But they have their
value in their way, and if they contain some utterances so unutterably
foolish as those in which Lord Chesterfield expressed himself upon Greek
literature, they contain some very excellent maxims for the management
of social life. Nobody could become a penny the worse for the study of
Chesterfield; many might become the better. They are not a whit more
cynical than, indeed they are not so cynical as, those letters of
Thackeray's to young Brown, which with all their cleverness make us
understand what Mr. Henley means when in his "Views and Reviews" he
describes him as a "writer of genius who was innately and irredeemably a
Philistine". The letters of Lord Chesterfield would not do much to make
a man a hero, but there is little in literature more unheroic than the
letters to Mr. Thomas Brown the younger.
It is curious to contrast the comparative enthusiasm with which the
Whartons write about Horace Walpole with the invective of Lord Macaulay.
To the great historian Walpole was the most eccentric, the most
artificial, the most capricious of men, who played innumerable parts and
over-acted them all, a creature to whom whatever was little seemed great
and whatever was great seemed little.
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