Of the movement headed by Wesley, as we have seen earlier in his career, Chesterfield seems to have taken as little heed as the younger Pliny did of the first holders of Wesley’s faith. It is a harder and more delicate question which we are met with in discussing Lord Chesterfield’s position with regard to morality. Johnson’s criticism of the _Letters_, that “they taught the morals of a courtesan and manners of a dancing master,” even though epigrammatic, yet bears within it traces of the sting which the lexicologist felt about the matter of the Dedication. Of the Earl’s opinions we have seen something in former extracts and in his own life. He speaks quite openly--“I wish to speak as one man of pleasure does to another.” “A polite arrangement,” he says elsewhere, “becomes a gallant man.” Anything disgraceful or impolite he will not stand. Yet as a human Picciola does Lord Chesterfield guard the soul of his son within its prison-house of life. He never speaks, however, to his son _pulpitically_. It is ever as a wise counsellor: and his tendency is always the same. It is suggestive of much to turn aside from the _petitesses_ of these instructions to the thoughts which were occupying the brain of the author of _Emilius_ about the same time. From very much the same foundations and the same materials how different is the result! In the one we breathe the fresh air of the country, of the rustic home and the carpenter’s shop: in the other we are stifled by the perfumes of the court-room and suffocated by tight lacing. In the one we are never for a moment to wear a mask: in the other we are never for a moment to move without it. Yet, though the one is built up of social theories by an enthusiastic dreamer, and the other is a cold, practical experiment by a man of the world, and “an imperfect man of action, whom politics had made a perfect moralist,” there is the same verdict of failure to be pronounced upon them both. Voltaire said of _Emilius_ that it was a stupid romance, but admitted that it contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. Lord Chesterfield’s was no romance, but its pages deserve perhaps as careful treatment. “It is a rich book,” says Sainte-Beuve; “one cannot read a page without finding some happy observation worthy of being mentioned.” Yet, as a system of education, it is blasted with the foul air of the charnel-house. V.