Birthday: "Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least."

Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773) was a bright young man who chose his parents well and became the 4th Earl Chesterfield. After reading classics at Cambridge, he went into politics and became known as an orator and wit. Navigating (mostly successfully) through the reigns of George I, II and early III, he held a number of significant posts, including that of Viceroy of Ireland, and was the author of the Calendar Act of 1750, which makes figuring out when George Washington was born so confusing.

Chesterfield’s son, Philip,was a bastard who married beneath his rank and kept his wife and two sons a secret from his father. When the son died at 36, the Earl welcomed the family and educated the kids; but at his death, a scandal broke when the press reported he left the boys annuities and 10,00 pounds each, but their mother, nothing. She assembled the father’s letters to his son- some four hundred, imparting advice on everything under the sun- and sold them as a book for 1500 pounds.

Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son caused a new scandal over the old man’s cynicism toward people and life; among his precepts was:

“I would heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh, while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it ‘being merry’. In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh.”

The book launched a thousand modern-day platitudes:

Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no delay, no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves.

The fuss guaranteed Eugenia Stanhope multiple editions, strong sales, and a very comfortable old age. When she died she instructed her sons, through her will, “to live in strict unity and friendship with one another, not to dissipate their fortunes and to beware of all human beings.”

The book remained in popular circulation for over a hundred years.

Chesterfield fancied himself a patron of the literary arts, and got from his support of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary the immortality for which he hoped, if not in the grand manner he anticipated. After the Earl gave ten pounds for starting the project- which took eight years and was vastly more costly than projected, and then quarreled with Johnson over the wording of the dedication- he seems to have forgotten the thin-skinned lexicographer.  

When the work was ready for publication, however, he published two articles praising it, prompting Johnson to write a scathing letter culminating in the question, “is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?"

Johnson, who also wrote up debates in Parliament, skewered Chesterfield’s speaking skills, telling his biographer, James, Boswell, "This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords!"

Nor did death give Johnson cause to let up. After the publication of the Letters in 1774, Johnson dismissed the book as what one might expect of a lord trying to instruct an illegitimate son on being an English gentleman: “"they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master”.

Having fathered- and outlived- an illegitimate son, Chesterfield and his wife (the illegitimate daughter of King George I) had no legitimate heirs. The old man therefore adopted his third cousin, who became the 5th earl in 1773. The Stanhopes were never very fecund, and the earldom meandered through various, increasingly extended cousins unto the 12th earl, whose childless death also marked the title’s extinction in 1967.

Bretby Hall, the family seat from 1630, passed, in a suitably complex Downton Abbeyesque series of transactions, from the childless 7th earl to his mother, the Dowager Countess, then to her grandson, who became 5th Earl Carnarvon. He sold the estate in pieces, starting in World War I, and used the proceeds to fund his archeological expeditions to Egypt, which included the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. After ownership by an industrialist and a seventy-year run as an orthopedic hospital, Bretby was restored and divided into luxury flats at the turn of the 21st century.

Besides Johnson’s ruthless pillorying, the 4th earl lives on as the namesake of counties in the American states of Virginia and South Carolina.