there he dissipated large sums in play. It was here, too, that Queen Caroline, the wife of George II., detected the intimacy that existed between Chesterfield and Lady Suffolk. There was an obscure window in Queen Caroline's apartments, which looked into a dark passage, lighted only by a single lamp at night. One Twelfth Night Lord Chesterfield, having won a large sum at cards, deposited it with Lady Suffolk, thinking it not safe to carry it home at night. He was watched, and his intimacy with the mistress of George II. thereupon inferred. Thenceforth he could obtain no court influence; and, in desperation, he went into the opposition.

On the death of George I., a singular scene, with which Lord Chesterfield's interests were connected, occurred in the Privy Council. Dr. Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, produced the king's will, and delivered it to his successor, expecting that it would be opened and read in the council; what was his consternation when his majesty, without saying a word, put it into his pocket, and stalked out of the room with real German imperturbability! Neither the astounded prelate nor the subservient council ventured to utter a word. The will was never more heard of: rumor declared that it was burnt. The contents, of course, never transpired; and the legacy of £40,000, said to have been left to the Duchess of Kendal, was never more spoken of, until Lord Chesterfield, in 1733, married the Countess of Walsingham. In 1743, it is said, he claimed the legacy, in right of his wife, the Duchess of Kendal being then dead: and was "quieted" with £20,000, and got, as Horace Walpole observes, nothing from the duchess-"except his wife."

The only excuse that was urged to extenuate this act, on the part of George II., was that his royal father had burned two wills which had been made in his favor. These were supposed to be the wills of the Duke and Duchess of Zell and of the Electress Sophia. There was not even common honesty in the house of Hanover at that period.

Disappointed in his wife's fortune, Lord Chesterfield seems to have cared very little for the disappointed heiress. Their union was childless. His opinion of marriage appears very much to have coincided with that of the world of malcontents who rush, in the present day, to the court of Judge Cresswell, with "dissolving views." On one occasion, he writes thus: "I have at last done the best office that can be done to most married people; that is, I have fixed the separation between my brother and his wife, and the definitive treaty of peace will be proclaimed in about a fortnight."

Horace Walpole related the following anecdote of Sir Wil

212

MADAME DU BOUCHET.

liam Stanhope (Chesterfield's brother) and his lady, whom he calls a "fond couple." After their return from Paris, when they arrived at Lord Chesterfield's house at Blackheath, Sir William, who had, like his brother, a cutting, polite wit, that was probably expressed with the "allowed simper" of Lord Chesterfield, got out of the chaise and said, with a low bow, Madame, I hope I shall never see your face again." She replied, "Sir, I will take care that you never shall;" and so they parted.

There was little probability of Lord Chesterfield's participating in domestic felicity, when neither his heart nor his fancy were engaged in the union which he had formed. The lady to whom he was really attached, and by whom he had a son, resided in the Netherlands: she passed by the name of Madame du Bouchet, and survived both Lord Chesterfield and her son. A permanent provision was made for her, and a sum of five hundred pounds bequeathed to her, with these words: "as a small reparation for the injury I did her." "Certainly," adds Lord Mahon, in his Memoir of his illustrious ancestor, a small one."

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For some time Lord Chesterfield remained in England, and his letters are dated from Bath, from Tonbridge, from Blackheath. He had, in 1726, been elevated to the House of Lords upon the death of his father. In that assembly his great eloquence is thus well described by his biographer :*

"Lord Chesterfield's eloquence, the fruit of much study, was less characterized by force and compass than by elegance and perspicuity, and especially by good taste and urbanity, and a vein of delicate irony which, while it sometimes inflicted severe strokes, never passed the limits of decency and propriety. It was that of a man who, in the union of wit and good sense with politeness, had not a competitor. These qualities were matured by the advantage which he assiduously sought and obtained, of a familiar acquaintance with almost all the eminent wits and writers of his time, many of whom had been the ornaments of a preceding age of literature, while others were destined to become those of a later period."

The accession of George II., to whose court Lord Chesterfield had been attached for many years, brought him no political preferment. The court had, however, its attractions, even for one who owed his polish to the belles of Paris, and who was almost always, in taste and manners, more foreign than English. Henrietta, Lady Pomfret, the daughter and heiress of John, Lord Jeffreys, the son of Judge Jeffreys, was at that time the leader of fashion.

* Lord Mahon, now Earl of Stanhope, if not the most eloquent, one of

the most honest historians of our time.

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THE BROAD-BOTTOMED ADMINISTRATION.

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Six daughters, one of them Lady Sophia, surpassingly lovely, recalled the perfections of that ancestress, Arabella Fermor, whose charms Pope has so exquisitely touched in the "Rape of the Lock." Lady Sophia became eventually the wife of Lord Carteret, the minister, whose talents and the charms of whose eloquence constituted him a sort of rival to Chesterfield. With all his abilities, Lord Chesterfield may be said to have failed both as a courtier and as a political character, as far as permanent influence in any ministry was concerned, until in 1744, when what was called the "Broad-bottomed administration" was formed, when he was admitted into the cabinet. In the following year, however, he went, for the last time, to Holland, as embassador, and succeeded beyond the expectations of his party in the purposes of his embassy. He took leave of the States-General just before the battle of Fontenoy, and hastened to Ireland, where he had been nominated Lord Lieutenant previous to his journey to Holland. He remained in that country only a year; but long enough to prove how liberal were his views-how kindly the dispositions of his heart.

Only a few years before Lord Chesterfield's arrival in Dublin, the Duke of Shrewsbury had given as a reason for accepting the vice-regency of that country (of which King James I. had said, there was 66 more ado" than with any of his dominions), "that it was a place where a man had business enough to keep him from falling asleep, and not enough to keep him awake."

Chesterfield, however, was not of that opinion. He did more in one year than the duke would have accomplished in five. He began by instituting a principle of impartial justice. Formerly, Protestants had alone been employed as managers;" the Lieutenant was to see with Protestant eyes, to hear with Protestant ears.

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"I have determined to proscribe no set of persons whatever," says Chesterfield, "and determined to be governed by none. Had the Papists made any attempt to put themselves above the law, I should have taken good care to have quelled them again. It was said my lenity to the Papists had wrought no alteration either in their religious or their political sentiments. I did not expect that it would; but surely that was no reason for cruelty toward them."

Often by a timely jest Chesterfield conveyed a hint, or even shrouded a reproof. One of the ultra-zealous informed him that his coachman was a Papist, and went every Sunday to mass. "Does he indeed? I will take care he never drives me there," was Chesterfield's cool reply.

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REFORMATION OF THE CALENDAR.

It was at this critical period, when the Hanoverian dynasty was shaken almost to its downfall by the insurrection in Scotland of 1745, that Ireland was imperiled: "With a weak or wavering, or a fierce and headlong Lord Lieutenant—with a Grafton or a Strafford," remarks Lord Mahon, "there would soon have been a simultaneous rising in the Emerald Isle." But Chesterfield's energy, his lenity, his wise and just administration saved the Irish from being excited into rebellion by the emissaries of Charles Edward, or slaughtered, when conquered, by the "Butcher," and his tiger-like dragoons. When all was over, and that sad page of history in which the deaths of so many faithful adherents of the exiled family are recorded, had been held up to the gaze of bleeding Caledonia, Chesterfield recommended mild measures, and advised the establishment of schools in the Highlands; but the age was too narrow-minded to adopt his views. In January, 1748, Chesterfield retired from public life. "Could I do any good," he wrote to a friend, "I would_sacrifice some more quiet to it; but convinced as I am that I can do none, I will indulge my ease, and preserve my character. I have gone through pleasures while my constitution and my spirits would allow me. Business succeeded them; and I have now gone through every part of it without liking it at all the better for being acquainted with it. Like many other things, it is most admired by those who know it least. I have been behind the scenes both of pleasure and business; I have seen all the coarse pulleys and dirty ropes which exhibit and move all the gaudy machines; and I have seen and smelt the tallow candles which illuminate the whole decoration, to the astonishment and admiration of the ignorant multitude. My horse, my books, and my friends will divide my time pretty equally."

He still interested himself in what was useful; and carried a Bill in the House of Lords for the Reformation of the Calendar, in 1751. It seems a small matter for so great a mind as his to accomplish, but it was an achievement of infinite difficulty. Many statesmen had shrunk from the undertaking; and even Chesterfield found it essential to prepare the public, by writing in some periodical papers on the subject. Nevertheless the vulgar outcry was vehement: "Give us back the eleven days we have been robbed of!" cried the mob at a general election. When Bradley was dying, the common people ascribed his sufferings to a judgment for the part he had taken in that "impious transaction," the alteration of the calendar. But they were not less bornès in their notions than the Duke of Newcastle, then prime minister. Upon Lord Chesterfield giving him notice of his bill, that bustling prem