According to Lord Hervey’s account he often even sacrificed his interest to his vanity.  The description given of Lord Chesterfield by one as bitter as himself implies, indeed, that great pains were requisite to counterbalance the defects of nature.  Wilkes, one of the ugliest men of his time, used to say, that with an hour’s start he would carry off the affections of any woman from the handsomest man breathing.  Lord Chesterfield, according to Lord Hervey, required to be still longer in advance of a rival.

‘With a person,’ Hervey writes, ’as disagreeable, as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following many women of the first beauty and the most in fashion.  He was very short, disproportioned, thick and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus.  One Ben Ashurst, who said a few good things, though admired for many, told Lord Chesterfield once, that he was like a stunted giant—­which was a humorous idea and really apposite.’

Notwithstanding that Chesterfield, when young, injured both soul and body by pleasure and dissipation, he always found time for serious study:  when he could not have it otherwise, he took it out of his sleep.  How late soever he went to bed, he resolved always to rise early; and this resolution he adhered to so faithfully, that at the age of fifty-eight he could declare that for more than forty years he had never been in bed at nine o’clock in the morning, but had generally been up before eight.  He had the good sense, in this respect, not to exaggerate even this homely virtue.  He did not rise with the dawn, as many early risers pride themselves in doing, putting all the engagements of ordinary life out of their usual beat, just as if the clocks had been set two hours forward.  The man in ordinary society, who rises at four in this country, and goes to bed at nine, is a social and family nuisance.  Strong good sense characterized Chesterfield’s early pursuits.  Desultory reading he abhorred.  He looked on it as one of the resources of age, but as injurious to the young in the extreme.  ‘Throw away,’ thus he writes to his son, ’none of your time upon those trivial, futile books, published by idle necessitous authors for the amusement of idle and ignorant readers.’

Even in those days such books ‘swarm and buzz about one:’  ’flap them away,’ says Chesterfield, ‘they have no sting.’  The earl directed the whole force of his mind to oratory, and became the finest speaker of his time.  Writing to Sir Horace Mann, about the Hanoverian debate (in 1743, Dec. 15), Walpole praising the speeches of Lords Halifax and Sandwich, adds, ’I was there, and heard Lord Chesterfield make the finest oration I have ever heard there.’  This from a man who had listened to Pulteney, to Chatham, to Carteret, was a singularly valuable tribute.

Whilst a student at Cambridge, Chesterfield was forming an acquaintance with the Hon. George Berkeley, the youngest son of the second Earl of Berkeley, and remarkable rather as being the second husband of Lady Suffolk, the favourite of George II., than from any merits or demerits of his own.