his model; but he is often languid, especially in his five or six last books, during which I am obliged to take a good deal of snuff. . . ."
If his views on Milton should be known, he adds, he would be abused by every tasteless pedant and every solid divine in England. His criticism of Dante it will be best for the reader to discover.
The weightier questions and the weightiest he pushed altogether aside. "I don't speak of religion," he writes. "I am not in a position to do so—the excellent Mr. Harte will do that." At any rate, Chesterfield knew his own ground. Incidentally we find his position cropping up. "The reason of every man is, or ought to be, his guide; and I should have as much right to expect every man to be of my height and temperament as to wish that he should reason precisely as I do." It was the doctrine of the French school that he had adopted, with something of a quietism of his own. "Let them enjoy quietly their errors," he says somewhere, "both in taste and religion."[1] It would be interesting to compare in these matters the relative positions of Chesterfield and Bolingbroke.
Of the movement headed by Wesley, as we have seen earlier in his career, Chesterfield seems to have
- ↑ "A wise Atheist (if such a thing there is) would, for his own interest and character in the world, pretend to some religion."—Letter CLXXX.
