at the Hague,” as he had before made him black-rod in Ireland, and gave the ingenious reason that he had a black face.’  But the great ‘dictator’ in the empire of politeness was now in a slow but sure decline.  Not long before his death he was visited by Monsieur Suard, a French gentleman, who was anxious to see ’l’homme le plus aimable, le plus poli et le plus spirituel des trois royaumes,’ but who found him fearfully altered; morose from his deafness, yet still anxious to please.  ‘It is very sad,’ he said, with his usual politeness, ’to be deaf, when one would so much enjoy listening.  I am not,’ he added, ’so philosophic as my friend the President de Montesquieu, who says, “I know how to be blind, but I do not yet know how to be deaf."’ ‘We shortened our visit,’ says M. Suard, ‘lest we should fatigue the earl.’  ‘I do not detain you,’ said Chesterfield, ‘for I must go and rehearse my funeral.’  It was thus that he styled his daily drive through the streets of London.

Lord Chesterfield’s wonderful memory continued till his latest hour.  As he lay, gasping in the last agonies of extreme debility, his friend, Mr. Dayrolles, called in to see him half an hour before he expired.  The politeness which had become part of his very nature did not desert the dying earl.  He managed to say, in a low voice, to his valet, ’Give Dayrolles a chair.’  This little trait greatly struck the famous Dr. Warren, who was at the bedside of this brilliant and wonderful man.  He died on the 24th of March, 1773, in the 79th year of his age.

The preamble to a codicil (Feb. 11, 1773) contains the following striking sentences, written when the intellect was impressed with the solemnity of that solemn change which comes alike to the unreflecting and to the heart stricken, holy believer:—­

’I most humbly recommend my soul to the extensive mercy of that Eternal, Supreme, Intelligent Being who gave it me; most earnestly at the same time deprecating his justice.  Satiated with the pompous follies of this life, of which I have had an uncommon share, I would have no posthumous ones displayed at my funeral, and therefore desire to be buried in the next burying-place to the place where I shall die, and limit the whole expense of my funeral to L100.’

His body was interred, according to his wish, in the vault of the chapel in South Audley Street, but it was afterwards removed to the family burial-place in Shelford Church, Nottinghamshire.

In his will he left legacies to his servants.[26] ‘I consider them,’ he said, ’as unfortunate friends; my equals by nature, and my inferiors only in the difference of our fortunes.’  There was something lofty in the mind that prompted that sentence.

His estates reverted to a distant kinsman, descended from a younger son of the first earl; and it is remarkable, on looking through the Peerage of Great Britain, to perceive how often this has been the case in a race remarkable for the absence of virtue.  Interested marriages, vicious habits, perhaps account for the fact; but retributive justice, though it be presumptuous to trace its course, is everywhere.