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From the British Quarterly Review.

LETTERS.-CHESTERFIELD, JUNIUS, COWPER.

1. The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield; including numerous letters now first published from the original manuscripts. Edited, with Notes, by LORD MAHON. Bentley.

2. Junius; including Letters by the same writer under other signatures. With a preliminary Essay, Notes, &c. Printed by G. Woodfall.

3. Cowper's Letters. Edited by SOUTHEY. Baldwin and Craddock.

world. altogether; we must therefore mention it in quite another place.

THE majority of men say, with Horace, | that Fame consists in being pointed at with the finger.. Some, however, who have fail- These are the chief sorts of fame; and each ed to get this mark, maintain that it consists exhibits it as very scarce and very fickle. in the praise of the wise "standards of opi- ! The be-sung, be-flattered, and be-sought (but nion;"-while others, who have not been never be-guiled) goddess, even when won, either pointed at by the many or applauded seems to watch to slip away. Like the by the few, insist that it can only be award-heart of Miss Pardoe's slave, she is a fettered by posterity. A very small minority, with a courage that does them honor, declare that there is no such thing as true fame in this world at all.

less thing. Like the trained negro who was sold, under disguises in all the States, (having a happy knack of slipping the collar, and rejoining his seller before his buyer could The finger-pointing fame is mostly confer- turn him to account,) she appears ever to be red without much reflection, and withdrawn on the outlook to take flight. She should without any scruple. The object of it is not be represented with a trumpet, thereseldom worthy, and cannot keep it. The fore, but with a staff. She should be paintpublic pump is got to work, and the water ed with the loins girt, and the wings spread, comes, but the vessel receiving it being a to show constant readiness to fly-to intisieve, the liquid slips away. That fame That fame mate, moreover, that her hunters need not which is conferred by the wise, or "stand-only swiftness to obtain her, but their utmost ards of opinion," can of course only fall per- vigilance to hold her when she has been manently to the greatest minds. No others caught. can stand test, or bear the winnowing; and even if they could, the "standards" of to-morrow always have it in their power to reverse the verdict of the standards of today. The people who appeal to posterity do so only as a refuge. They would otherwise be open to the ridicule of having labored in vain-of having run, and lost. But their satisfaction is false. They care no more for posterity than you do. They have not lived and acted only to obtain praise which they can never hear; they rather solace their pride by imputing to blindness what they are ashamed to allow they should impute to merited contempt. For the courageous minority-we cannot deal with it at present. It denies the existence of real fame in this

The finger-pointing fame has as many shapes as Proteus. Like the ancient kings in battle, she has many doubles; but, like the Banquo of the feast, most of these are false. They wear the seeming of reality, but are as insubstantial as the wind. A man believes that they are as solid as they seem to be, and rushes in pursuit-he grapples with them, he looks into them, and finds that, like the crater of Vesuvius, there is little besides vacuity. Chief in this ghostly army is political fame. It is a swift game, and for a long time baffles the keenest hunter, but as last he seizes it and makes it his. It voices out his name until he thinks the farthest age must hear; it echoes and re-echoes his praises; it trumpets him along the way: and

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With the South-Sea swindle we have now no more to do than to note, that in consequence of the excitement caused in England by its failure, the Stuart made another throw for the sceptre, but was himself thrown. The king was just at that time very popular, and Stanhope spoke in favor of augmenting the

he was made a captain in the Guards. In 1725, however, he refused the order of the Bath, then revived, and ere long was dismissed from his post. This might have been serious for him, had not both his king and his father died in the year following. He became Earl of Chesterfield. He left the Lower House with the Walpoles and Pulteneys, and other stars, shining there, and joined company with Wharton, Argyle, Carteret, Queensbury, and the other great men of the Upper one- -whose names are the stumbling-blocks in Pope's verses, and whom we anathematize when asterisks and patent pot-hooks call us down from the poetry, to prosy memoranda of their lives.

then, when his soul is swelling in him, and he hugs himself with the assurance that he will be "forever known," it suddenly dissolves under his touch, and leaves him-all the voices cease, the trumpets die away, and he falls headlong, never to be pointed at again. Political fame is like a brilliant firework, that blazes wildly for a little, and then sud-army; a declaration of attachment for which denly expires, leaving but a dim smoulder, which ere long fades out into the darkness. In 1714 the celebrated, or notorious, Lord Bolingbroke was ousted from the Secretaryship of State, and Addison the Spectator stepped into his shoes. Queen Anne died. The hasty regency party proclaimed George I., and Addison stepped out of the shoes, which were given to General Stanhope, whose kinsman, Philip Dormer Stanhope, afterwards Earl of Chesterfield, was at Cambridge. George, on ascending the throne, declared for the Whigs, and the Tories, who had been in power since Sacheverel's time, kicked the beam. In 1715 Walpole impeached Lord Bolingbroke, who fled the country. The late leader was outlawed, lived some years in France, and acquired French notions of belief. When the storm passed, he returned to England, had his outlawry reversed, made much noise, and won much applause and censure; on the whole deserving Dr. Croly's summary for his fame now that "He gave from youth to age the unhappy example of genius rendered useless, rank degraded, and opportunities thrown away. Gifted with powers which might have raised or sustained the fortunes of empire, his youth was distinguished only by systematic vice, his manhood by unprincipled ambition, and his age by callous infidelity."

In the same 1715 young Mr. Stanhope made his first speech in the House against Ormond, who was likewise impeached of high treason. This done, he immediately took a pleasure trip to Paris by advice-for he was under age, and the opposition threatened to expose him if he voted. During his stay here he is thought to have been of much service to Lord Stair, in discovering the Jacobins' plot-but be that as it may, the Chevalier de St. George's friends were induced to make the first attempt-we know with what disastrous results to every one but the dastard for whom they made it. Stanhope returned to England, and though his rising was for some time delayed, in consequence of a dispute between his Majesty and the Prince of Wales, whose side he took, his kinsman had his eye on him, and showed desire to push him on.

George II., on acceding to power, retained his father's favorites, much to the chagrin of those who championed him when Prince of Wales. But Chesterfield was not quite forgotten. He was sent ambassador to Holland in 1728, and in consequence of his tact in that position, won the king's praise when he was, a little after, travelling on the Continent. This induced Townshend to attempt to turn out Newcastle, then Secretary, and put in the Earl, which, however, he was not able to do, and Chesterfield, who had accompanied George to London, returned to Holland, after having been gartered at the king's charges. It was about this time that the Commons objected to public reports of hon. members' speeches. We hope to be pardoned for sometimes almost wishing that it objected now.

We need say little of the next years. The tragic seaman who kept his ear in his pocket, for exhibition when the time came to rouse up, the Lion to revenge it, has told his story about Spanish wrongs, and got satisfied-at least we hope so. The French intrigues,

too, and the Danish and Dutch, are over, now. The things intrigued about were rarely worth half the noise they made; and the landmarks so curiously set in those days, by battles and treaties, have been mostly washed away by the tides of later wars. Suffice it for us that Chesterfield, in 1731, gained much honor in getting the Vienna treaty signed. In 1732 he returned to England, and distinguished himself by op

gan on the door-step, after supper, in tears. His cry was liberty, and his aim was power. Such an one, invaluable for opposition, could not govern. Such talents are as opposed to those needed by a statesman as abilities for criticism are from those for authorship. He failed, of course, in time of need. He was made Earl of Bath, and so sailed comfortably away-to oblivion.

position to Sir Robert Walpole. In 1734 | ball-room, all hilarity; and now, like Mullihe found time to marry. In 1737 he made his once celebrated speech against dramatic censorship, proposed by Walpole. Fielding had produced a satire on the ministers, (Pasquin, for which Hogarth drew an illustrated bill,) which the town, as the public was then called, flocked to hear. The example was much followed, till the premier resolved to stop it, which he did in spite of opposition. After this, a quarrel between Walpole and the Prince of Wales, whose side Chesterfield took, brought about an open breach between the factions, and the so called country party was obliged to gointo the country. Bath was chosen as the place of refuge, and Beau Nash (Douglas Jerrold's hero,) becomes visible in the solemnity of history, anticking and fooling for a moment, on the scene.

In 1739, however, the tide showed signs of turning. War was commenced against Spain, and Vernon was sent to Darien. The trans-Pyrenean nation had done our shipping so much damage, and robbed us so infamously in Honduras, that the country would no longer suffer Walpole's patience of insult and shyness of fight. His popularity was sinking-the shadow was melting from his grasp. In 1740, Sandys, the motion-maker, attacked him Anstey-wise. He failed; but in 1742, when a new parliament was convened, and the nation was sick of the war, which had been prosecuted till the Panama business brought it to an anti-climax, the opposition to his longer holding office was so great and general, that he thought it well to retire. Poor Walpole! The once famous statesman found himself, now his career was well-nigh closed, the object of resentment, if not of finger-pointing. He had done his best-and now his life was scarcely safe. Fond of the shows of greatness, he had but little greatness to deserve the shows. But Time has hung the curtains around him, do not let us too roughly rend them back. His premiership is over now-and its cares and its toils, and his life, are over. He is away his fame, too, is away-one day the morning will break, and we shall be away.

The kaleidoscope once moved, many things shifted together. Pulteney, the "people's friend" of those days, was naturally looked to as Walpole's successor. He was a living dissolving view. His face was said to wear a new expression every day. He was by turns a saint, a savage, and a sage. He was now, like Mulligan in the

He

Of the ensuing parliamentary history and war-work we are too sick to make notes here. Ministers came short, as usual, and speeches were made, and applauded, and forgotten, as usual. There was another Stuart landing, and droves of victims were led to and offered at Saint George's altar, not in Hanover-square. We can, however, recollect or imagine these, and pass to 1745, when Chesterfield, after another successful embassage to Holland, was made LordLieutenant of Ireland. This was the best part of his life. He gave himself to the melioration of that blessed island, which was then, as now, boisterous as the surrounding element. He was liberal, but firm. would not, like others, hunt the Catholics to please the Protestants. He saw the crow's feet round the Scarlet Lady's eyes; he saw that decay was at work, and he would not help her to fictitious life by the tonic of persecution. Indeed, he early showed his spirit in that matter when an eager Protestant told him that his coachman was a Roman and often went to mass. Does he?" said the Earl, "then he shall never-drive me there." Yet he did not trust or favor them. Once, when he heard of a projected rising, he took one of their chief men aside, and said, "If your persuasion behave like faithful subjects, I will treat them as such; but if not, I shall be worse to them than Cromwell." This was quite sufficient to prevent any insurrection while he was king's vicar; might we not suppose that if such a course were pursued in our times, such a result would follow? The Irish might have believed in Mumbo-Jumbo, like the Cingalese, or in the Moon, like Chinamen, but Chesterfield would not have stretched out a state arm to molest them, if they kept the peace.

Unfortunately, in 1746, he left this post, and took the seals with Newcastle. His good sense was swamped in other people's nonsense. They made a bad business of it on the whole, and in 1748 he retired. His only other appearance in history as a notable man was in 1751, when he proposed in the Lords, the change of style, as it was

called, from the Julian to the Gregorian year, the latter being used by most European nations. The matter was a good deal debated; but the necessity for some standard of computation being evident, both with a view to history and commerce, it was at last carried. It is most inconvenient to all Russian merchants that the great Autocracy has not sanctioned the change. Here, however, the calendar was put forward eleven days in September; the to-morrow of the 2nd inst. being the 14th.

We skip the next few years as our fathers skipped the eleven days, and now we are in "a time of experiments." All sorts of parties had power. They came like the phantasms on the mirror in the Henriade; they stayed a moment, and departed. The Rockingham ministry, which must be recollected as the nurse of our great Burke, reigned a little, and then resigned its places to Grafton. He, in turn, was pushed aside by Pitt; who was displaced ere long by the extraordinary mixture, the ingredients of which were mainly Bedford and Grafton. With their followers we luckily shall not at this time have to do.

It was in the second year of the reign of these people-viz., in 1769, that Junius, the most extraordinary writer that perhaps ever addressed a community, burst on the world. This Myth-like being set himself to restore Whig principles and to preach liberty; to reform abuses and watch place-holders; and he applied his lash to all members of the government, up to the king. He evidently brought personal hostility, as well as hatred on public grounds, to the task. His secrecy was impenetrable, and his knowledge on private matters far more extensive, while it was also more correct, than that of our indefatigable correspondent, Joseph Ady. His power over the language, too, was gigantic; and every man whose public or private character had holes in it, lived in terror of this undiscoverable genius, who might, in a moment, turn the lightning of his satire on him and show all those flaws.

We naturally look with curiosity at this "mighty boar of the forest," as Burke called him, when we go back on the trail of our country to the times in which he broke through the "cobwebs of the law," and foiled or trampled down the hunters. And that curiosity is heightened when we see him stalking, uncontrollable, about the stage of history for his own time-and with unparalleled audacity confronting and rebuking his king-especially as he never dropped his

mask and never claimed reward. His shifts and disguises, too, laid bare now; his identity with so many people proved to demonstration; his mysterious knowledge both of government and private matters-all help to swell our interest in him, and we toil through oceans (or marshes) of note-work and folly to get at his splendid tirades against statesmen and individuals, for the daring, fury, and even ferocity of which his letters stand in English literature without a parallel.

But it is not so with his contemporary, Chesterfield. We have no such curiosity wakened for him. We know his life—while we know nothing of the life of Junius. There is no romance, like a gauze curtain, round the Earl, removing him from our immediate inspection, and making him half sublime, because half obscure. He was a perfect gentleman. He lived and adhered to the Proprieties, as firmly as Addison in Cato to the Unities. He was part, like ourselves, of the "common world," which, according to Schiller and Coleridge, or Coleridge alone, "is all too narrow for the stricken heart of love," though, as we think, full enough of broad sympathies for a living heart. We feel that his flesh and blood were like ours. But it is not so with Junius. There is something cold and fiendish about him. He has no humanity-he seems to delight to punish. Chesterfield, we admit, had no genius; while Junius had. The Earl had taste, and tact, and talent; he could admire the beautiful, but we doubt if he had any notion of the sublime. He was thankful that he was not a poet, neither the father of one. He would most probably, if present, have gathered his cloak round him and galloped to the nearest inn in the thunderstorm when Burns on horseback composed his "Scots wha hae." But if he had no genius, he had not an evil spirit. The great genius of Junius is undeniable, but it is also undeniable that he did not use it, like Brama, to create and cherish, but, like Seeva, to destroy. The sun that might have shone out bright and genial in the midst of heaven, to comfort and make glad, descended basely to the things of earth, and scorched and blasted all it touched.

We will look for a moment at each of them, and then hurry on. It is now too late in the intellectual existence of the world to run a-muck among authors, especially foreign ones-like the offensive Privy Councillor Schlosser. This crabbed body, who speaks of Dr. Johnson as one "who with

the enemies of all toleration and improve- | ment, strove as madly as a monk against all progress," darts for an instant on Lord Chesterfield, and gets rid of his claim to notice by saying, "his morality is that of a highly-polished sharper." Such expedition in the dispatch of his victims may show well in a German executioner, and command German applause; an English mob, however, would cry "shame." He is of course wrong. Chesterfield had many faults, and so, we doubt not, had the immaculate Schlosser, though he throws so many stones; but we like that man best who states what he thinks right, and not the man who only knows to run against what he thinks wrong. Chesterfield had learned the world, and seen its hollowness and falseness; few could teach that learning to his boy, and so he tried to teach it. He might surely have gone farther, and counselled his son rather how to turn and reform the world, than to profit by its depravity. But what has the Privy Councillor to do with this? Had the Earl published any letters himself, the case would have been different. The most wooden-headed of Germans might have then had some excuse-as it is, he has none. Chesterfield did not publish his letters; he never authorized their publication; had he been asked, he probably would have refused permission. It was with him, as with the works of some modern royal authors-a stranger published them. His son's wife, who had never the virtue to declare herself during her husband's life, and probably only did so after his death, on cash accounts, printed them after the old gentleman had left the scene. He was no party to it. He had watched over his son's education with

the greatest care. He had supplied him religious tutors, and linguist tutors, tutors en tous genres, and with natural anxiety for a clumsy boy, whose masters were defective in the Graces, he had chosen to write him letters upon Men and Manners, which were afterwards dishonorably (we think) published. Why should a foggy foreigner, ignorant most likely of all these facts, run against that father, and style him "sharper?" Even an enemy who might wish that the Earl had written a book, would not have profited by such an one as this. That would be as unjust as to judge the brilliant parliament-man by his parlor sayings, when he is in undress, away from his stilts, and among his children. We sometimes fervently wish that our literary hackneys would spare us their versions of the critic

labors of our difficult German neighbors. They abound in words, and delight in generalities; but being naturally slow and heavy, they become ridiculous-like dancing elephants, when they make a show of briskness. The following is a passage containing, we think, the essence of Chesterfield's writing:

"It may be objected," he says to his son, "that I am now recommending dissimulation to you. I both own and justify it. It has been long said, Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare: I go still farther, and say, that without some dissimulation lation that is false, mean, and criminal; that is the cunning which Lord Bacon calls crooked or left-handed wisdom, and which is never made of use but by those who have not true wisdom. And the same great man says that dissimulation is only to hide our own cards, whereas simulation is to put on in order to look into other people's. Lord Bolingbroke says that simulation is a stiletto, not only an unjust but an unlawful weapon, whereas dissimulation is a shield, as secrecy is armor, and it is no more possible to preserve secrecy in business without some degree of dissimulation than it is to succeed without secrecy."

no business can be carried on at all. It is simu

If this is sharper's morality, all men of business, and all statesmen too, are sharpers. Volto sciolto; pensieri stretti may not be the precept, but it is the practice, of the world, and all who live in it must find the secret of its practice out, or fail in getting on. We do not wish our readers to suppose we recommend dissimulation; but a man who paints the world must paint it as it is, and not as he could wish it to be.

Had Chesterfield issued his letters in the form of a book, he would have excised with a more liberal hand than even the present judicious and talented editor. While, however, it would be most unjust to judge him as an ordinary author, we must be suffered to say of his letters as those of a man, that they are not such as should have been written by a Christian man. It was well and praiseworthy in him to engage professors and teachers for his son, but he should have assisted them himself in the matter of religion. It is no excuse for the heathenism of London that we pay tithes and rates enough to buy instructors for all its inhabitants. It is necessary to give something more than money. Religion is not like cotton, or indigo, or stock, that can be bought, and sold, and transferred. The father should have spoken often of it, with the other things. His letters would not have been of less value in this respect, because of more value in that. But

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