better health than I have reason to expect at my age and with my constitution: however, I feel a gradual decay, though a gentle one; and I think I shall not tumble, but slide gently to the bottom of the hill of life. When that will be I neither know nor care, for I am very weary."
And in the following August, anticipating alike the autumn of his life and of the year, he writes:
"I feel this beginning of the autumn, which is already very cold; the leaves are withered, fall apace, and seem to intimate that I must follow them, which I shall do without reluctance, being extremely weary of this silly world."—(Letter CCCLV.)
Yet even a year later we find him giving dinner parties to the Duke of Brunswick, and wishing that he had both the monarchs of Austria and Prussia, that they should, "together with some of their allies, take Lorraine and Alsace from France." (Letter CCCLXIV.) For a few more years he lingered on, gardening, reading, and writing, and then in 1773, almost alone, he parted with "this silly world."
II.
I have omitted from this sketch of Lord Chesterfield's political life any reference to the literary side of his character. I have, however, spoken of his friendship with Voltaire. Voltaire came to England in the same year that Chesterfield's father died, to obtain, among other things, a publisher for the
