these letters are not exceeded in style by anything in the language.[1]
Manuals, of course, there have been many. In the age gone by there had been Walsingham's, there had been Burghley's Advice, there had been Sir Walter Raleigh's; but from the time that Cicero wrote his De Officiis for his own child down to these, we come upon but few of this sort. There had been Castiglione's Cortegiano, and in a few years Della Casa's Galateo; there is Roger Ascham's Scholemaster. Chesterfield had found much to his taste and method in the Moral Reflections of La Rochefoucauld and the Characters of La Bruyère. In England had just appeared Locke's Essay on Education, and this he sends for his son to read.[2] In 1759 Lessing and Wieland were writing on the same subject; and in 1762 Rousseau published Emile. Everywhere education was, to use a common phrase, in the air. Chesterfield loved his son passionately and unremittingly. He had been much in France, and admired the French nation; and he determined that his son should combine the
- ↑ For his fine sense of the quality of words witness: "An unharmonious and rugged period at this time shocks my ears, and I, like all the rest of the world, will willingly exchange and give up some degree of rough sense for a good degree of pleasing sound."
- ↑ Characteristically, no mention is made of Shaftesbury nor of Hutcheson.
