uld scarcely have earned in his own
day the notoriety which the publication of his "Diary" had in a manner
preserved to later days. If he was hardly worth a corner in the
Whartons' picture-gallery he was certainly scarcely deserving of the
attention of Browning. Even his ineptitude was hardly important enough
to have twenty pages of Browning's genius wasted upon it, twenty pages
ending with the sting about

The scoff
That greets your very name: folks see but one
Fool more, as well as knave, in Dodington.

Dodington has been occasionally classed with Lord Hervey but the
classification is scarcely fair. With all his faults--and he had them in
abundance--Lord Hervey was a better creature than Bubb Dodington. If he
was effeminate, he had convictions and could stand by them. If Pope
sneered at him as Sporus and called him a curd of asses' milk, he has
left behind him some of the most brilliant memoirs ever penned. If he
had some faults in common with Dodington he was endowed with virtues of
which Dodington never dreamed.

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for raking together and bringing out all manner of unpublished writings.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
whi