For, in the minds of all who understand these times and those, Chesterfield's short season of rule in Ireland was by far the greatest period of his career. The Chesterfield of Dublin Castle was as high above the Chesterfield of the House of Lords as Goldsmith the poet is above Goldsmith the historian, or Blackstone the constitutional lawyer is above Blackstone the poet. Judging of Chesterfield's conduct in the Irish Viceroyalty by Chesterfield's past career, men would have been entitled to assume that his sympathies would go altogether with the governing race in Ireland. With them were the wealth, the rank, the fashion, the elegance, the refinement. With them was the easy-going profession of State religion--just the sort of thing that suited Chesterfield's ways. What sympathy could such a man as he have with the Celtic and Catholic Irishman? Why should he care to be popular with such a population? Even such gifted, and, on the whole, patriotic Protestants as Swift only sympathized with the Catholic Celts as an Englishman living in Virginia, in the old plantation days, might have sympathized with the population of negro slaves. Chesterfield might have entered on his formal task in the temper of graceful levity and high-bred languid indifference. He might have allowed the cultured and respectable gentlemen who were his permanent officials to manage things as they had long been doing before his time, pretty much in their own way. He might have given them politely to understand that so long as they spared him any trouble in his unthankful task he would back them up in anything they did. He {248} might have made it plain to the Protestant gentry and the Castle folk that his sympathies were all with them; that he desired only to mix with them; and that it really did not much matter what the outer population in Ireland thought of him or of them. Thus he would easily have become the darling of Dublin Castle; and to most Irish Viceroys the voice of Dublin Castle was the voice of Ireland; at all events, the only voice in Ireland to which they cared to listen. [Sidenote: 1745--The state of Ireland]