It Will Be Remembered That The Earl Sent His Son Abroad At The Age Of
Fourteen To Study For Five Years On The Continent, And To Acquire A
Better Preparation For Life Than Oxford Or Cambridge Could Offer.
Of
these universities Chesterfield had a low opinion.
He could not
sufficiently scorn an education which did not prevent a man from being
flurried at his Presentation to the King. He remembered that he himself,
when he was first introduced into good company, with all the awkwardness
and rust of Cambridge about him, was frightened out of his wits. At
Cambridge he "had acquired among the pedants of an illiberal seminary a
turn for satire and contempt, and a strong tendency to argumentation and
contradiction," which was a hindrance to his progress in the polite
world. Only after a continental education did he see the follies of
Englishmen who knew nothing of modern Europe, who were always talking of
the Ancients as something more than men, and of the Moderns as something
less. "They are never without a classic or two in their pockets; they
stick to the old good sense; they read none of modern trash; and will
show you plainly that no improvement has been made, in any one art or
science, these last seventeen hundred years."[365]
His son, therefore, was to waste no time in the society of pedants, but
accompanied by a travelling tutor, was to begin studying life first-hand
at the Courts. His book-learning was to go side by side with the study
of manners:
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