If in the letters to his son we can, without being severe, lay hold of some cases of slightly damaged morality, we should have to point out, by way of compensation, some very serious and really admirable passages, where he speaks of the Cardinal de Retz, of Mazarin, of Bolingbroke, of Marlborough, and of many others. It is a rich book. One cannot read a page without finding some happy observation worthy of being remembered. Lord Chesterfield intended this beloved son for a diplomatic life; he at first found some difficulties in the way on account of his illegitimacy. To cut short these objections, he sent his son to Parliament; it was the surest method of conquering the scruples of the court. Mr. Stanhope, in his maiden speech, hesitated a moment, and was obliged to have recourse to notes. He did not make a second attempt at speaking in public. It appears that he succeeded better in diplomacy, in those second-rate places where solid merit is sufficient. He filled the post of ambassador extraordinary to the court of Dresden. But his health, always delicate, failed before he was old, and his father had the misfortune to see him die before him when he was scarcely thirty-six years old (1768). Lord Chesterfield at that time lived entirely retired from the world, on account of his infirmities, the most painful of which was complete deafness. Montesquieu, whose sight failed, said to him once, “_I know how to be blind._” But he was not able to say as much; he did not know how to be deaf. He wrote of it to his friends, even to those in France, thus: “The exchange of letters,” he remarked, “is the conversation of deaf people, and the only link which connects them with society.” He found his latest consolations in his pretty country-house at Blackheath, which he had called by the French name of Babiole. He employed his time there in gardening and cultivating his melons and pineapples; he amused himself by vegetating _in company with them_. “I have vegetated here all this year,” he wrote to a French friend (September, 1753), “without pleasures and without troubles; my age and deafness prevented the first; my philosophy, or rather my temperament (for one often confounds them), guaranteed me against the last. I always get as much as I can of the quiet pleasures of gardening, walking, and reading, and in the meantime _I await death without desiring or fearing it_.” He never undertook long works, not feeling himself sufficiently strong, but he sometimes sent agreeable essays to a periodical publication, _The World_. These essays are quite worthy of his reputation for skill and urbanity. Nevertheless, nothing approaches the work--which was no work to him--of those letters, which he never imagined any one would read, and which are yet the foundation of his literary success.