short. Tell me whom you see, the father says, rather than what you see. Keep a particular attention to the propriety and elegance of your style, and translate three or four lines a day from any language into the most elegant English you can, which in a quarter of an hour a day will form an habitual elegance. Begin to be a man of method, since business is carried on by method and order. At Hanover speak German even affectedly, to show that you prefer the language. At courts merit without favor does little, favor without merit does a good deal, and favor and merit together do everything. A man who sets out in the world with real timidity, he says in another letter, has not an equal chance, and will be discouraged, put by or trampled upon.

A letter of February 1754 gathers the father’s position at that date. He says that the one thing he fears for the son is laziness, which would make him stagnate in a contemptible obscurity all his life, and he calls indolence a sort of suicide, because the man is effectually destroyed though the appetites of the brute may survive. Business, he adds, by no means forbids pleasures, since they season each other and nobody enjoys either in perfection who does not join both. In the same letter he says that his own retirement is final, since he has lost his hearing and his constitution declines daily. He will not return to business and will not go to Ireland. He knows himself, he says, which is no common piece of knowledge, and he retired in time, like a satisfied guest, or, as Pope puts it better, before tittering youth shoves you from the stage. What he asks for is to be the counselor of the son’s rising ambition, a Mentor. Let me see my own youth revived in you, he says.

What he retired to is described in a letter of February 1748, six years earlier, on his first trip to Bath after giving up the seals. He has put a Latin motto on the frieze of his library, and it sets out the life he plans: at one time the books of the ancients, at another sleep and idle hours. The satisfaction he expects there, he says, will be owing to having employed part of his life well at the son’s age, because he planted young the knowledge that is now his refuge and shelter. He does not regret his time in pleasure or in business, since he has been behind the scenes of both and seen the springs and pulleys of the decorations that astonish the audience. What he regrets, and always will, is the time he lost in mere idleness and doing nothing.

From a few years later comes the letter that teaches what the father had learned about misfortune. In April 1759 the son is disappointed. He had hoped to come to England the next month, and it cannot be done, so he will come next winter and not this summer. The father’s reply is an exercise. A wise man, without being a Stoic, considers in all misfortunes their best as well as their worst side, and everything has a better and a worse side. Then he does it, step by step. He asks the son to simplify the matter and see what it amounts to. The son will pass this summer at Hamburg and next winter in England, and not the other way round. He asks whether the summer is not better, for health and pleasure, than winter in a northern frozen zone, and whether a winter in England will not supply more pleasures than a summer in an empty capital would have done. So the son is a gainer by his misfortune. The father says the philosophy is not the consolation of an old man almost insensible of pleasure and pain. It is what experience taught him, and he has practiced it above 30 years. I always made the best of the best, and never made bad worse by fretting. This has enabled him to go through the scenes of life in which he has been an actor with more pleasure and less pain than most. The son may reply that one cannot change one’s nature, and the father grants it, but only to a certain degree. Though we cannot totally change our nature, we may in a great measure correct it by reflection and philosophy. He ends the letter with an offer of 200 pounds, which, he hopes, will more than clear the son, and with a line of Horace in his own words, to be neither transported nor depressed by the accidents of life.

His own accidents are many by then, and he reports them with a joke. In 1759 he says he owes his recovery not to his physicians but to an ass and a cow, who nourish him between them, the ass in the morning and the cow at night, and he has just bought a milch-goat. In 1763 he reports a first fit of the stone or gravel, a complaint he had long suspected in his body, and he hopes his son will be kept from that and from deafness. He tells the son to take care of his health as much as he can, because to be, or not to be, is a question of much less importance than to be or not to be well. He writes that Bath, where he goes for his rheumatism, is a place where every day is still but as the first. When he is about 70 he says the beginning of autumn is already cold, the leaves fall apace and seem to intimate that he must follow them, which he shall do without reluctance, being extremely weary of this silly world. He adds, God bless you, both in it and after it.

The last letter to the son is dated in October 1768 and is mostly about swollen legs. The son’s two latest letters have alarmed him, and he hopes the son thinks himself worse than he is, as sick people do. Above 40 years ago, he recalls, after a fever, his own legs swelled in the same way, and the doctors said it was not dropsy, and they were right. In four successive letters he has sent the son snuff from the Duchess of Somerset. If it was not good for man to be alone originally, he says, it is much worse for a sick man, who thinks too much of his distemper and magnifies it, and he suggests that some learned ecclesiastics would be glad to sit with the son. Harte, the tutor, who has lost the use of his left side, asked after the son with great affection, and the father himself can hardly go up or down stairs without a servant. The editor’s note after it says the son died the next month, and that the death was announced by a lady to whom Mr. Stanhope had been married for several years, without his father’s knowledge. She had two sons by the son.

After that come letters to the widow. In the first one an inflammation of his eyes makes him use another hand to write it. He tells her that all he asks for his own burial is not to be buried alive, and that how and where he is buried must be a matter of indifference to every rational creature. In the next he says that the last time he saw her he was so taken up in playing with the boys that he forgot their more important affairs, and he asks how soon she would have them at school. He tells her to equip them with clothes, all good but plain, and to send him the account, because from this time forward the two boys are not to cost her one shilling. He fixes the 8th of the next month for school. When she leaves them there, he asks her to suppress as well as she can the overgrowings of maternal tenderness, which would grieve the boys the more and give them a terror of the new place. He will send his own coach to carry her and the boys, with all their immense baggage, to Loughborough House.

At the end, the carriage that began the correspondence, the broken berline between Heidelberg and Schaffhausen, comes back as a coach sent for two small boys. The old habits stay. He teases the widow about widows. One swallow makes no summer, he says, five righteous men were once necessary to save a city and could not be found, and he will keep his former opinion of widows in general until he finds four more like her. He sizes up the boys. Charles will be a scholar, if she pleases, but Philip, without being one, will be something as good, though he cannot yet guess what. Phil, he supposes, has been in some scrapes, and he will come triumphantly out of them by dint of strength and resolution. Man does not live, in his opinion, by Greek and Latin alone, which means knowing a great many words of two dead languages that nobody living knows perfectly. Useful knowledge, he says, is modern languages, history and geography, with some Latin thrown in for custom and for closet amusement.

His own state he reports without ornament. Her kind anxiety for his health and life, he says in 1769, is more than they are worth, since without the one the other is a burden, and he is very weary of it. In 1770 he has a letter from the boys, and reports that Charles’s was very finely written and Philip’s very prettily, and that they say they want nothing. In 1771 he tells her that she interests herself in the state of his existence more than he does, and that it is worth the care of neither of them.

The last letter is to the boys themselves, and it is about 150 words long. He has received two of the best written letters he ever saw in his life. As for Charles, he did not wonder, because Charles will take pains and is a lover of letters. But you, idle rogue, you Phil, how came you to write so well? He has heard that Phil has a nickname at school, from his friendship with a Master Strangeways, and that to be rude they call him Master Strangeways, a strange boy. Is it true? There is nothing in it about the Graces, the minutes, the learned or the temper. It asks the boys what they want from London and offers to bring it.

One real line. “Tell me what you would have me bring you both from hence, and I will bring it you, when I come to town.” — Chesterfield, Letters to His Son.

What didn’t hold. The seams here are of opinion and of period, and none is a failed experiment. They mark where later readers part from one man’s advice in one century.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.