Note 45 — LORD CHESTERFIELD’S LETTERS, SENTENCES, AND MAXIMS. (continued 3)
Reading edition
A notorious, wretched debauchee, who has been pilloried into a miserable and degraded immortality by Arbuthnot, Pope and Hogarth; the painter has given us his portrait in “The Harlot’s Progress,” plate 1. Pope has set him up as an instance of that hardest trial to good men, the success of the wicked:
“Should some lone temple, nodding to its fall, For Chartres’ head reserve the nodding wall.”
And Arbuthnot wrote the most tremendously severe epitaph in the whole range of literature on him while yet alive: “Here continueth to rot the body of Colonel Francis Chartres,” etc. Finally, Chesterfield points him out to his son as the most notorious blasted rascal in the world—blasted, indeed, as by lightning. It is needless to say that this word is not used as a vulgar oath, but to point out a man whose name is, as the Bible of 1551 has it: “Marred forever by blastynge.”