If we ask ourselves what is the moral of the Letters, and what is their significance, we are met with a varied reply. We have here the outpourings of a man’s soul _in penetralibus_. As such the book stands for its time unique. Chesterfield, when he wrote these letters, was not actuated by the criticisms of Grub Street, nor indeed any criticisms. He never for a moment dreamt that his letters would be published, and they are therefore bereft of that stifling self-consciousness which is the bane of so many writers. It is this which makes so frequently a man’s letters more living than his published works, at any rate more real. So far, of course, Lord Chesterfield shares this distinction with other writers. But his letters are noteworthy for more than this. They combine with it a complete system of education, a system which was thought out without opposition and expressed without fear. In such a case, of course, we do not look for style; but so perfect and so equal was the man that we are even told that these letters are not exceeded in style by anything in the language.[9] Manuals, of course, there have been many. In the age gone by there had been Walsingham’s, there had been Burghley’s _Advice_, there had been Sir Walter Raleigh’s; but from the time that Cicero wrote his _De Officiis_ for his own child down to these, we come upon but few of this sort. There had been Castiglione’s _Cortegiano_, and in a few years Della Casa’s _Galateo_; there is Roger Ascham’s _Scholemaster_. Chesterfield had found much to his taste and method in the _Moral Reflections_ of La Rochefoucauld and the _Characters_ of La Bruyère. In England had just appeared Locke’s _Essay on Education_, and this he sends for his son to read.[10] In 1759 Lessing and Wieland were writing on the same subject; and in 1762 Rousseau published _Emile_. Everywhere education was, to use a common phrase, in the air. Chesterfield loved his son passionately and unremittingly. He had been much in France, and admired the French nation; and he determined that his son should combine the good qualities of both nationalities--the ideal statesman and the ideal polished man of society. He did not forget that on Philip Stanhope would ever remain the brand of the bar sinister; but we may well believe that this was only one more daring reason for the experiment which he chose to make. He was playing for high stakes, and he was not careless of the issue. “My only ambition,” he writes in 1754, “remaining is to be the counsellor and minister of your rising ambition. Let me see my own youth revived in you; let me be your mentor, and I promise you, with your parts and knowledge you shall go far.”--(Letter CCLXXIV.)