Books: Sage of the Minuet

LORD CHESTERFIELD AND His WORLD (456 pp.)—Samuel Shellabarger—Little, Brown ($5).

Samuel Shellabarger is a master of the histrionical romance. His Captain from Castile and Prince of Foxes bristled with swashbuckling Renaissance antics, and bustled down the old pay-dirt road to sales of more than 1,000,000 copies each. But before he became the darling of the cloak-and-swagger set, Author Shellabarger, a onetime Princeton professor, wrote sober-sided biographies. One of these. Lord Chesterfield and His World, published in Britain in 1935, is making a belated U.S. bow. Scholarly Author Shellabarger has taken a firm grip...