His old age, which was an early one, lasted a long time. His wit gave a hundred turns to this sad theme. Speaking of himself and one of his friends, Lord Tyrawley, equally old and infirm: “Tyrawley and I,” he said, “have been dead two years, but we do not wish it to be known.” Voltaire, who under the pretence of being always dying, had preserved his youth much better, wrote to him on the 24th of October, 1771, this pretty letter, signed “_Le vieux malade de Ferney_”: “Enjoy an honorable and happy old age, after having passed through the trials of life. Enjoy your wit and preserve the health of your body. Of the five senses with which we are provided, you have only one enfeebled, and Lord Huntingdon assures me that you have a good stomach, which is worth a pair of ears. It will be perhaps my place to decide which is the most sorrowful, to be deaf or blind, or have no digestion. I can judge of all these three conditions with a knowledge of the cause; but it is a long time since I ventured to decide upon trifles, least of all upon things so important. I confine myself to the belief that, if you have sun in the beautiful house that you have built, you will spend some tolerable moments; that is all we can hope for at our age. Cicero wrote a beautiful treatise upon old age, but he did not verify his words by deeds; his last years were very unhappy. You have lived longer and more happily than he did. You have had to do neither with perpetual dictators nor with triumvirs. Your lot has been, and still is, one of the most desirable in that great lottery where good tickets are so scarce, and where the Great Prize of continual happiness has never been gained by any one. Your philosophy has never been upset by chimeras which have sometimes perplexed tolerably good brains. _You have never been in any sense a charlatan, nor the dupe of charlatans_, and that I reckon as a rare merit, which adds something to the shadow of happiness that we are allowed to taste of in this short life.” Lord Chesterfield died on the 24th of March, 1773. In pointing out his charming course of worldly education, we have not thought it out of place even in a Democracy,[15] to take lessons of _savoir vivre_ and politeness, and to receive them from a man whose name is so closely connected with those of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who, more than any other of his countrymen in his own time, showed singular fondness for our nation; who delighted, more than was right, perhaps, in our amiable qualities; who appreciated our solid virtues, and of whom it might be said, as his greatest praise, that he was a French wit, if he had not introduced into the _verve_ and vivacity of his sallies that inexplicable something of imagination and color that bears the impress of his race. LORD CHESTERFIELD’S LETTERS, SENTENCES, AND MAXIMS.