was contemplated by the writer.  The dodges and devices of authors are well-nigh infinite and quite beyond conjecture, and it is, of course, possible that Lord Chesterfield kept copies of these letters, which bear upon their faces evidence of care and elaboration.  It is not to be supposed for a moment that he ever forgot he had written them.  It is hard to believe he never inquired after them and their whereabouts.  Great men have been known to write letters which, though they bore other addresses, were really intended for their biographers.  It would not have been surprising if Lord Chesterfield wrote these letters intending some day to publish them, but not only is there no warrant for such an opinion, but the opposite is clearly established.  It is, no doubt, odd that the son should have carefully preserved more than 400 letters written to him during a period beginning with his tenderest years and continuing whilst he was travelling on the Continent.  It seems almost a miracle.  What made the son treasure them so carefully?  Did he look forward to being his father’s biographer?  Hardly so at the age of ten, or even twenty.  Biographies were not then what they have since become.  No doubt in the middle of the eighteenth century letters were more treasured than they are to-day, and young Stanhope’s friends may also have thought it wise to encourage him to preserve documentary evidence of the great interest taken in him by his father.  None the less, I think the preservation of this correspondence is in the circumstances a most extraordinary though well-established fact.

The son died in 1768 of a dropsy at Avignon, and the news was communicated to the Earl by his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope, of whose existence he was previously unaware.  Two grandsons accompanied her.  It was a shock; but ’les manieres nobles et aisees, la tournure d’un homme de condition, le ton de la bonne compagnie, les graces le je ne scais quoi qui plait,’ came to Lord Chesterfield’s assistance, and he received his son’s widow, who was not a pleasing person, and her two boys with kindness and good feeling, and provided for them quite handsomely by his will.  The Earl died in 1773, in his seventy-ninth year, and thereupon Mrs. Stanhope, who was in possession of all the original letters addressed to her late husband, carried her wares to market, and made a bargain with Mr. Dodsley for their publication, she to receive L1,575.  Mr. Dodsley advertised the forthcoming work, and on that the Earl’s executors, relying upon the well-known case of Pope v. Curl, decided by Lord Hardwicke in 1741, filed their bill against Mrs. Stanhope, seeking an injunction to restrain publication.  The widow put in her sworn Answer, in which she averred that she had, on more occasions than one, mentioned publication to the Earl, and that he, though recovering from her certain written characters of eminent contemporaries, had seemed quite content to let her do what she liked