Page:Letters, sentences and maxims.djvu/10

 —a criticism which is but another proof of that which has been somewhere said of him, that he has had the fate to be generally misunderstood. Yet nothing is more certain than that Lord Chesterfield did not mean to be anything but inscrutable. "Dissimilation is a shield," he used to say, "as secrecy is armor." "A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether he really be so or not." It is still worth while attempting to solve the problem which is offered to us by his inscrutability, not only on its own account, but because Lord Chesterfield is a representative spirit of the eighteenth century.

I.

Philip Dormer Stanhope did not experience in his youth either of those influences which are so important in the lives of most of us. His mother died before he could know her, and his father was one of those living nonentities whom his biographer sums up in saying that "We know little more of him than that he was an Earl of Chesterfield." Indeed, what influence there may have been was of a negative kind, for he had, if anything, an avowed dislike