We have said already in this history that a reader, in getting at an estimate of the character of Lord Hervey, will have to strike a sort of balance for himself between {6} the extravagant censure flung at him by his enemies and the extravagant praise blown to him by his friends. But we find no such occasion or opportunity for striking a balance in the case of Lord Chesterfield. All the testimony goes the one way. What do we hear of him? That he was dwarfish; that he was hideously ugly; that he was all but deformed; that he was utterly unprincipled, vain, false, treacherous, and cruel; that he had not the slightest faith in the honor of men or the virtue of women; that he was silly enough to believe himself, with all his personal defects, actually irresistible to the most gifted and beautiful woman, and that he was mendacious enough to proclaim himself the successful lover of women who would not have given ear to his love-making for one moment. Yet we cannot believe that Chesterfield was by any means the monster of ugliness and selfish levity whom his enemies, and some who called themselves his friends, have painted for posterity. He was, says Hervey, short, disproportioned, thick, and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus. "One Ben Ashurst, who said few good things, though admired for many, told Lord Chesterfield once that he was like a stunted giant, which was a humorous idea and really apposite." His portraits do not by any means bear out the common descriptions of his personal appearance. Doubtless, Court painters then, as now, flattered or idealized, but one can scarcely believe that any painter coolly converted a hideous face into a rather handsome one and went wholly unreproved by public opinion of his time. The truth probably is that Chesterfield's bitter, sarcastic, and unsparing tongue made him enemies, who came in the end to see nothing but deformity in his person and perfidy in his heart. It is easy to say epigrammatically of such a man that his propensity to ridicule, in which he indulged himself with infinite humor and no distinction, and with inexhaustible spirits and no discretion, made him sought and feared, liked and not loved, by most of his acquaintance; it is easy to say that {7} no sex, no relation, no rank, no power, no profession, no friendship, no obligation, was a shield from those pointed, glittering weapons that seemed only to shine to a stander-by, but cut deep in those they touched. But to say this is not to say all, or to paint a fair picture. It is evident that he delighted in passing himself off on serious and heavy people as a mere trifler, paradox-maker, and cynic. He invited them not to take him seriously, and they did take him seriously, but the wrong way. They believed that he was serious when he professed to have no faith in anything; when he declared that he only lived for pleasure, and did not