Page:Letters, sentences and maxims.djvu/11

 for his son. Naturally under these conditions he had to endure the slings and arrows of fortune alone and uncounselled. One domestic influence was allowed him in the mother of his mother, whose face still looks out at us from the pages of Dr. Maty, engraved by Bartolozzi from the original of Sir Peter Lely—a face sweet, intellectual, open—over the title of Gertrude Savile, Marchioness of Halifax. She it was who undertook, at any rate to some small degree, the rearing of her daughter's child. Lord Chesterfield is rather a Savile than a Stanhope.

He heard French from a Normandy nurse in his cradle, and he received, when he grew a little older, "such a general idea of the sciences as it is a disgrace to a gentleman not to possess." But it is not till he gets to Cambridge at the age of eighteen that we hear anything definite. He writes to his tutor of former days, whom he seems to have made a real friend, from Trinity Hall:

Thirty-six years later he draws for his son this picture of his college-life: