' This being remarked to Johnson, who was by no means pleased at
being immortalized as the Hottentot--'Sir,' he answered, 'Lord
Chesterfield never saw me eat in his life.'
[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.
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