“... Seven years, my lord, have passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work under difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect; for I never had a patron before.... “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations, where no benefit has been received; or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which providence has enabled me to do for myself. “Having carried on my work thus far, with so little obligation to any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed, though I should conclude it, if possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, my lord, your lordship’s most humble and most obedient servant, “SAMUEL JOHNSON.” Such a transaction is but little to the praise of Lord Chesterfield, who would have posed as the Mæcenas of the eighteenth century. But there the matter rests. It is another proof of what the Earl was not, but with the slightest bend of his body might have been. He lost the Dedication to one of the greatest achievements of the time. III. Let us turn to Lord Chesterfield’s son. Sainte-Beuve says of him--he was “one of those ordinary men of the world of whom it suffices to say there is nothing to be said.” But there is so much melancholy interest attaching to his history that we may well try to discern some of the features of the youth. No portrait of Philip Stanhope, so far as I am aware, has ever been given to the public, though we know from his father’s letters that one, if not more than one, was executed at Venice during his stay there, so that I am unable, as yet, to surmise anything from physical feature of form and angle. We know that his father sent him to Westminster School, and that there he was slovenly and dirty. Of his intellectual qualities we hear nothing. His father’s letter to the boy, then sixteen, is subtle: