Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, 4th Earl quotes
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She loved money, but could occasionally part with it, especially to men of learning, whose patronage she affected. She often conve...rsed with them, and bewildered herself in their metaphysical disputes, which neither she nor they themselves understood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His poor, crazy, deformed body was a mere Pandora's box, containing all the physical ills that ever afflicted humanity. This, perh...aps, whetted the edge of his satire, and may in some degree excuse it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
George the first was an honest, dull, German gentleman, as unfit as unwilling to act the part of a king, which is to shine and to ...oppress. Lazy and inactive even in his pleasures, which were therefore lowly sensual. He was coolly intrepid, and indolently benevolent. He was diffident of his own parts, which made him speak little in public, and prefer in his social, which were his favourite, hours the company of wags and buffoons. Even his mistress, the duchess of Kendal, with whom he passed most of his time, and who had all influence over him, was very little above an idiot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His youth was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of pleasures, in which he licentiously triumphed, disdaining all decorum. ...His fine imagination was often heated and exhausted with his body in celebrating and deifying the prostitute of the night, and his convivial joys were pushed to all the extravagancy of frantic bacchanals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His breast was the seat of all those passions which degrade our nature, and disturb our reason. There they raged in a perpetual co...nflict; but avarice, the meanest of them all, generally triumphed, ruled absolutely, and in many instances, which I forbear to mention, most scandalously.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords,... that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In private life he was good-natured, chearful, social; inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals. He had a coarse, strong wit,... which he was too free of for a man in his station, as it is always inconsistent with dignity. He was very able as a minister, but without a certain elevation of mind necessary for great good, or great mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He degraded himself by the vice of drinking, which, together with a great stock of Greek and Latin, he brought away with him from ...Oxford and retained and practised ever afterwards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had a gentleman-like frankness in his behaviour, and as a great point of honour as a minister can have, especially a minister a...t the head of the treasury, where numberless sturdy and insatiable beggars of condition apply, who cannot all be gratified, nor all with safety be refused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had not the least pride of birth and rank, that common narrow notion of little minds, that wretched mistaken succedaneum of mer...it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »