 CHESTORFIELD'S LETTERS to his son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. LETTER XXV. LONDON. AUGUST XXIII. OLD STYLE. 1748. DEAR BOY. Your friend Mr. Elliot has dined with me twice since I returned here, and I can say with truth that, while I had the seals, I never examined or stifled a state prisoner with so much caring and curiosity as I did him. Nay, I did more. For contrary to the laws of this country, I gave him in some manner the question ordinary and extraordinary, and I have infinite pleasure in telling you that the rack which I put him to did not extort from him one single word that was not such as I wish to hear of you. I heartily congratulate you upon such an advantageous testimony from so creditable a witness. LADATI A LADATO VIRU. Is one of the greatest pleasures and honors a rational being can have. May you long continue to deserve it. Your aversion to drinking and your dislike to gaming which Mr. Elliot assures me are both very strong, give me the greatest joy imaginable for your sake, as the former would ruin both your constitution and understanding and the latter your fortune and character. Mr. Hart wrote me words some time ago, and Mr. Elliot confirms it now, that you employ your pen money in a very different manner from that in which pen money is commonly lavished. Not in Jew jaws and baubles, but in buying good and useful books. This is an excellent symptom and gives me very good hopes. Go on thus, my dear boy, but for these next two years and I ask no more. You must then make such a figure and such a fortune in the world as I wish you, and as I have taken all these pains to enable you to do. After that time I allow you to be as idle as ever you please, because I am sure that you will not then please to be so at all. The ignorant and the weak are only idle, but those who have once acquired a good stock of knowledge always desire to increase it. Knowledge is like power in this respect, that those who have the most are most desirous of having more. It does not clog by possession, but increases desire, which is the case of very few pleasures. Upon receiving this congratulatory letter and reading your own praises, I am sure that it must naturally occur to you how great a share of them you owe to Mr. Hart's care and attention, and consequently that your regard and affection for him must increase, if there be room for it, in proportion as you reap, which you do daily, the fruits of his labours. I must not, however, conceal from you that there was one article in which your own witness, Mr. Elliot, faltered, for upon my questioning him home as to your manner of speaking he could not say that your utterance was either distinct or graceful. I have already said so much to you upon this point that I can add nothing. I will therefore only repeat this truth, which is, that if you do not spink distinctly and gracefully, nobody will desire to hear you. I am glad to learn that Abbe Mabley's Duat public de l'Europe makes a part of your evening amusements. It is a very useful book, and gives a clear deduction of the affairs of Europe, from the Treaty of Munster to this time. Pray read it with attention, and with the proper maps, always recurring to them for the several countries or towns yielded, taken, or restored. Père Bougeant's third volume will give you the best idea of the Treaty of Munster, and open you to the several views of the belligerent and contracting parties, and there never were greater than at that time. The House of Austria, in the war immediately preceding that treaty, intended to make itself absolute in the empire, and to overthrow the rights of the respective states of it. The view of France was to weaken and dismember the House of Austria to such a degree, as that it should no longer be a counterbalance to that of Bourbon. Sweden wanted possessions on the continent of Germany, not only to supply the necessities of its own poor and barren country, but likewise to hold the balance in the empire between the House of Austria and the states. The House of Brandenburg wanted to aggrandize itself by pilfering in the fire, changed sides occasionally, and made a good bargain at last, for I think it got, at the peace, nine or ten bishoprics secularized. So that we may date, from the Treaty of Munster, the decline of the House of Austria, the great power of the House of Bourbon, and the aggrandizement of that Brandenburg, which I am much mistaken if it stops where it is now. Make my compliments to Lord Pultney, to whom I would have you be not only attentive but useful, by setting him, in case he wants it, a good example of application and temperance. I begin to believe that, as I shall be proud of you, others will be proud, too, of imitating you. Those expectations of mine seem now so well grounded, that my disappointment, and consequently my anger, will be so much the greater if they fail. But as things stand now, I am most affectionately and tenderly yours. LETTER 48 London, August 30, old style, 1748 Dear Boy, your reflections upon the conduct of France, from the Treaty of Munster to this time, are very just, and I am very glad to find by them, that you not only read, but that you think and reflect upon what you read. Many great readers load their memories, without exercising their judgments, and make lumber-rooms of their heads instead of furnishing them usefully. Facts are heaped upon facts without order or distinction, and may justly be said to compose that, Rudus, Ingestac, Moless, Chem Dixere Chaos. Go on, then, in the way of reading that you are in. Take nothing for granted upon the bare authority of the author, but weigh and consider, in your own mind, the probability of the facts and the justness of the reflections. Consult different authors upon the same facts, and form your opinion upon the greater or lesser degree of probability arising from the whole, which, in my mind, is the utmost stretch of historical faith. Certainty I fear not being to be found. When a historian pretends to give you the causes and motives of events, compare those causes and motives with the characters and interests of the parties concerned, and judge for yourself whether they correspond or not. Consider whether you cannot assign others, again more probable, and in that examination do not despise some very mean and trifling causes of the actions of great men. For so various and inconsistent its human nature, so strong and changeable our passions, so fluctuating our our wills, and so much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies, that every man is more the man of the day than a regular consequential character. The best have something bad, and something little, the worst have something good, and sometimes something great. For I do not believe what Vilius Petriculus, for the sake of saying a pretty thing, says of Scipio, key nihil non ladenam autfesit, audixit autsensit. Just by the reflections of historians, with which they think it necessary to interlaw their histories, or at least to conclude their chapters, and which in the French histories are always introduced with tante idèvres, and in the English so true it is, do not adopt them implicitly upon the credit of the author, but analyze them yourself and judge whether they are true or not. But to return to the politics of France, from which I have digressed, you have certainly made one further reflection of an advantage which France has over and above its abilities in the cabinet and the skill of its negotiators, which is, if I may use the expression, its soleness, continuity of riches and power within itself and the nature of its government. Near twenty millions of people, and the ordinary revenue of above thirteen million sterling a year, are at the absolute disposal of the crown. This is what no other power in Europe can say, so that different powers must now unite to make a balance against France, which union, though formed upon the principle of their common interest, can never be so intimate as to compose a machine so compact and simple as that of one great kingdom, directed by one will and moved by one interest. The allied powers, as we have constantly seen, have, besides the common and declared object of their alliance, some separate and concealed view to which they often sacrifice the general one, which makes them, either directly or indirectly, pull different ways. Thus the design upon Toulon failed in the year 1706, only from the secret view of the House of Austria upon Naples, which made the court of Vienna, notwithstanding the representatives of the other allies to the contrary, send to Naples the twelve thousand men that would have done the business at Toulon. In this last war, too, the same causes had the same effects. The Queen of Hungary, in secret, thought of nothing but recovering of Cilicia, and what she had lost in Italy. Therefore, never sent half that quota which she promised, and we paid for, in deflanders, but left that country to the maritime powers to defend as they could. The King of Sardinia's real object was Savona and all the Riviera de Ponente, for which reason he concurred so lamely in the invasion of Provence, where the Queen of Hungary, likewise, did not send one-third of the force stipulated, engrossed as she was by her oblique views upon the plunder of Genoa, and the recovery of Naples. In so much that the expedition into Provence, which would have distressed France to the greatest degree, and have caused a great detachment from their army and flanders, failed shamefully, for want of everything necessary for its success. Suppose, therefore, any four or five powers who, altogether, shall be equal, or even a little superior, enriches in strength to that one power against which they are united. The advantage will still be greatly on the side of that single power, because it is but one. The power and riches of Charles V. were, in themselves, certainly superior to those of France's the first, and yet upon the whole, he was not an overmatch for him. Charles V's dominions, great as they were, were scattered and remote from each other. Their constitution's different. Wherever he did not reside, disturbances arose, whereas the compactness of France made up the difference in strength. This obvious reflection convinced me of the absurdity of the Treaty of Hanover in 1725, between France and England, to which the Dutch afterward is seated, for it was made upon the apprehensions, either real or pretended, that the marriage of Don Carlos with the eldest Archduchess, now Queen of Hungary, was settled in the Treaty of Vienna of the same year between Spain and the late Emperor Charles VI. Which marriage, those consummate politicians said would revive in Europe the exorbitant power of Charles V. I am sure I hardly wish it had, as in that case there had been what there certainly is not now, one power in Europe to counterbalance that of France. And then the maritime powers would, in reality, have held the balance of Europe in their hands. Even supposing that the Austrian power would then have been an overmatch for that of France, which by the way is not clear, the weight of the maritime powers, then thrown into the scale of France, would infallibly have made the balance at least even. In which case, too, the moderate efforts of the maritime powers on the side of France would have been sufficient, whereas now they are obliged to exhaust and beggar themselves, and that too ineffectually, in hopes to support the shattered, beggar and insufficient house of Austria. This has been a long political dissertation, but I am informed that political subjects are your favorite ones, which I am glad of considering your destination. You do well to get your materials all ready before you begin your work. As you buy, and I am told, read books of this kind, I will point out two or three for your purchase in Perusel. I am not sure that I have mentioned them before, but that is no matter if you have not got them. Memoir pour sauver à l'histoire du 17e siècle is a most useful book for you to recur to for all the facts and chronology of that country. It is in four volumes Octavo, and very correct and exact. If I do not mistake, I have formally recommended to you Les Memoirs du Cardinal Lorette, however, if you have not yet read them, pray do, and with the attention which they deserve. You will find there the best account of a very interesting period of the minority of Louis XIV. The characters are drawn short, but in a strong and masterly manner, and the political reflections are the only just and practical ones that I ever saw in print. They are well worth your transcribing. Le commerce des anciens pour Monsieur Uet, avec Delbranche In one little volume Octavo is worth your Perusel, as commerce is a very considerable part of political knowledge. I need not, I am sure, suggest to you, when you read the course of commerce, either of the ancients or of the modern, to follow it upon your map, for there is no other way of remembering geography correctly, but by looking perpetually in the map for the places one reads of, even though one knows before pretty near where they are. Adieu. As all the accounts which I receive of you grow better and better, so I grow more and more affectionately yours. End of Section XXV. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section XXVI. Of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter XXIX London, September 5, Old Style, 1748. Dear Boy, I have received yours with the enclosed German letter to Mr. Gravenkopf, which he assures me is extremely well written, considering the little time that you have applied yourself to that language. As you have now got over the most difficult part, pray go on diligently, and make yourself absolutely master of the rest. Whoever does not entirely possess a language will never appear to advantage or even equal to himself, either in speaking or writing it. His ideas are fettered and seem imperfect or confused, if he is not master of all the words and phrases necessary to express them. I therefore desire that you will not fail writing a German letter once every fortnight to Mr. Gravenkopf, which will make the writing of that language familiar to you, and, moreover, when you shall have left Germany and be arrived in Turin, I shall require you to write even to me in German, that you may not forget with ease what you have with difficulty learned. I likewise desire that while you are in Germany you will take all opportunities of conversing in German, which is the only way of knowing that or any other language accurately. You will also desire your German master to teach you the proper titles and superscriptions to be used to people of all ranks, which is a point so material in Germany that I have known many a letter returned unopened, because one title in twenty has been omitted in the direction. St. Thomas's Day now draws near, when you are to leave Saxony to go to Berlin, and I take it for granted that if anything is yet wanting to complete your knowledge of the state of that electorate, you will not fail to procure it before you go away. I do not mean, as you will easily believe, the number of churches, parishes, or towns, but I mean the Constitution, the revenues, the troops, and the trade of that electorate. A few questions, sensibly asked, of sensible people, will produce you the necessary information, which I desire you will enter in your little book. Berlin will be entirely a new scene to you, and I look upon it in a manner as your first step into the great world. Take care that step be not a false one, and that you do not stumble at the threshold. You will there be more in company than you have yet been. Manors and attentions will therefore be more necessary. Pleasing in company is the only way of being pleased in it yourself. Sense and knowledge are the first and necessary foundations for pleasing in company, but they will by no means do alone, and they will never be perfectly welcome if they are not accompanied with manners and attentions. You will best acquire these by frequenting the companies of people of fashion, but then you must resolve to acquire them, in those companies, by proper care and observation. For I have known people who, though they have frequented good company all their lifetime, have done it in so inattentive and unobserving a manner as to be never the better for it, and to remain as disagreeable, as awkward, and as vulgar, as if they had never seen any person of fashion. When you do go into company, by good company is meant the people of the first fashion of the place, observe carefully their turn, their manners, their address, and conform your own to them. But this is not all, neither. Go deeper still, observe their characters, and pray, as far as you can, into both their hearts and their heads. Seek for their particular merit, their predominant passion, or their prevailing weaknesses, and you will then know what to bait your hook with to catch them. Man is a composition of so many and such various ingredients that it requires both time and care to analyze him. For though we have all the same ingredients in our general composition, as reason, will, passions, and appetites, yet the different proportions and combinations of them in each individual produce that infinite variety of characters, which in some particular or other distinguishes every individual from another. Reason ought to direct the whole, but seldom does, and he who addresses himself singly to another man's reason, without endeavoring to engage his heart in his interest also, is no more likely to succeed than a man who should apply only to a king's nominal minister and neglect his favorite. I will recommend to your attentive perusal, now that you are going into the world, two books, which will let you as much into the characters of men as books can do. I mean, les réflexions morales de monsieur de rouge-fecot, and les carateurs de brillard. But remember, at the same time, that I only recommend them to you as the best general maps to assist you in your journey, and not marking out every particular turning and winding that you will meet with. There your own sagacity and observation must come to their aid. La Roche-Foucault is, I know, blamed, but I think without reason, for deriving all our actions from the source of self-love. For my own part I see a great deal of truth, and no harm at all in that opinion. It is certain that we seek our own happiness in everything we do, and it is as certain that we can only find it in doing well, and in conforming all our actions to the rule of right reason, which is the great law of nature. It is only a mistaken self-love that is a blameable motive, when we take the immediate and indiscriminate gratification of a passion or appetite for real happiness. But am I blameable if I do a good action, upon account of the happiness which that honest consciousness will give me? Surely not. On the contrary, that pleasing consciousness is a proof of my virtue. The reflection which is the most censured in Monsieur de la Roche-Foucault's book is a very ill-natured one, is this. On trouvait dans la majoire de son meilleur ami quelque chose qui ne déplait pas. And why not? Why may I not feel a very tender and real concern for the misfortune of my friend, and yet at the same time feel a pleasing consciousness at having discharged my duty to him, by comforting and assisting him to the utmost of my power in that misfortune? Give me bit-virtuous actions, and I will not quibble and chicane about the motives. And I will give anybody their choice of these two truths, which amount to the same thing. He who loves himself best is the honestest man, or the honestest man loves himself best. The characters of La Bruyère are pictures from life, most of them finally drawn and highly colored. Furnish your mind with them first, and when you meet with their likeness, as you will every day, they will strike you the more. You will compare every feature with the original, and both will reciprocally help you to discover the beauties and the blemishes. As women are a considerable, or at least a pretty numerous, part of company, and as their suffrages go a great way toward establishing a man's character in the fashionable part of the world, which is of great importance to the fortune and figure he proposes to make in it, it is necessary to please them. I will therefore upon this subject let you into certain arcana that will be useful for you to know, but which you must with the utmost care conceal and never seem to know. Women then are only children of a larger growth. They have an entertaining tattle and sometimes wit. But for solid reasoning, good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four and twenty hours together. Some little passion or humor always breaks upon their best resolutions. Their beauty neglected or controverted, their age increased, or their supposed understandings depreciated, instantly kindles their little passions, and overturns any system of consequential conduct, that in their most reasonable moments they might have been capable of forming. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly forward child. But he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does both, which is the thing in the world that they are proud of. For they love mightily to be dabbling in business, which, by the way, they always spoil, and being justly distrustful that men in general look upon them in a trifling light, they almost adore that man who talks more seriously to them, and who seems to consult and trust them. I say who seems, for weak men really do, but wise ones only seem to do it. No flattery is either too high or too low for them. They will greedily swallow the highest, and gratefully accept of the lowest, and you may safely flatter any woman from her understanding down to the exquisite taste of her fan. Women who are either indisputably beautiful or indisputably ugly are best flattered upon the score of their understandings. But those who are in a state of mediocrity are best flattered upon their beauty, or at least their graces. For every woman who is not absolutely ugly thinks herself handsome, but not hearing often that she is so is the more grateful and the more obliged to the few who tell her so. Whereas a decided and cautious beauty looks upon every tribute paid to her beauty only as her do, but wants to shine and to be considered on the side of her understanding, and a woman who is ugly enough to know that she is so knows that she has nothing left for it but her understanding, which is consequently and probably, in more senses than one, her weak side. But these are secrets which you must keep involubly, if you would not, like Orpheus, be torn to pieces by the whole sex. On the contrary, a man who thinks of living in the great world must be galant, polite, and attentive to please the women. They have, from the weakness of men, more or less influence in all courts. They absolutely stamp every man's character in the Beaumont, and make it either current or cry it down and stop it in payments. It is therefore absolutely necessary to manage, please, and flatter them, and never to discover the least marks of contempt, which is what they never forgive. But in this they are not singular, for it is the same with men, who will much sooner forgive an injustice than an insult. Every man is not ambitious or courteous or passionate, but every man has pride enough in his composition to feel and resent the least slight and contempt. Remember therefore most carefully to conceal your contempt, however just, wherever you would not make an implacable enemy. Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known than their crimes, and if you hint to a man that you think him silly, ignorant, or even ill-bred, or awkward, he will hate you more and longer than if you tell him plainly that you think him a rogue. Never yield to that temptation, which to most young men is very strong, of exposing other people's weaknesses and infirmities, for the sake either of diverting the company or showing your own superiority. You may get the laugh on your side by it for the present, but you will make enemies by it forever, and even those who laugh with you then will, upon reflection, fear and consequently hate you, besides that it is ill-natured, and a good heart desires rather to conceal than expose other people's weaknesses or misfortunes. If you have wit, use it to please, and not to hurt. You may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching. Whatever it is wished for, under the line it is dreaded. These are some of the hints which my long experience in the great world enables me to give you, and which, if you attend to them, may prove useful to you in your journey through it. I wish it may be a prosperous one. At least I am sure that it must be your own fault if it is not. Make my compliments to Mr. Hart, who I am very sorry to hear is not well. I hope by this time he is recovered. Adieu. I have more than once recommended to you the memoirs of the cardinal durettes, and to attend particularly to the political reflections interspersed in that excellent work. I will now preach a little upon two or three of those texts. In the disturbances at Paris, Monsieur de Beaufort, who was a very popular, though a very weak man, was the cardinal's tool with the populace. Proud of his popularity, he was always for assembling the people of Paris together, thinking that he made a great figure at the head of them. The cardinal, who was factious enough, was wise enough at the same time to avoid gathering the people together, except when there was occasion, and when he had something particular for them to do. However, he could not always check Monsieur de Beaufort, who having assembled them once very unnecessarily and without any determined object, they ran riot, would not be kept within bounds by their leaders, and did their cause a great deal of harm, upon which the cardinal observes, most judiciously, to Monsieur de Beaufort me savoir pas, que qui assemble le peuple, le mot. It is certain that great numbers of people met together, animate each other, and will do something, either good or bad, but often or bad, and the respective individuals, who are separately very quiet, when met together in numbers, grow too multuous as a body, and ripe for any mischief that may be pointed out to them by the leaders. And if their leaders have no business for them, they will find some for themselves. The demagogues, or leaders of popular factions, should therefore be very careful not to assemble the people unnecessarily, and without a settled and well considered object. Besides that, by making those popular assemblies too frequent, they make them likewise too familiar, and consequently less respected by their enemies. Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers. When the numbers are very great, all sense and reason seem to subside, and one sudden frenzy to seize on all, even the coolest of them. Another very just observation of the cardinals is that the things which happen in our own times, and which we see ourselves, do not surprise us near so much as the things which we read of in times past, though not in the least more extraordinary, and adds that he has persuaded that when Coligula made his horse a consul, the people of Rome at that time were not greatly surprised at it, having necessarily been in some degree prepared for it by an insensible gradation of extravagances from the same quarter. This is so true that we read every day, with astonishment, things which we see every day without surprise. We wonder at the intrepidity of a Leonidas, a Codris, and a Cirtius, and are not the least surprised to hear of a sea-captain who has blown up his ship, his crew, and himself, that they might not fall into the hands of the enemies of his country. I cannot help reading of Porcena and Regulus, with surprise and reverence, yet I remember that I saw, without either, the execution of Shepard. Footnote. James Shepard, a coach painter's apprentice, was executed at Tibern for High Treason, March 17, 1718, in the reign of George I. End footnote. A boy of eighteen years old, who intended to shoot the late king, and who would have been pardoned if he would have expressed the least sorrow for his intended crime. But on the contrary, he declared that if he was pardoned he would attempt it again, that he thought it a duty which he owed to his country, and that he died with pleasure for having endeavored to perform it. Reason equals Shepard to Regulus, but prejudice, and the recency of the fact, makes Shepard a common malifactor and Regulus a hero. Uncarefully and reconsider all your notions of things, analyze them and discover their component parts, and see if habit and prejudice are not the principal ones, weigh the matter upon which you are to form your opinion in the equal and impartial scales of reason. It is not to be conceived how many people, capable of reasoning, if they would, live and die in a thousand errors from laziness. They will rather adopt the prejudices of others than give themselves the trouble of forming opinions of their own. They say things at first because other people have said them, and then they persist in them because they have said them themselves. The last observation that I shall now mention of the cardinals is that a secret is more easily kept by a good many people than one commonly imagines. By this he means a secret of importance, among people interested in the keeping of it. And it is certain that people of business know the importance of secrecy, and will observe it, where they are concerned in the event. To go and tell any friend, wife, or mistress, any secret with which they have nothing to do, is discovering to them such an unretentive weakness as must convince them that you will tell it to twenty others, and consequently that they may reveal it without the risk of being discovered. But a secret properly communicated only to those who are to be concerned in the thing in question, will probably be kept by them, though they should be a good many. Little secrets are commonly told again, but great ones are generally kept. Adieu. I wait with impatience for your accurate history of the Chevalier fortepie, which you promised me in your last, and which I take to be the forerunner of a larger work that you intend to give the public, containing a general account of all the religious and military orders of Europe. Seriously, you will do well to have a general notion of all these orders, ancient and modern, both as they are frequently the subjects of conversation, and as they are more or less interwoven with the histories of those times. Witness the Teutonic order, which as soon as it gained strength began its unjust depredations on Germany, and acquired such considerable possessions there. And the order of Malta also, which continues to this day its piracies upon the infidels. Besides one can go into no company in Germany without running against Monsieur le Chevalier, or Monsieur le commandeur de l'ordre to Teutonic. It is the same in all other parts of Europe with regard to the order of Malta, where you can never go into company without meeting two or three Chevaliers or commandeurs, who talk of their pruve, their langue, their caravan, etc. of all of which things I am sure you would not willingly be ignorant. On the other hand, I do not mean that you should have a profound and minute knowledge of these matters, which are of a nature that a general knowledge of them is fully sufficient. I would not recommend you to read Abbe Vertot's History of the Order of Malta in four quarto volumes. That would be employing a great deal of good time very ill. But I would have you know the foundations, the objects, the insignia, and the short general history of them all. As for the ancient religious military orders, which were chiefly founded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Malta, the Teutonic, the Knights Templars, etc., the injustice and the wickedness of those establishments cannot, I am sure, have escaped your observation. Their pious object was, to take away by force other people's property, and to massacre the proprietors themselves if they refused to give up that property and adopt the opinions of these invaders. What right or pretense had these confederated Christians of Europe to the Holy Land? Let them produce their grant of it in the Bible. Will they say that the Saracens had possessed themselves of it by force, and that consequently they had the same right? Is it lawful then to steal goods because they were stolen before? Surely not. The truth is that the wickedness of many and the weakness of more in those ages of ignorance and superstition concurred to form those flotigious conspiracies against the lives and properties of unoffending people. The Pope sanctified the villainy, and annexed the pardon of sins to the perpetration of it. This gave rise to the crusades, and carried such swarms of people from Europe to the conquest of the Holy Land. Peter the Hermit, an active and ambitious priest, by his indefatagable pains, was the immediate author of the first crusade. Kings, princes, all professions and characters united, from different motives, in this great undertaking, as every sentiment except true religion and morality invited to it. The ambitious hoped for kingdoms, the greedy and the necessitous for plunder, and some were enthusiast enough to hope for salvation, by the destruction of a considerable number of their fellow creatures who had done them no injury. I cannot omit, upon this occasion, telling you that the Eastern emperors at Constantinople, who as Christians were obliged at least to seem to favour these expeditions, seeing the immense numbers of the crusade, and fearing that the Western Empire might have some mind to the Eastern Empire, too, if it succeeded against the infidels, as l'appétit bien en mangeant. These Eastern Empires very honestly poisoned the waters where the crusade were to pass, and so destroyed infinite numbers of them. The later orders of knighthood, such as the garter in England, the elephant in Denmark, the golden fleece in Burgundy, the Saint-Esprit, Saint-Michel, Saint-Louis, and Saint-Lazare in France, etc., are of a very different nature, and were either the invitations to, or the reward of, brave actions in fair war, and are now rather the decoration of the favour of the prince, than the proofs of the merit of the subject. However, they are worth your inquiries to a certain degree, and conversation will give you frequent opportunities for them. Wherever you are, I would advise you to inquire into the respective orders of that country, and to write down a short account of them. For example, while you are in Saxony, get an account of lang le blanc and of what other orders there may be, either Polish or Saxon, and when you shall be at Berlin, inform yourself of three orders, la gal noire, la generosity et la vraie merité, which are the only ones that I know of there. But whenever you meet with straggling ribbons and stars, as you will with a thousand in Germany, do not fail to inquire what they are, and to take a minute of them in your memorandum book, for it is a sort of knowledge that costs little to acquire, and yet is of some use. Young people have frequently an incuriousness about them, arising either from laziness or contempt of the object, which deprives them of several little such parts of knowledge that they afterward wish they had acquired. If you will put conversation to profit, great knowledge may be gained by it. And is it not better, since it is full as easy, to turn it upon useful than upon useless subjects? People always talk best upon what they know most, and it is both pleasing them and improving oneself to put them upon that subject. With people of a particular profession, or of a distinguished eminency in any branch of learning, one is not at a loss. But with those, whether men or women, who properly constitute what is called the Beaumont, one must not choose deep subjects, nor hope to get any knowledge above that of orders, ranks, families, and court anecdotes, which are therefore the proper, and not altogether useless, subjects of that kind of conversation. Women especially are to be talked to as below men and above children. If you talk to them too deep, you only confound them, and lose your own labor. If you talk to them too frivolously, they perceive and resent the contempt. The proper tone for them is what the French call the entourageant, and is in truth the polite jargon of good company. Thus, if you are a good chemist, you may extract something out of everything. Apropos of the Beaumont, I must again and again recommend the graces to you. There is no doing without them in that world, and to make a good figure in that world is a great step toward making one in the world of business, particularly that part of it for which you are destined. An ungraceful manner of speaking, awkward motions, and a disagreeable address are great clogs to the ablest man of business, as the opposite qualifications are of infinite advantage to him. I am told there is a very good dancing master at Leipzig. I would have you dance a minuet very well, not so much for the sake of the minuet itself, though that, if danced at all, ought to be danced well, as that it will give you a habitual gentile carriage and manner of presenting yourself. Since I am upon little things, I must mention another, which, though little enough in itself, yet as it occurs at least once in every day, deserves some attention, I mean carving. Do you use yourself to carve adroitly and gentilely, without hacking half an hour across a bone, without bespattering the company with the sauce, and without overturning the glasses into your neighbor's pockets? These awkwardnesses are extremely disagreeable, and, if often repeated, bring ridicule. They are very easily avoided by a little attention and use. How trifling so ever these things may seem, or really be in themselves, they are no longer so when above half the world thinks them otherwise. And as I would have you, omnibus or notum, excelere rebus, I think nothing above or below my pointing out to you, or your excelling in. You have the means of doing it, and time before you make use of them. Take my word for it. I ask nothing now but what you will, twenty years hence, most heartily wish that you had done. Attention to all these things, for the next two or three years, will save you infinite trouble and endless regrets hereafter. May you in the whole course of your life have no reason for any one just to regret. Adieu. Your address in China has arrived, and I have sent it to your mamma. End of Section Twenty-Eight. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section Twenty-Nine of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter Fifty-Two London, September 27th, Old Style, 1748 Dear Boy, I have received your Latin lecture upon war, which though it is not exactly the same Latin that Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid spoke, is, however, as good Latin as the erudite German speak or write. I have always observed that the most learned people, that is, those who have read the most Latin, write the worst, and that distinguishes the Latin of gentleman scholar from that of pennant. A gentleman has probably read no other Latin than that of the Augustan age, and therefore can write no other, whereas the pennant has read much more bad Latin than good, and consequently writes so too. He looks upon the best classical books as books for schoolboys, and consequently below him, but pours over fragments of obscure authors, treasures up the obsolete words which he meets with there, and uses them upon all occasions to show his reading at the expense of his judgment. Plautus is his favorite author, not for the sake of the wit and the viscomica of his comedies, but upon account of the many obsolete words and the cant of low characters which are to be met with nowhere else. He will rather use alli than illy, optume than optima, and any bad word rather than any good one, provided he can but prove that strictly speaking it is Latin, that is, that it was written by a Roman. By this rule I might write now to you in the language of Chaucer or Spencer, and assert that I wrote English, because it was English in their days, but I should be a most affected puppy if I did so, and you would not understand three words of my letter. All these, and such like-evented peculiarities, are the characteristics of learned coxcomes and penance, and are carefully avoided by all men of sense. I dipped accidentally the other day into Patiscus's preface to his lexicon, where I found a word that puzzled me, and which I did not remember ever to have met with before. It is the adverb prefischine, which means, in a good hour, an expression which, by the superstition of it, appears to be low and vulgar. I looked for it, and at last I found that it is once or twice made use of in platus, upon the strength of which this learned pedant thrusts it into his preface. Whenever you write Latin, remember that every word or phrase which you make use of, but cannot find in Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Horace, Virgil, and Obid is bad illiberal Latin, though it may have been written by a Roman. I must now say something as to the matter of the lecture, in which I confess there is one doctrine laid down that surprises me. It is this. Quam vero hostis, sitlenta, sitve, morte, omnia, dironobus, minetons, quacunca, belantibus, negotium est, perumsane, interferit, quomodo, ium, abrere, et, interfissere, satagumus, sifurosium, exure, concutur, ergoveneto, quacu, utifas est, et cetera, whereas I cannot conceive that the use of poison can, upon any account, come within the lawful means of self-defense. Force may, without doubt, be justly repelled by force, but not by treachery and fraud, for I do not call the stratogens of war, such as embuscades, masked batteries, false attacks, et cetera, frauds, or treachery. They are mutually to be expected and guarded against, but poisoned arrows, poisoned waters, or poisoned administer to your enemy, which can only be done by treachery, I have always heard, read, and thought, to be unlawful and infamous means of defense, be your danger ever so great. But, sifurosium, exure, concutur, must I rather die than poison this enemy? Yes, certainly, much rather die than do abase or criminal action, nor can I be sure beforehand that this enemy may not, in the last moment, furochium exure. But the public lawyers now seem to me to warp the law, in order to authorize, than to check, those unlawful proceedings of princes and states, which by being become common appear less criminal, though custom can never alter the nature of good and ill. Pray let no quibbles of lawyers, no refinements of causious, to break into the plain notions of right and wrong, which every man's right reason and plain common sense suggest to him. To do as you would be done by is the plain, sure, and undisputed rule of morality and justice. Stick to that, and be convinced that whatever breaks into it in any degree, however speciously it may be turned, and however puzzling it may be to answer it, is notwithstanding false in itself, unjust and criminal. I do not know a crime in the world which is not by the causest among the Jesuits, especially the twenty-four collected I think by Escobar, allowed in some or many cases not to be criminal. The principles first laid down by them are often specious. Their reasonings plausible, but the conclusion always a lie. For it is contrary to that evident and undeniable rule of justice which I have mentioned above, of not doing to any one which you would not have him do to you. But however these refined pieces of causistry and sophistry, being very convenient and welcome to people's passions and appetites, they gladly accept the indulgence without desiring to detect the fallacy or the reasoning, and indeed many, I might say most people, are not able to do it, which makes the publication of such quibblings and refinements the more pernicious. I am no skillful causest nor subtle disputant, and yet I would undertake to justify and qualify the profession of a high woman, step by step, and so plausibly as to make many ignorant people embrace the profession, as an innocent, if not even a laudable one, and puzzle people of some degree of knowledge to answer me point by point. I have seen a book, entitled Quitibit a Quillock bit, or the art of making anything out of anything, which is not so difficult as it would seem, if once one quits certain plain truths, obvious in gross to every understanding, in order to run after the ingenious refinements of warm imaginations and speculative reasonings. Dr. Berkley, Bishop of Coyne, a very worthy, ingenious and learned man, has written a book to prove there is no such thing as matter, and that nothing exists but in idea. That you and I only fancy ourselves eating, drinking, and sleeping. You at Leipzig, and I at London. That we think we have flesh and blood, arms, legs, etc., but that we are only spirit. His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable, but yet I am so far from being convinced by them, that I am determined to go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that matter, which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as good a plight as possible. Common sense, which in truth very uncommon, is the best sense I know of. Abide by it. It will counsel you best. Read and hear, for your amusement, ingenious systems, nice questions subtly agitated, with all the refinements that warm imaginations suggest, but consider them only as exorcitations for the mind, and turn all ways to settle with common sense. I stumbled the other day at a bookseller's, upon Comte Gabelis, in two very little volumes, which I had formerly read. I read it over again, and with fresh astonishment. Most of the extravagances are taken from the Jewish rabbins, who broached those wild notions, and delivered them in the unintelligible jargon which the Cabelis and Rosicrucians deal in to this day. Their number is, I believe, much lessened, but there are still some, and I myself have known, too, who studied and firmly believed in that mystical nonsense. What extravagancy is man not capable of entertaining when once his shackled reason is led in triumph by fancy and prejudice? The ancient alchemists give very much into this stuff, by which they thought they should discover the Philosopher's Stone, and some of the most celebrated empirics employed it in the pursuit of the universal medicine. Maracelsus, a bold, empiric and wild Cabelist, asserted that he had discovered it, and called it his Alcahast. Why or wherefore, God knows, only that those madmen call nothing by an intelligible name. You may easily get this book from the Hague. Read it, for it will both divert and astonish you, and at the same time teach you Neil Adamurari, a very necessary lesson. Your letters, except when upon a given subject, are exceedingly laconic, and neither answer my desires nor the purpose of letters, which should be familiar conversations between absent friends. As I desire to live with you upon the footing of an intimate friend, and not of a parent, I could wish that your letters gave me more particular accounts of yourself and of your lesser transactions. When you write to me, suppose yourself conversing freely with me by the fireside. In that case you would naturally mention the incidents of the day, that's where you had been, who you had seen, what you thought of them, etc. Do this in your letters. Acquaint me sometimes with your studies, sometimes with your diversions. Tell me of any new persons and characters that you meet with in company, and add your own observations upon them. In short, let me see more of you in your letters. How do you go on with Lord Pultney, and how does he go on at Leipzig? Has he learning? Has he parts? Has he application? Is he good or ill-natured? In short, what is he? At least, what do you think of him? You may tell me without reserve, for I promise you secrecy. You are now of an age that I am desirous to begin a confidential correspondence with you. And as I shall, on my part, write you very freely my opinion upon men and things, which I should often be very unwilling that anybody but you and Mr. Hart should see. So on your part, if you write me without reserve, you may depend upon my invaluable secrecy. If you have ever looked into the letters of Madame de Savigne to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, you must have observed the ease, freedom, and friendship of that correspondence. And yet I hope and I believe that they did not love one another better than we do. Tell me what books you are now reading, either by way of study or amusement, how you passed your evenings when at home, and where you passed them when abroad. I know that you sometimes go to Madame Valentine's assembly. What do you do there? Do you play, or sup, or is it only la belle conversation? Do you mind your dancing while your dancing master is with you? As you will be often under the necessity of dancing a minuet, I would have you dance it very well. Remember that the graceful motion of the arms, the giving of your hand, and the putting on and pulling off of your hat gentilely, are the material parts of a gentleman's dancing. But the greatest advantage of dancing well is that it necessarily teaches you to present yourself, to sit, stand, and walk gentilely, all of which are of real importance to a man of fashion. I should wish that you were polished before you go to Berlin, where as you will be in a great deal of good company, I would have you have the right manners for it. It is a very considerable artel to have le temps de la bonne compagnie in your destination particularly. The principal business of a foreign minister is to get into the secrets and to know all les allures of the court at which he resides. This he can never bring about, but by such a pleasing address, such engaging manners, and such an insinuating behavior, as may make him sought for, and in some measure domestic, in the best company and the best families of the place. He will then indeed be well informed of all the passes, either by the confidences made him, or by the carelessness of people in his company, who are accustomed to look upon him as one of them, and consequently are not upon their guard before him. For a minister who only goes to the court he resides at, inform, to ask an audience of the prince, or the minister upon whom his last instructions puts them upon their guard, and will never know anything more than what they have a mind that he should know. Here women may be put to some use. A king's mistress, or a minister's wife or mistress, may give great and useful information, and are very apt to do it, being proud to show that they have been trusted. But then, in this case, the height of that sort of address, which strikes women, is requisite. I mean that easy politeness, gentile and graceful address, and that exterior brilliance which they cannot withstand. There is a sort of men, so like women, that they are to be taken just in the same way. I mean those who are commonly called fine men, who swarm at all courts, who have little reflection and less knowledge, but who, by their good-breeding and tran-tron of the world, are admitted into all companies, and by the impudence or carelessness of their superiors, pick up secrets worth knowing, which are easily got out of them by proper address. Adieu. I came here three days ago upon account of a disorder in my stomach, which affected my head and gave me vertigo. I already find myself something better, and consequently do not doubt but that the course of these waters will set me quite right. But however and wherever I am, your welfare, your character, your knowledge and your morals employ my thoughts more than anything that can happen to me, or that I can fear or hope for myself. I am going off this stage. You are coming upon it. With me what has been, has been, and reflection now would come too late. With you everything is to come, even in some manner reflection itself, so that this is the very time when my reflections, the result of experience, may be of use to you, by supplying the want of yours. As soon as you leave Leipzig, you will gradually be going into the great world, where the first impressions that you shall give of yourself will be of great importance to you. But those which you shall receive will be decisive, for they always stick. To keep good company, especially at your first setting out, is the way to receive good impressions. If you ask me what I mean by good company, I will confess to you that it is pretty difficult to define, but I will endeavor to make you understand it as well as I can. Good company is not what respective sets of company are pleased either to call or think themselves, but it is that company which all the people of the place call and acknowledge to be good company, notwithstanding some objections which they may form to some individuals who compose it. It consists chiefly, but by no means without exception, of people of considerable birth, rank, and character, for people of neither birth nor rank are frequently, and very justly admitted into it, if distinguished by any particular merit or eminency in any liberal art or science. Nay, so motley a thing is good company, that many people without birth, rank, or merit intrude into it by their own forwardness, and others slide into it by the projection of some considerable person, and some even of indifferent characters and morals make a part of it. But in the main, the good part preponderates, and people of infamous and blasted characters are never admitted. In this fashionable good company, the best manners and the best language of the place are most unquestionably to be learned, for they establish and give the tone to both, which are therefore called the language and manners of good company, there being no legal tribunal to ascertain either. A company consisting wholly of people of the first quality cannot, for that reason, be called good company, in the common exceptation of the phrase, unless they are, into the bargain, the fashionable and accredited company of the place. For people of the very first quality can be as silly, as ill-bred, and as worthless, as people of the meanest degree. On the other hand, a company consisting entirely of people of very low condition, whatever their merit or parts may be, can never be called good company, and consequently, should not be much frequented, though by no means despised. A company wholly composed of men of learning, though greatly to be valued and respected, is not meant by the words good company. They cannot have the easy manners and tornura of the world, as they do not live in it. If you can bear your part well in such a company, it is extremely right to be in it sometimes, and you will be but more esteemed in other companies for having a place in that. But then do not let it engross you, for if you do, you will only be considered as one of the literati by profession, which is not the way either to shine or rise in the world. The company of professed wits and pests is extremely inviting to most young men, who, if they have wit themselves, are pleased with it, and if they have none, are sillily proud of being one of it. But it should be frequented with moderation and judgment, and you should by no means give yourself up to it. A wit is a very unpopular denomination, as it carries terror along with it, and people in general are as much afraid of a live wit in company, as a woman is of a gun, which she thinks may go off of itself and do her a mischief. Their acquaintance is, however, worth seeking, and their company worth frequenting, but not exclusively of others, nor to such a degree as to be considered only as one of that particular set. But the company which of all others you should most carefully avoid is that low company, which in every sense of the word is low indeed, low in rank, low in parts, low in manners, and low in merit. You will perhaps be surprised that I should think it necessary to warn you against such company, but yet I do not think it wholly unnecessary, from the many instances which I have seen of men of sense and rank, discredited, verified, and undone by keeping such company. Vanity, that source of many of our follies and some of our crimes, has sunk many a man into company in every light infinitely below himself, for the sake of being the first man in it. There he dictates, is applauded, admired, and for the sake of being the caripsias of that wretched chorus, disgraces and disqualifies himself soon for any better company. Depend upon it, you will sink or rise to the level of the company which you commonly keep. People will judge of you, and not unreasonably by that. There is good sense in the Spanish saying, tell me whom you live with, and I will tell you who you are. Make it therefore your business, wherever you are, to get into that company which everybody in the place allows to be the best company next to their own, which is the best definition that I can give you of good company. But here, too, one caution is very necessary, for want of which many young men have been ruined, even in good company. Good company, as I have before observed, is composed of a great variety of fashionable people, whose characters and morals are very different, though their manners are pretty much the same. When a young man, new in the world, first gets into that company, he very rightly determines to conform to and imitate it. But then he too often, and fatally, mistakes the objects of his imitation. He is often heard that absurd term of gentile and fashionable vices. He there sees some people who shine, and who in general are admired and esteemed, and observes that these people are whoremasters, drunkards, or game-sters. On which he adopts their vices, mistaking their defects for their perfections, and thinking that they owe their fashions and their luster to those gentile vices. Whereas it is exactly the reverse, for people have acquired the reputation by their parts, their learning, their good-breeding, and other real accomplishments, and are only blemished and lowered in the opinions of all reasonable people, and of their own, in time, by these gentile and fashionable vices. A whoremaster in a flux, or without a nose, is a very gentile person indeed, and well-worthy of imitation. A drunkard, vomiting up at night the wine of the day, and stupefied by the headache all the next, is doubtless a fine model to copy from. And a game-ster, tearing his hair and blaspheming for having lost more than he had in the world, is surely a most amiable character. No, these are alloys, and great ones too, which can never adorn any character, but will always debase the best. To prove this, suppose any man, without parts and some other good qualities, to be merely a whoremaster, a drunkard, or a game-ster, how will he be looked upon by all sorts of people? Why, as a most contemptible and vicious animal? Therefore it is plain that in these mixed characters the good part only makes people forgive, but not approve the bad. I will hope and believe that you will have no vices, but if unfortunately you should have any, at least I beg of you to be content with your own, and to adopt no other buddies. The adoption of vices has, I am convinced, ruined ten times more young men than natural inclinations. As I make no difficulty of confessing my past errors, where I think the confession may be of use to you, I will own that when I first went to the university I drank and smoked, not with standing the aversion I had to wine and tobacco, only because I thought it gentile, and that it made me look like a man. When I went abroad I first went to the Hague, where gaming was much in fashion, and where I observed that many people of shining rank and character gamed too. I was then young enough, and silly enough, to believe that gaming was one of their accomplishments, and as I aimed at perfection I adopted gaming as a necessary step to it. Thus I acquired by error the habit of a by-switch, far from adorning my character, has, I am conscious, been a great blemish in it. Imitate then, with discernment and judgment, the real perfections of the good company into which you may get. Copy their politeness, their carriage, their address, and the easy and well-bred turn of their conversation. But remember that, let them shine ever so bright, their vices, if they have any, are so many spots which you would no more imitate, than you would make an artificial ward upon your face, because some very handsome man had the misfortune to have a natural one upon his. But on the contrary, think how much handsomer he would have been without it. Having thus confessed some of my agar-mens, I will now show you a little of my right side. I always endeavored to get into the best company wherever I was, and commonly succeeded. There I pleased to some degree by showing a desire to please. I took care never to be absent or distraic, but on the contrary, attended to everything that was said, done, or even looked in company. I never failed in the minutest attentions and was never journalier. These things, and not my agar-men, made me fashionable. Adieu. This letter is full long enough. End of Section 30. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 31 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 54. Bath, October 19, Old Style, 1748. Dear Boy. Having in my last pointed out what sort of company you should keep, I will now give you some rules for your conduct in it. Rules which my own experience and observation enable me to lay down and communicate to you with some degree of confidence. I have often given you hints of this kind before, but then it has been by snatches. I will now be more regular and methodical. I shall say nothing with regard to your bodily carriage and address, but leave them to the care of your dancing master and to your own attention to the best models. Remember, however, that they are of consequence. Talk often but never long. In that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company, this being one of the very few cases in which people do not care to be treated, everyone being fully convinced that he has the wherewithal to pay. Tell stories very seldom, and absolutely never, but where they are very apt and very short. Omit every circumstance that is not material, and beware of digressions, to have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination. Never hold anybody by the button or the hand in order to be heard out, for if people are not willing to hear you, you had much better hold your tongue than them. These long talkers single out some one unfortunate man in company, commonly him whom they observe to be the most silent or their next neighbor to whisper, or at least in a half voice, to convey a continuity of words to. This is excessively ill-bred, and in some degree a fraud, conversation-stock being a joint and a common property. But on the other hand, if one of these unmerciful talkers lays hold of you, hear him with patience, and at least seeming attention, if he is worth obliging, for nothing will oblige him more than a patient hearing, as nothing would hurt him more than either to leave him in the midst of his discourse, or to discover your impatience under your affliction. Take rather than give the tone of the company you are in. If you have parts, you will show them more or less upon every subject, and if you have not, you had better talk sillily upon a subject of other peoples than of your own choosing. Read as much as you can in mixed companies argumentative, polemical conversations, which, though they should not, yet certainly do, indispose for a time the contending parties toward each other, and, if the controversy grows warm and noisy, endeavor to put an end to it by some gentile levity or joke. I quieted such a conversation hubbub once, by representing to them that, though I was persuaded none there present would repeat out of company what passed in it, yet I could not answer for the discretion of the passengers in the street, who must necessarily hear all that was said. Above all things, and upon all occasions, avoid speaking of yourself, if it be possible, such as the natural pride and vanity of our hearts, that it perpetually breaks out, even in the people of the best parts, in all the various modes and figures of the egotism. Some abruptly speak advantageously of themselves without either pretense or provocation. They are impudent. Others proceed more artfully, as they imagine, and forge accusations against themselves, complain of columnities which they never heard, in order to justify themselves, by exhibiting a catalogue of their many virtues. They acknowledge it may, indeed, seem odd that they should talk in that manner of themselves. It is what they do not like, and what they never would have done, no, no tortures should ever have forced it from them, if they had not been thus unjustly and monstrously accused. And in these cases, justice is surely due to oneself, as well as to others, and when our character is attacked, we may say in our own justification what otherwise we never would have said. This thin veil of modesty drawn before vanity is much too transparent to conceal it, even from very moderate discernment. Others go more modestly and more slightly still, as they think, to work, but in my mind still more ridiculously. They confess themselves, not without some degree of shame and confusion, into all the cardinal virtues, by first degrading them into weaknesses, and then owning their misfortune and being made up of those weaknesses. They cannot see people suffer without sympathizing with and endeavor to help them. They cannot see people want without relieving them, though truly their own circumstances cannot very well afford it. They cannot help speaking the truth, though they know all the imprudence of it. In short, they know that, with all these weaknesses, they are not fit to live in the world, much less to thrive in it. But they are now too old to change, and must rub on as well as they can. This sounds too ridiculous and utre, almost, for the stage, and yet take my word for it, you will frequently meet with it upon the common stage of the world. And here I will observe, by the by, that you will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant that a discrete dramatist would not venture to set them upon the stage in their true and high coloring. This principle of vanity and pride is so strong in human nature that it descends even to the lowest objects, and one often sees people angling for praise, where admitting all they say to be true, which, by the way, it seldom is, no praise is to be caught. One man affirms that he has rode post a hundred miles in six hours. Probably it is a lie, but supposing it to be true, what then? Why, he is a very good post-boy, that is all. Another asserts, and probably not without oaths, that he has drunk six or eight bottles of wine at a sitting. Out of charity I will believe him a liar, for if I do not, I must think him a beast. Such and a thousand more are the follies and extravagances, which vanity draws people into, and which always defeat their own purpose, and, as Waller says upon another subject, make the wretch the most despised, where he wishes to be prized. The only sure way of avoiding these evils is never to speak of yourself at all. But when historically you are obliged to mention yourself, take care not to drop one single word that can directly or indirectly be construed as fishing for applause. Be your character what it will, it will be known, and nobody will take it upon your own word. Never imagine that anything you can say yourself will varnish your defects, or add luster to your perfections. But on the contrary, it may, and nine times and ten will, make the former more glaring and the latter obscure. If you are silent upon your own subject, neither envy, indignation, nor ridicule were obstruct or allay the applause which you may really deserve. But if you publish your own panagiric upon any occasion, or in any shape whatsoever, and however artfully dressed or disguised, they will all conspire against you, and you will be disappointed of the very end you aim at. Take care never to seem dark and mysterious, which is not only a very unamable character, but a very suspicious one, too. If you seem mysterious with others, they will be really so with you, and you will know nothing. The height of abilities is to have Volto Schiolto and Pensieri Stretti, that is, a frank, open, and ingenuous exterior, with a prudent interior, to be upon your own guard, and yet by a seeming natural openness to put people off theirs. Depend upon it, nine and ten of every company you are in will avail themselves of every indiscreet and unguarded expression of yours, if they can turn it to their own advantage. A prudent reserve is therefore as necessary as a seeming openness is prudent. Always look people in the face when you speak to them. The not doing it is thought to imply conscious guilt, besides that you lose the advantage of serving by their countnesses what impression your discourse makes upon them. In order to know people's real sentiments, I trust much more to my eyes than to my ears, for they can say whatever they have a mind I should hear, but they can seldom help looking, what they have no intention that I should know. Never retail nor receive scandal willingly. Defamation of others may for the present gratify the malignity of the pride of our hearts. Cool reflection will draw very disadvantageous conclusions from such a disposition. And in the cause of scandal, as in that of robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief. Mimicry, which is the common and favorite amusement of little low minds, is in the yet most contempt with great ones. It is the lowest and most illiberal of all buffoonery. Pray neither practice it yourself nor applaud it in others. Besides that the person is mimicked is insulted, and as I have often observed to you before an insult is never forgiven. I need not, I believe, advise you to adapt your conversation to the people you are conversing with, for I suppose you would not, without this caution, have talked upon the same subject and in the same manner to a minister of state, a bishop, a philosopher, a captain, and a woman. A man of the world must, like the chameleon, be able to take every different hue, which is by no means a criminal or abject, but a necessary complacence, for it relates only to manners and not to morals. One word only as to swearing, and that, I hope and believe, is more than is necessary. You may sometimes hear some people in good company interlard their discourse with o's by way of embellishment as they think, but you must observe, too, that those who do so are never those who contribute in any degree to give that company the denomination of good company. They are always subalterns, or people of low education, for that practice, besides that it has no one temptation to plead, is as silly and illiberal as it is wicked. Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things, for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore only seen to smile, but never heard to laugh. But to conclude this long letter, all the above-mentioned rules, however carefully you may observe them, will lose half their effect if unaccompanied by the graces. Whatever you say, if you say it with a supercilious, cynical face, or an embarrassed countenance, or a silly disconcerted grin, it will be ill-received. If into the bargain you mutter it, or utter it indistinctly and ungracefully, it will be still worse received. If your air and address are vulgar, awkward, and gauche, you may be esteemed indeed if you have a great intrinsic merit, but you will never please, and without pleasing you will rise but heavily. Venus among the ancients was synonymous with the graces, who were always supposed to accompany her, and Horace tells us that even youth and mercury, the god of arts and eloquence, would not do without her. Perum, comas, sine, tu juventus mercurescu. They are not inexorable ladies, and may be had, if properly and diligently pursued. Adieu. My anxiety for your success increases in proportion as the time approaches of your taking your part upon the great stage of the world. The audience will form their opinion of you upon your first appearance, making the proper allowance for your inexperience, and so far it will be final, that though it may vary as to the degrees, it will never totally change. This consideration excites that restless attention with which I am constantly examining how I can best contribute to the perfection of that character, in which the least spotter blemish would give me more real concern than I am now capable of feeling upon any other account whatsoever. I have long since done mentioning your great religious and moral duties, because I could not make your understanding so bad a compliment as to suppose that you wanted, or could receive, any new instructions upon those two important points. Mr. Hart, I am sure, has not neglected them, and besides they are so obvious to common sense and reason, that commentators may, as they often do, perplex, but cannot make them clearer. My province, therefore, is to supply by my experience your hitherto inevitable inexperience in the ways of the world. People at your age are in a state of national ebriety, and want rails and guard-foo wherever they go, to hinder them from breaking their necks. This drunkenness of youth is not only tolerated, but even pleases, if kept within certain bounds of discretion and decency. These bounds are the point which it is difficult for the drunken man himself to find out, and there it is that the experience of a friend may not only serve, but save him. Carry with you and welcome into company all the gayety and spirits, but as little of the giddiness of youth as you can. The former will charm, but the latter will often, though innocently, implacably offend. Inform yourself of the characters and situations of the company, before you give way to what your imagination may prompt you to say. There are in all companies more wrong beads than right ones, with many more who deserve than who like censure. Should you therefore expiate in the praise of some virtue, which some in company notoriously want, or to claim against any vice, with which others are notoriously infected with, your reflections, however general and unapplied, will by being applicable be thought personal and leveled at those people. This consideration points out to you sufficiently not to be suspicious and captures yourself, nor to suppose that things, they may be, are therefore meant at you. The manners of well-bred people secure one from those indirect and mean attacks, but if by chance a flippant woman or a pert cockscomb lets off anything of that kind, it is much better not to seem to understand than to reply to it. Cautiously avoid of talking either of your own or other people's domestic affairs. Yours are nothing to them but tedious, theirs are nothing to you. The subject is a tender one, and it is odds that you touch somebody or other's sore place, for in this case there is no trusting to specious appearances, which may be and often are so contrary to the real situations of things, between men and their wives, parents and their children, seeming friends, etc., that with the best intentions in the world one often blenders disagreeably. Remember that the wit, humor, and jokes of most mixed companies are local. They thrive in that particular soil, but will not often bear transplanting. Every company is differently circumstance, has its particular cant and jargon, which may give occasion to wit and mirth within that circle, but would seem flat and insipid in any other, and therefore will not bear repeating. Nothing makes a man look sillier than a pleasantry not relished nor understood, and if he meets with a profound silence where he expected general applause, or what is worse, if he is desired to explain the bonement, his awkward and embarrassed situation is easier imagined than described. I propose of repeating, take great care never to repeat, I do not mean hear the pleasantries, in one company what you hear in another. Things seemingly indifferent may by circulation have much graver consequences than you would imagine. Besides there is a general tacit trust in conversation, by which a man is obliged not to report anything out of it, though he is not immediately enjoined to secrecy. A retailer of this kind is sure to draw himself into a thousand scrapes and discussions, and to be shyly and uncomfortably received wherever he goes. You will find, in most good company, some people who only keep their place there by contemptible title enough. These are what we call very good-natured fellows, and the French, bon diable. The truth is they are people without any parts of fancy, and who having no will of their own, readily assent to, concur in, and applaud whatever is said or done in the company, and adopt with the same alacrity the most virtuous or the most criminal, the wisest or the silliest scheme that happens to be entertained by the majority of the company. This foolish and often criminal complacence flows from a foolish cause, the want of any other merit. I hope that you will hold your place in company by a nobler tenure, that you will hold it, you can bear a quibble, I believe, yet, in capite. Have a will and an opinion of your own, and adhere to them steadily, but then do it with good humor, good breeding, and if you have it, with urbanity, for you have not yet heard enough either to preach or to censure. All other kinds of complacence are not only blameless but necessary in good company. Not to seem to perceive the little weaknesses and the idle but innocent affectations of the company, but even to flatter them, in a certain manner, is not only very allowable, but in truth a sort of polite duty. They will be pleased with you, if you do, and will certainly not be reformed by you, if you do not. For instance, you will find in every group of company two principal figures, biz, the fine lady and the fine gentleman who absolutely give the law of wit, language, fashion, and taste, to the rest of that society. There is always a strict, and for the time being, a tender alliance between these two figures. The lady looks upon her empire as founded upon the divine right of beauty, and full as good a divine right as it is any king, emperor, or pope can pretend to. She requires, and commonly meets with, unlimited passive obedience. And why should she not meet with it? Her demands go no higher than to have her unquestioned preeminence in beauty, wit, and fashion firmly established. Few sovereigns, by the way, are so reasonable. The fine gentleman's claims of right are mutatus mutandus, the same, and though indeed he is not always a wit to jure, yet he is the wit de facto of that company. He is entitled to a share of your allegiance, and everybody expects at least as much as they are entitled to, if not something more. Prudence bids you make your court to these joint sovereigns, and no duty that I know of forbids it. Rebellion here is exceedingly dangerous, and inevitably punished by banishment, and immediate forfeiture of all your wit, manners, taste, and fashion. As on the other hand, a cheerful submission, not without some flattery, is sure to procure you a strong recommendation and most effectual pass, throughout all there, and probably the neighboring dominions. With a moderate share of sagacity, you will, before you have been half an hour in their company, easily discover those two principal figures, both by the deference which you will observe the whole company pay them, and by that easy, careless, and serene air which their consciousness of power gives them. As in this case, so in all others, aim always at the highest, get always into the highest company, and address yourself particularly to the highest in it. The search after the unattainable philosopher's stone has occasioned a thousand useful discoveries, which otherwise would never have been made. What the French justly call les manières nobelles, or only to be acquired in the very best companies. They are the distinguishing characteristics of men of fashion. People of low education never wear them so close, but that some part or the other of their original vulgarism appears. Les manières nobelles equally forbid insolent contempt or low envy and jealousy. Low people, in good circumstances, fine clothes and equipage, will insolently show contempt for all those who cannot afford as fine clothes, as good in equipage, and who have not, as their term is, as much money in their pockets. On the other hand, they are nod with envy and cannot help discovering it, of those who surpass them in any of these articles, which are far from being sure criterion of merit. They are likewise jealous of being slighted, and consequently suspicious and capcious. They are eager and hot about trifles, because trifles were, at first, their affairs of consequence. Les manières nobelles imply exactly the reverse of all this. Study them early. You cannot make them too habitual and familiar to you. Just as I had written what goes before, I received your letter of the twenty-fourth, new style, but I have not received that which you mentioned for Mr. Hart. Yours is of the kind that I desire, for I want to see your private picture, drawn by yourself at different settings. For though it is drawn by yourself, I presume that you will take the most advantageous lightness. Yet I think that I have skill enough in that kind of painting to discover the true features, though ever so artfully colored or thrown into skillful lights and shades. By your account of the German play, which I do not know whether I should call tragedy or comedy, the only shining part of it, since I am in a way of quibbling, seems to have been the fox's tale. I presume, too, that the play has had the same fate with the squib, and has gone off no more. I remember a squib much better applied, when it was made the device of the colors of a French regimen of grenadiers. It was represented bursting, with this motto under it. Perium dum lucium. I like the description of your picnic, where I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your symposium intended more to promote conversation than drinking. Such an amicable collision, as Lord Shaftesbury very prettily calls it, rubs off and smooths those rough corners which mere nature has given to the smoothest of us. I hope some part, at least, of the conversation is in German. Apropos, tell me, do you speak that language correctly, and do you write it with ease? I have no doubt of your mastering the other modern languages, which are much easier, and occur much oftener, for which reason I desire that you will apply most diligently to German, while you are in Germany, that you may speak and write that language most correctly. I expect to meet Mr. Elliott in London in about three weeks, after which you will soon see him at Leipzig. Adieu. End of Section 32, read by Professor Heathern Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Section 33 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibreVox.org into the public domain. Letter 56 London, November 18, old style, 1748. Dear Boy, whatever I see or whatever I hear, my first consideration is, whether it can in any way be useful to you. As proof of this, I went accidentally the other day into a print shop, where, among many others, I found one print from a famous design of Carlo Moratti, who died about thirty years ago, and was the last eminent painter in Europe. The subject is Il Studio del Desenio, for the School of Drawing. An old man, supposed to be the master, points to his scholars, who are variously employed in perspective, geometry, and the observation of the statues of antiquity. With regard to perspective, of which there are some little specimens, he has wrote Tanto Cebasti, that is, as much as is sufficient. With regard to geometry, Tanto Cebasti, again, with regard to the contemplation of the ancient statues, there is written Non Me Abastanza. There can never be enough. But in the clouds, at the top of the piece, are represented the three graces, with just this sentence written over them, Anifatica Ivana, that is, without us all labour is vain. This everybody allows to be true in painting, but people do not seem to consider, as I hope you will, that this truth is as full applicable to every other art or science, indeed, to everything that is to be said or done. I will send you the print itself by Mr. Elliot when he returns, and I will advise you to make the same use of it that the Roman Catholics say they do of the pictures and images of their saints, which is, only to remind them of those for the adoration they disclaim. Nay, I will go further, as the transition from potpourri to paganism is short and easy. I will classically and poetically advise you to invoke, and sacrifice to them daily, and all the day. It must be owned that the graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain, and, I doubt, the best of us here have more of rough than polished diamond. Since barbarism drove them out of Greece and Rome, they seemed to have taken refuge in France, where their temples are numerous and their worship the established one. Examine yourself seriously. Why such and such people please and engage you, more than such and such others of equal merit? And you will always find that it is because the former have the graces and the latter not. I have known many a woman with an exact shape and a symmetrical assemblage of beautiful features. Please nobody, while others, with very moderate shapes and features, have charmed everybody. Why? Because Venus will not charm so much without her attendant graces, as they will without her. Among men how often have I seen the most solid merit and knowledge neglected, unwelcome or even rejected, for want of them? While flimsy parts, little knowledge and less merit, introduced by the graces, have been received, cherished and admired. Even virtue, which is moral beauty, wants some of its charms if unaccompanied by them. If you ask me how you shall acquire what neither you nor I can define or ascertain, I can only answer by observation. Form yourself with regard to others upon what you feel pleases you in them. I can tell you the importance, the advantage, of having the graces, but I cannot give them you. I heartily wish I could, and I certainly would, for I do not know a better present than I can make you. To show you that a very wise, philosophical and retired man thinks upon that subject as I do, who have always lived in the world, I send you, by Mr. Elliot, the famous Mr. Locke's book upon education, in which you will find the stress that he lays upon the graces, which he calls, and very truly, good breeding. I have marked all the parts of the book that are worth your attention, for as he begins with the child, almost from its birth, the parts relative to its infancy would be useless to you. Germany is, still less than England, the seat of the graces. However, you had as good not say so while you were there. But the place which you are going to, in a degree, is, for I have known as many well-bred, pretty men come from Turin as from any part of Europe. The late King Victor Amity took great pains to form such of his subjects as were of any consideration, both to business and manners. The present King, I am told, follows his example. This, however, is certain, that in all courts and congresses, where there are various foreign ministers, those of the King of Sardinia are generally the ableist, the politest, and les plus de l'I. You will, therefore, at Turin have very good models to form yourself upon, and remember that with regard to the best models, as well as to the antique Greek statues in the print, non me bastanza. Observe every word, look, and motion of those who are allowed to be the most accomplished persons there. Observe their natural and careless but gentile air. Their unembarrassed good-breeding, their unassuming but yet unprostituted dignity. Mind their decent mirth, their discreet frankness, and that entregeant which, as much as above the frivolous as below the important and the secret, is the proper medium for conversation in mixed companies. I will observe, by the by, that the talent of that light entregeant is often of great use to a foreign minister, not only as it helps him to domesticate himself in many families, but also as it enables him to put by and parry some subjects of conversation which might possibly lay him under difficulties, both what to say and how to look. Of all the men that I ever knew in my life, and I knew him extremely well, the late Duke of Marlborough possessed the graces in the highest degree, not to say engrossed them, and indeed he got the most by them, for I will venture, contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes for great events, to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough's greatness and riches to those graces. He was eminently illiterate, wrote bad English and spelled it still worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts, that is, he had no brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had, most undoubtedly, an excellent good plain understanding with sound judgment. But these alone would probably have raised him but something higher than they found him, which was paged to King James II's queen. There the graces protected and promoted him, for while he was an ensign of the guards, the Duchess of Cleveland, then favourite mistress to King Charles II, struck by those very graces, gave him five thousand pounds, with which he immediately bought an annuity for his life of five hundred pounds a year, of my grandfather Halifax, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortune. His figure was beautiful, but his manner was irresistible, by either man or woman. It was by this engaging, graceful manner that he was enabled, during all his war, to connect the various and jarring powers of the Grand Alliance, and to carry them on to the main object of the war, notwithstanding their private and separate views, jealousies, and wrong-headednesses. Whatever court he went to, and he was often obliged to go himself to some rusty and refractory ones, he as constantly prevailed and brought them into his measures. The pensionary Huncis, a venerable old minister, grown gray in business, and who had governed the Republic of the United Provinces for more than forty years, was absolutely governed by the Duke of Marlboro, as that Republic feels to this day. He was always cool, and nobody ever observed the least variation in his countenance. He could refuse more gracefully than other people could grant, and those who went away from him the most dissatisfied as to the substance of their business, were yet personally charmed with him, and in some degree, comforted by his manner. With all his gentleness and gracefulness, no man living was more conscious of his situation, nor maintained his dignity better. With the share of knowledge which you have already gotten, and with the much greater which I hope you will soon acquire, what may you not expect to arrive at, if you join all these graces to it? In your destination, particularly, they are in truth half your business, for if you once gain the affections as well as the esteem of the Prince or Minister of the court to which you are sent, I will answer for it, that will effectually do the business of the court that sent you. Otherwise, it is uphill work. Do not mistake, and think that these graces which I so often and so earnestly recommend to you, should only accompany important transactions, and be warned, Jus de Galas. No, they should, if possible, accompany every, the least thing you say or do, for if you neglect them in little things, they will leave you in great ones. I should, for instance, be extremely concerned to see you even drink a cup of coffee ungracefully, and slop yourself with it, by your awkward manner of holding it, nor should I like to see your coat buttoned, or your shoes buckled awry. But I should be outraged, if I heard you mutter your words unintelligibly, stammer in your speech, or hesitate, misplace, and mistake in your narrations, and I should run away from you with greater rapidity, if possible, then I should now run to embrace you, if I found you destitute of all those graces, which I have set my heart upon there making you one day, omnibus ornatum accelereribus. This subject is inexhaustible, as it extends to everything that is to be said or done, but I will leave it for the present, as this letter is already pretty long. Such is my desire, my anxiety for your perfection, that I never think I have said enough, though you may probably think that I have said too much, and though in truth, if your own good sense is not sufficient to direct you, in many of these plain points, all that I or anybody else can say will be insufficient. But where you are concerned, I am the insatiable man in Horus, who covets still a little corner more to complete the figure of his field. I dread every corner that may deform mine, in which I would have, if possible, no one defect. I have this moment received yours of the seventeenth new style and cannot condol with you upon the secession of your German commisso, who both by your and Mr. Hart's description seem to be des gens d'une amiable absence, and if you can replace them by any other German conversation, you will be a gainer by the bargain. I cannot conceive, if you understand German well enough to read any German book, how the writing of the German character can be so difficult and tedious to you, the twenty-four letters being very soon learned, and I do not expect that you should write with the utmost purity and correctness as to the language. What I meant by your writing, once a fortnight, to Grebenkopf, was only to make the written character familiar to you. However, I will be content with one in three weeks or so. I believe you are not likely to see Mr. Elliot again soon, he being still in Cornwall with his father, who I hear is not likely to recover. Adieu. End of Section thirty-three, read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section thirty-four of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter fifty-seven, London, November twenty-ninth, Old Style, seventeen forty-eight. Dear boy, I delayed writing to you till I could give you some account of the motions of your friend Mr. Elliot, for whom I know you have, and very justly, the most friendly concern. His father and he came to town together in a post-chase a fortnight ago, the rest of the family remaining in Cornwall. His father with difficulty survived the journey and died last Saturday, seven night. Both concern and decency can find your friend till two days ago when I saw him. He has determined, and I think very prudently, to go abroad again. But how soon it is yet impossible for him to know, as he must necessarily put his own private affairs in some order first. But I conjecture that he may possibly join you at Turin. Sooner, to be sure, not. I am very sorry that you are likely to be so long without the company and the example of so valuable a friend, and therefore I hope that you will make it up to yourself, as well as you can at this distance, by remembering and following his example. Imitate that application of his, which has made him know all thoroughly and to the bottom. He does not content himself with the surface of knowledge, but works in the mind for it, knowing that it lies deep. Pope says, very truly, in his essay on criticism, a little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not, the period in spring. I shall send you by a ship that goes to Hamburg next week, and by which Hawkins sends Mr. Hart some things that he wrote for, all those which I propose sending you by Mr. Elliot, together with a very little box that I am desired to forward to Mr. Hart. There will be likewise two letters of recommendation for you to Monsieur André and Comte Allegrati, at Berlin, which you will take care to deliver to them as soon as you shall be rigged and fitted out to appear there. They will introduce you into the best company, and I depend upon your own good sense for your avoiding of bad. If you fall into bad and low company there or anywhere else, you will be irrecoverably lost, whereas if you keep good company and company above yourself, your character and your fortune will be immovably fixed. I have not time to-day, upon account of the meeting of the Parliament, to make this letter of the usual length, and indeed after the volumes that I have written to you, all I can add must be unnecessary. However, I shall probably, ex abotati, return soon to my former prolixity, and you will receive more and more, last words from yours. LETTER XVIII. LONDON. DECEMBER VI. OLD STYLE. 1748. DEAR BOY. I am at present under very great concern for the loss of a most affectionate brother, with whom I had always lived in the closest friendship. My brother John died last Friday night of a fit of the gout, which he had had for about a month in his hands and feet, and which fell at last upon his stomach and head. As he grew toward the last lethargic, his end was not painful to himself. At the distance which you are at from hence, you need not go into mourning upon this occasion, as the time of your mourning would be near over, before you could put it on. By a ship which sails this week for Hamburg, I shall send you those things which I propose to have sent to you by Mr. Elliott. Viz. A little box from your mamma. A less box for Mr. Hart. Mr. Locke's book upon education. The print of Carlo Moratti, which I mentioned to you some time ago, and two letters of recommendation, one to Mr. Andre and the other to Comte Allegorati at Berlin. Both those gentlemen will, I am sure, be as willing as they are able to introduce you into the best company, and I hope you will not, as many of your countrymen are apt to do, decline it. It is in the best companies only that you can learn the best manners and that torneur and those graces which I have so often recommended to you, as the necessary means of making a figure in the world. I am most extremely pleased with the account which Mr. Hart gives me of your progress in Greek, and of your having read Hesiod almost critically. Upon this subject I suggest but one thing to you, of many that I might suggest, which is that you have now got over the difficulties of that language, and therefore it would be unpardonable not to persevere to your journey's end, now that all the rest of your way is downhill. I am also very well pleased to hear that you have such a knowledge of, and taste for curious books and scarce and valuable tracks. This is a kind of knowledge which very well becomes a man of sound and solid learning, but which only exposes a man of slight and superficial reading. Therefore pray make the substance and manner of such books your first object, and their title pages, indexes, letters, and binding but your second. It is the characteristic of a man of parts and good judgment to know, and give that degree of attention that each object deserves. Whereas little minds mistake little objects for great ones, and lavish away upon the former that time and attention which only the latter deserve. To such mistakes we owe the numerous and frivolous tribes of insect-mongers, shell-mongers, and pursuers and dryers of butterflies, etc. The strong mind distinguishes, not only between the useful and the useless, but likewise between the useful and the curious. He applies himself intensely to the former. He only amuses himself with the latter. Of this little sort of knowledge which I have just hinted at, you will find at least as much as you need wish to know, in a superficial but pretty French book entitled Spectacle de la Nature, which will amuse you while you read it, and give you a sufficient notion of the various parts of nature. I would advise you to read it at leisure hours. But that part of nature which Mr. Hart tells me you have begun to study with director Magnificus is of much greater importance, and deserves much more attention. I mean astronomy. The vast and immense planetary system, the astonishing order and regularity of those innumerable worlds, will open a scene to you, which not only deserves your attention as a matter of curiosity or rather astonishment, but still more, as it will give you greater and consequently jester ideas of that eternal and omnipotent being, who contrived, made, and still preserves that universe, than all the contemplation of this comparatively very little orb, which we at present inhabit, could possibly give you. Upon this subject, Monsieur Fontenelle's plurality des mons, which you may read in two hours' time, will both inform and please you. God bless you, yours. Letter 59, London, December 13, Old Style, 1748 Dear Boy, The last four posts have brought me no letters, either from you or from Mr. Hart, at which I am uneasy, not as a mamma would be, but as a father should be, for I do not want your letters as bills of health. You are young, strong and healthy, and I am consequently in no pain about that. Moreover, were either you or Mr. Hart ill, the other would doubtless write me word of it. My impatience for yours or Mr. Hart's letters arises from a very different cause, which is my desire to hear frequently of the state and progress of your mind. You are now at that critical period of life when every week ought to produce fruit or flowers answerable to your culture, which I am sure has not been neglected, and it is by your letters and Mr. Hart's accounts of you that at this distance I can only judge at your gradations to maturity. I desire, therefore, that one of you two will not fail to write me once a week. The sameness of your present way of life, I easily conceive, would not make out a very interesting letter to an indifferent bystander. But so deeply concerned as I am in the game you are playing, even the least move is to me of importance, and helps me to judge of the final event. As you will be leaving Leipzig pretty soon after you shall have received this letter, I here send to you one in close to deliver to Mr. Moscow. It is to thank him for his attention and civility to you during your stay with him, and I take it for granted that you will not fail making him the proper compliments at parting. The good name that we leave behind us at one place often gets before us to another, and is of great use. As Mr. Moscow is much known and esteemed in the Republic of letters, I think it would be of advantage to you if you got letters of recommendation from him to some of the learned men at Berlin. These testimonials give a luster which is not to be despised, for the most ignorant are forced to seem, at least, to pay a regard to learning, as the most wicked are to virtue. Such is their intrinsic worth. Your friend Deval dined with me the other day, and complained most grievously that he had not heard from you above a year. I bid him abuse you for it himself, and advised him to do it in verse, which, if he was really angry, his indignation would enable him to do. He accordingly brought me, yesterday, the enclosed reproaches and challenge, which he desired me to transmit to you. As this is his first essay in English poetry, the inaccuracies in the rhymes and the numbers are very excusable. He insists, as you will find, upon being answered in verse, which I should imagine that you and Mr. Hart, together, could bring about. As the late Lady Dorchester used to say, that she and Dr. Radcliffe together could cure a fever. This is, however, sure, that it now rests upon you, and no man can say what methods Deval may take, if you decline his challenge. I am sensible that you are under some disadvantages in this proffered combat. Your climate, at this time of the year especially, delights more in the wood fire than in the poetic fire, and I conceive them uses, if there are any at Leipzig, to be rather shivering than singing. Nay, I question whether Apollo is even known there as God of verse or as God of light, perhaps a little as God of physics. These will be fair excuses if your performance should fall something short, though I do not apprehend that it will. While you have been at Leipzig, which is a place of study more than a pleasure or company, you have at all opportunities of pursuing your studies uninterruptedly, and have had, I believe, very few temptations to the contrary. But the case will be quite different at Berlin, where the splendor and dissipation of a court and the Beaumond will present themselves to you in gaudy shapes, attractive enough to all young people. Do not think now that like an old fellow I am going to advise you to reject them, and shut yourself up in your closet. Quite the contrary, I advise you to take your share and enter into them with spirit and pleasure. But then I advise you, too, to allot your time prudently, as that learning may keep pace with pleasure. There is full time in the course of the day for both, if you do but manage that time right and like a good economist. The whole morning, if diligently and attentively devoted to solid studies, will do a great way at the year's end, and the evenings spent in the pleasures of good company will go as far in teaching you a knowledge not much less necessary than the other. I mean the knowledge of the world. Between these two necessary studies, that of books in the morning and that of the world in the evening, you see that you will not have one minute to squander or slatter in a way. Nobody ever lent themselves more than I did, when I was young, to the pleasures and dissipation of good company. I even did it too much. But then I can assure you that I always found time for serious studies, and when I could find it no other way, I took it out of my sleep, for I resolved to always rise early in the morning, however late I went to bed at night, and this resolution I have kept so sacred that unless when I have been confined to my bed by illness, I have not, for more than forty years, ever been in bed at nine o'clock in the morning, but commonly up before eight. When you are at Berlin, remember to speak German as often as you can in company, for everybody there will speak French to you, unless you let them know that you can speak German, which they will then choose to speak. Adieu. End of Section thirty-four. Read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section thirty-five of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter sixty. London. December twentieth. Old Style. seventeen forty-eight. Dear boy. I received last Saturday by three males, which came in at once, two letters from Mr. Hart, and yours of the eighth, New Style. It was I who mistook your meaning with regard to your German letters, and not you who expressed it ill. I thought it was the writing of the German character that took up so much of your time, and therefore I advised you, by the frequent writing of that character, to make it easy and familiar to you. But since it is only the propriety and purity of the German language which make your writing it so tedious and laborious, I will tell you that I shall not be nice upon that article, and did not expect that you should yet be master of all the idioms, delicacies, and peculiarities of that difficult language. That can only come by use, especially frequent speaking. Therefore, when you shall be at Berlin and afterwards at Turin, where you will meet many Germans, pray take all opportunities of conversing in German, in order not only to keep up what you have got of that language, but likewise to improve and perfect yourself in it. As to the characters, you form them very well, and as you yourself own better than your English ones. But then let me ask you this question. Why do you not form your Roman characters better? For I maintain that it is in every man's power to write what hand he pleases, and consequently, that he ought to write a good one. You form, particularly, your E.E. and your L.L. in zigzag, instead of making them straight, as thus E.E.L.L. a fault very easily mended. You will not, I believe, be angry with this little criticism when I tell you that by all the accounts I have had of late from Mr. Hart and the others, this is the only criticism that you give me occasion to make. Mr. Hart's last letter of the fourteenth new style, particularly, makes me extremely happy. By assuring me that, in every respect, you do exceedingly well. I am not afraid by what I now say of making you too vain, as I do not think that a just consciousness and an honest pride of doing well can be called vanity. For vanity is either the silly affectation of good qualities which one has not, or the sillier pride of what does not deserve commendation in itself. By Mr. Hart's account you are got very near the goal of Greek and Latin, and therefore I cannot suppose that, as your sense increases, your endeavors and your speed will slacken in finishing the small remains of your course. Consider what luster and a clot it will give you when you return here to be allowed to be the best scholar, for a gentleman in England, not to mention the real pleasure and solid comfort which such knowledge will give you throughout your whole life. Mr. Hart tells me another thing, which I own I did not expect. It is this, that when you read aloud or repeat parts of plays, you speak very properly and distinctly. This relieves me from great uneasiness, which I was under upon account of your former bad enunciation. Go on and attend most diligently to this important article. It is of all graces, and they are all necessary, the most necessary one. Comte Pertenieux, who has been here about a fortnight, far from disavowing, confirms all that Mr. Hart has said to your advantage. He thinks that he shall be at Turin much about the time of your arrival there, and pleases himself with the hopes of being useful to you. Though should you get there before him, he says that Comte Duperron, with whom you are a favorite, will take that care. You see by this one instance, and in the course of your life you will see by a million of instances, of what use a good reputation is, and how swift and advantageous the harbinger it is, wherever one goes. Upon this point, too, Mr. Hart does you justice, and tells me you are desirous of praise from the praiseworthy. This is a right and generous ambition, and without which I fear few people would deserve praise. But here, let me, as an old stager upon the theatre of the world, suggest one consideration to you, which is to extend your desire of praise a little beyond the strictly praiseworthy, or else you may be apt to discover too much contempt for at least three parts in five of the world, who will never forgive at you. In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and naives, who singly from their number must to a certain degree be respected, though they are by no means respectable. And a man who will show every naver fool that he thinks him such, will engage in a most ruinous war, against numbers much superior to those that he and his allies can bring into the field. Abhor a nave, and pity a fool in your heart, but let neither of them unnecessarily see that you do so. Some complacence and attention to fools is prudent and not mean, as a silent abhorrence of individual naives is often necessary and not criminal. As you will now soon part with Lord Pultney, with whom, during your stay together at Leipzig, I suppose you have formed a connection. I imagine that you will continue it by letters, which I would advise you to do. They tell me that he is good-natured and does not want parts, which are of themselves too good reasons for keeping it up. But there is a third reason, which in the course of the world is not to be despised. His father cannot live long, and will leave him an immense fortune, which in all events will make him of some consequence. And if he has parts into the bargain, a very great consequence. So that his friendship may be extremely well worth your cultivating, especially as it will not cost you above one letter in a month. I do not know whether this letter will find you at Leipzig. At least it is the last that I shall direct there. My next either to you or Mr. Hart will be directed to Berlin. But as I do not know to what house or street there, I suppose it will remain in the post-house till you send for it. Upon your arrival at Berlin you will send me your particular direction, and also pray be minute in your accounts of your reception there, by those whom I recommend to you, as well as by those to whom they present you. Remember too that you are going to a polite and literate court, where the graces will best introduce you. Adieu. God bless you, and may you continue to deserve my love as much as you now enjoy it. P.S. Lady Chesterfield bids me tell you that she decides entirely in your favor against Mr. Grevencock, and even against herself, for she does not think that she could at this time write either so good a character or so good German. Pray write her a German letter upon that subject, in which you may tell her, that, like the rest of the world, you approve of her judgment, because it is in your favor, and that you true Germans cannot allow Danes to be competent judges of your language, etc. End of Section 35. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibreVoc.