The name of Lord Chesterfield is in the air just now.  Within the last few months the curiosity of the world has been stimulated and satisfied by the publication of some hitherto unknown letters by Lord Chesterfield.  The pleasure which the student of history has taken in this new find is just dimmed at this moment by the death of Lord Carnarvon, whose care and scholarship gave them to the worlds.  They are indeed a precious possession.  A very eminent French critic, M. Brunetiere, has inveighed lately with much justice against the passion for raking together and bringing out all manner of unpublished writings.  He complains, and complains with justice, that while the existing classics of literature are left imperfectly edited, if not ignored, the activity of students is devoted to burrowing out all manner of unimportant material, anything, everything, so long as it has not been known beforehand to the world.  The French critic protests against the class of scholars who go into ecstacies over a newly discovered washing list of Pascal or a bill from Racine’s perruquier.  The complaint tells against us as well on our side of the Channel.  We hear a great deal about newly discovered fragments by this great writer and that great writer, which are of no value whatever, except that they happen to be new.  But no such stricture applies to the letters of Lord Chesterfield which the late Lord Carnarvon so recently gave to the world.  They are a valuable addition to our knowledge of the last century, a valuable addition to our knowledge of the man who wrote them.  And knowledge about Lord Chesterfield is always welcome.  Few of the famous figures of the last century have been more misunderstood than he.  The world is too ready to remember Johnson’s biting letter; too ready to remember the cruel caricatures of Lord Hervey.  Even the famous letters have been taken too much at Johnson’s estimate, and Johnson’s estimate was one-sided and unfair.  A man would not learn the highest life from the Chesterfield letters; they have little in common with the ethics of an A Kempis, a Jean Paul Richter, or a John Stuart Mill.  But they have their value in their way, and if they contain some utterances so unutterably foolish as those in which Lord Chesterfield expressed himself upon Greek literature, they contain some very excellent maxims for the management of social life.  Nobody could become a penny the worse for the study of Chesterfield; many might become the better.  They are not a whit more cynical than, indeed they are not so cynical as, those letters of Thackeray’s to young Brown, which with all their cleverness make us understand what Mr. Henley means when in his “Views and Reviews” he describes him as a “writer of genius who was innately and irredeemably a Philistine”.  The letters of Lord Chesterfield would not do much to make a man a hero, but there is little in literature more unheroic than the letters to Mr. Thomas Brown the younger.