66. The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune.
67. Whoever assembles the multitude will raise commotions.
LORD CHESTERFIELD’S REMARKS UPON THE FOREGOING MAXIMS.
I have taken the trouble of extracting and collecting, for your use, the foregoing Political Maxims of the Cardinal de Retz, in his Memoirs. They are not aphorisms of his invention, but the true and just observations of his own experience, in the course of great business. My own experience attests the truth of them all. Read them over with attention as here above, and then read with the same attention, and tout de suite, the Memoirs, where you will find the facts and characters from whence those observations are drawn, or to which they are applied; and they will reciprocally help to fix each other in your mind. I hardly know any book so necessary for a young man to read and remember. You will there find how great business is really carried on; very differently from what people, who have never been concerned in it, imagine. You will there see what courts and courtiers really are, and observe that they are neither so good as they should be, nor so bad as they are thought by most people. The court poet, and the sullen, cloistered pedant, are equally mistaken in their notions, or at least in the accounts they give us of them. You will observe the coolness in general, the perfidy in some cases, and the truth in a very few, of court friendships. This will teach you the prudence of a general distrust, and the imprudence of making no exception to that rule, upon good and tried grounds. You will see the utility of good breeding toward one’s greatest enemies, and the high imprudence and folly of either insulting or injurious expressions.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The greatest English writer of the present day thus sums up the eighteenth century:—“An age of which Hoadly was the bishop, and Walpole the minister, and Pope the poet, and Chesterfield the wit, and Tillotson the ruling doctor.”—Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, i. 388.
[2] For another, very different, view of the life and studies at Cambridge at the time, see the Life of Ambrose Bonwicke (1694-1714).
[3] [“Pasquin. A Dramatic Satire on the Times, by Henry Fielding. Acted at the Haymarket, 1736; 1740.” (Baker.)]
[4] [“King Charles I. Hist Tr. by W. Havard, 1737.” (Ibid.).]
[5] Chesterfield says he had been accustomed to read and translate the great masterpieces to improve and form his style. His indebtedness to Milton in his Areopagitica in the above passage is obvious.