Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield - Character and Works - Letters To His Son

Letters To His Son

This collection, also called Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, comprises over 400 letters written beginning in 1737 or 1738 and continuing until his son's death in 1768. The majority of the letters were written between 1746 and 1754. The letters are written in French, English, and some in Latin. They are mostly instructive letters on such subjects as geography, history, and classical literature. Later letters, written when the author had become an established minor diplomat, deal largely with political matters.

The letters were first published by his son's widow Eugenia Stanhope in 1774, and the Letters to his Godson (1890). The Letters are brilliantly written, full of elegant wisdom, of keen wit, of admirable portrait-painting, of exquisite observation and deduction.

In the Letters to his Son Chesterfield epitomises the restraint of polite 18th-century society, writing from Bath on 9 March 1748:

"I would heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh."