Word: chesterfields
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...LORD CHESTERFIELD AND His WORLD (456 pp.)-Samuel Shellabarger-Little, Brown...
...bristled with swashbuckling Renaissance antics, and bustled down the old pay-dirt road to sales of more than 1,000,000 copies each. But before he became the darling of the cloak-and-swagger set, Author Shellabarger, a onetime Princeton professor, wrote sober-sided biographies. One of these. Lord Chesterfield and His World, published in Britain in 1935, is making a belated U.S. bow. Scholarly Author Shellabarger has taken a firm grip on a slippery subject: a man with the moral instincts of a chameleon and the temperament of an icicle...
Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, was a chilly 18th Century aristocrat, diplomat and wit, whose famous letters to his son, designed to make the lad a blue chip off the old block, immortalized their author instead. Reared in the Age of Reason, Chesterfield also became its perfect symbol: a man who saw his time steadily, but never saw through...
...Chesterfield's emotional budget, sentiment was a luxury, style a necessity. "Do everything," the earl instructed a godson, "in minuet-time; speak, think, and move always in that measure." The irony of Chesterfield's own life was that he gracefully missed every other beat. He served George II ably as ambassador to The Hague, and was probably one of the few lord-lieutenants of Ireland whose blarney charmed the Irish. But solid triumphs abroad never netted him more than slim cabinet posts at home, and George II scornfully dubbed the diminutive earl a "dwarf-baboon...
...each month. So far, Hope has been noisily funny; Lester, noisily unfunny; and Fred Allen still baffled by the new medium. Allen made his usual acid jokes about admen and television, presided over three skits that didn't quite come off, gloomily croaked a singing commercial for Sponsor Chesterfield, but was unable to approach the comedy highs he reached on radio...