" I shall only tell
you that I am insolent; I talk a great deal; I am very loud and
peremptory; I sing and dance as I walk along; and, above all, I spend an
immense sum in hair-powder, feathers, and white gloves.'
Although he entered Parliament before he had attained the legal age,
and was expected to make a great figure in that assembly, Lord
Chesterfield preferred the reputation of a wit and a beau to any other
distinction. 'Call it vanity, if you will,' he wrote in after-life to
his son, 'and possibly it was so; but my great object was to make every
man and every woman love me. I often succeeded: but why? by taking great
pains.'
According to Lord Hervey's account he often even sacrificed his interest
to his vanity. The description given of Lord Chesterfield by one as
bitter as himself implies, indeed, that great pains were requisite to
counterbalance the defects of nature. Wilkes, one of the ugliest men of
his time, used to say, that with an hour's start he would carry off the
affections of any woman from the handsomest man breathing. Lord
Chesterfield, according to Lord Hervey, required to be still longer in
advance of a rival.
'With a person,' Hervey writes, 'as disagreeable, as it was possible for
a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following many
women of the first beauty and the most in fashion.
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