Lord Chesterfield--he was Lord Stanhope then, but we use the title by which he was afterwards famous--was about twenty-five years of age. He had proved himself at Cambridge an accomplished classical scholar, and on leaving the university he made the then fashionable tour of Europe. He wasted a good deal of money gaming at the Hague--a vice to which he was much given--and then went to Paris, where, as he was young, handsome and wealthy, he achieved a great success. “I shall not give you my opinion of the French,” he writes, “as I am very often taken for one; and many a Frenchman has paid me the highest compliment he thinks he can pay to any one, which is, ‘Sir, you are just like one of us’. I talk a great deal; I am very loud and peremptory; I sing and dance as I go along; and, lastly, I spend a monstrous deal of money in powder, feathers, white gloves, etc.” When he came back to England he was appointed a gentleman of the bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, and at the court of Leicester House he was one of the most shining ornaments. Johnson speaks of him as “a wit among lords and a lord among wits”. He warmly espoused the cause of the Prince against his father, and he often delighted the Princess by ridiculing the dull court of the King, and especially the mistresses, whom he described as “two considerable specimens of the King’s bad taste and strong stomach”. The Princess was mocking one day at Kielmansegge’s painted face. “She looks young--if one may judge from her complexion,” she said, “not more than eighteen or twenty.” “Yes, madam,” replied Chesterfield, “eighteen or twenty stone.” And then he went on to say: “The standard of his Majesty’s taste, as exemplified in his mistress, makes all ladies who aspire to his favour, and who are near the suitable age, strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and the dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others--burst.” Whereat the Princess and her ladies laughed heartily. But Chesterfield’s wit was a two-edged sword, which he sometimes directed against the Princess herself, mimicking her gestures and her foreign accent the moment her back was turned. She soon became aware through her ladies, who, of course, told tales, that she was mocked at by him, and once she warned him, half in jest and half in earnest. “You have more wit, my lord, than I,” she said, “but I have a bitter tongue, and always repay my debts with exorbitant interest”--a speech which he had later reason to remember. Of course he denied, with exquisite grace, that he could possibly have dared to ridicule the most charming of princesses, but Caroline did not trust him. His sarcasms made him many enemies, though his great object, he declares, when a young man, was “to make every man I met like me, and every woman love me”.