me Lord-Lieutenant," he wrote back. They took him at his word, and Chenevix soon obtained his place.
Chesterfield had always looked forward to the post with longing. "I would rather be called the Irish Lord-Lieutenant," he had said, "than go down to Posterity as the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland." It was, as has been truly observed, the most brilliant and useful part of his career. I shall be pardoned for quoting again from Mahon. "It was he who first, since the revolution, had made that office a post of active exertion. Only a few years before the Earl of Shrewsbury had given as a reason for accepting it, that it was a place where a man had business enough to hinder him from falling asleep, and not enough to keep him awake. Chesterfield, on the contrary, left nothing undone nor for others to do. . . . [He] was the first to introduce in Dublin the principle of impartial justice. It is very easy, as was formerly the case, to choose the great Protestant families as managers; to see only through their eyes, and to hear only through their ears; it is very easy, according to the modern fashion, to become the tool and the champion of Roman Catholic agitators; but to hold the balance even between both; to protect the Establishment, yet never wound religious liberty; to repress the lawlessness, yet not
