If we look at the result we must pronounce his experiment no less a failure. The odds were too heavy in the first instance, and a man of less energy and stability than Lord Chesterfield would not have dared to have played at such high stakes. He ought to have considered what an infliction he was casting upon his son, and respected the feelings of others rather than his own ambition. He has reaped the harvest which he had sown. When Philip Stanhope tried to obtain an appointment at the embassy in Brussels the Marquis de Botta made so much to do on the ground of his illegitimacy that his claim was disallowed. When there was a chance of his receiving an appointment at Venice, the king objected on the same grounds. Not one word of displeasure is handed down to us in these familiar letters, but we know that both felt it deeply and never forgave. But even Philip Stanhope himself must have disappointed his father. When his widow, with her two children, walked up the hall of Chesterfield House, where the Earl sat alone in solitary childless grandeur, it must have seemed a strange answer to the question which he had asked Time some thirty-eight years before. He may well have grown weary of sitting at the table at which he had staked his all and lost. Vivacious, sincere, plain, and liberal-minded, his memory may well pass down to posterity as that of a great man with mean aspirations. That ambition was not wanting in his composition is true, and it was this which encompassed his ruin. He reminds us of the melancholy structure of S. Petronio at Bologna, begun in emulation of the Florentine Duomo by the Bolognese. One sees the outline of the structure which was to have been raised, but for two centuries it has stood uncompleted, a monument to her greatness and her shame. Careless of the interests of those around him; careless and callous of what was demanded of man by men; careless of speech so long as he could create a _bon mot_ or a well-balanced phrase, Lord Chesterfield’s life is characteristic of his time. Chesterfield, if we may make one more comparison, is like one of those great trees that we see upon the banks of a river, which, while drawing its nurture half from its native soil and the stream by its side, and half from the sky above it, has had that very soil worn away by the current of the stream, so that the tree, by its own natural weight and under the force of adverse winds and circumstance, has bowed itself over toward the waves, losing its natural height and grandeur for ever. Dead to the higher interests of humanity; dead to the deeper influences which keep us sober and thoughtful and earnest; dead, again, to any ideal save such as might serve his own designs:--such was the man who deemed himself called upon, or fitted, to perform the sacred office of Education to his darling child. CRITICAL ESSAY. BY C. A. SAINTE-BEUVE.[13]