In 1716 there was Paul Methuen, who had been embassador to Portugal in the reign of Queen Anne, named Secretary of State, for a short time, in the absence of Earl Stanhope; there was Philip Dormer, earl of Chesterfield, in 1746; there was John, duke of Bedford, who succeeded Lord Chesterfield in 1748, and who had previously been embassador to Paris; and there was Sir Thomas Robinson in 1754, who had been an embassador to Vienna. In our own day there is scarcely an instance. For though George Canning was embassador for a short time to Lisbon, and the Marquis of Wellesley to Spain; though the Duke of Wellington was embassador to Paris, was charged with a special mission to Russia, was plenipotentiary at Verona, yet none of these noblemen and gentlemen ever regularly belonged to the diplomatic corps. The most illustrious and striking instance of an embassador raised into a Secretary of State is the case of Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield The character of no man within a century and a half has been so misrepresented and misunderstood. Lord John Russell, in the _Bedford Correspondence_, which he edited, charges this nobleman with conducting the French nobility to the guillotine and to emigration. But Lord Chesterfield died on the 24th March, 1773, sixteen years before 1789, and nineteen years before 1792. To any man of reading and research--to any man of a decent acquaintance with literature, it is unnecessary now to vindicate the character of the Earl of Chesterfield. He was unequaled in his time for the solidity and variety of his attainments; for the brilliancy of his wit; for the graces of his conversation, and the polish of his style. His embassy to Holland marks his skill, his dexterity, and his address, as an able negotiator; and his administration of Ireland indicates his integrity, his vigilance, and his sound policy as a statesman and as a politician. He was at once the most accomplished, the most learned, and the most far-seeing of the men of his day; and in our own, these is not one public man to compare with him. He foresaw and foretold, in 1756, that French Revolution whose outbreak he did not live to witness. In 1744 he was admitted into the cabinet, on his own terms, and was soon after intrusted with a second embassy to Holland, in which his skill and dexterity were universally admitted. He was not more remarkable for a quick insight into the temper of others, than for a command of his own. In history, in literature, in foreign languages, he was equally a proficient. With classical literature he had been from his boyhood familiar. He wrote Latin prose with correctness, ease, and purity; and spoke that tongue with a fluency and facility of the rarest among Englishmen, and not very common even among foreigners. In the House of Lords his speeches were more admired and extolled than any others of the day. Horace Walpole had heard his own father, had heard Pitt, had heard