Lord Chesterfield's Choice Thoughts to His Son

Philip Dormer Stanhope · Down to Earth Series · 18 pages

Selections from the letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, to his son — the eighteenth century's most famous course of instruction in worldly conduct, gathered here under two headings: on becoming a man of the world and a gentleman, and on vice and virtue, haughtiness and humility. The reason a book of manners sits in a series of theosophical study notes emerges from the selection, which is weighted throughout toward the discipline of self-estimate rather than toward etiquette.

Three maxims give the flavour and the argument. That great learning without sound judgement carries us into pride and pedantry — the fault the whole selection is arranged against. That one should speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry, which is the same even-handedness the series applies to its own sources. And that one should never seem wiser or more learned than the people one is with, which in Chesterfield is a rule of politeness and in this context reads as a rule of humility. Pope supplies the epigraph, on the difference being as great between the optics seeing as the objects seen, and on all manners taking a tincture from our own.

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