 Section 137 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 168 London, May 31st, Old Style, 1752 My dear friend, the world is the book and the only one to which, at present, I would have you apply yourself, and the thorough knowledge of it will be of more use to you than all the books that ever were read. Lay aside the best book whenever you can go into the best company, and depend upon it you change for the better. However, as the most tumultuous life, whether of business or pleasure, leaves some vacant moments every day, in which a book is the refuge of a rational being, I now mean to point out to you the method of employing those moments, which will and ought to be but few, in the most advantageous manner. Throw away none of your time upon those trivial futile books, published by idle or necessitous authors, for the amusement of idle and ignorant readers, such sort of books swarm and buzz about one every day. Flap them away, they have no sting. Certain petfinum, have some one object for those leisure moments, and pursue that object invariably till you have attained it, and then take some other. For instance, considering your destination, I would advise you to single out the most remarkable and interesting eras of modern history, and confine all your reading to that era. If you pitch upon the Treaty of Munster, and that is the proper period to begin with, in the course which I am now recommending, do not interrupt it by dipping and deviating into other books, unrelated to it, but consult only the most authentic histories, letters, memoirs, and negotiations, relative to that great transaction, reading and comparing them with all that caution and distrust, which Lord Bolingbroke recommends to you, in a better manner, and in better words than I can. The next period worth your particular knowledge is the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which was calculated to lay, and in effect did lay, the succession of the House of Bourbon to the Crown of Spain. Pursue that in the same manner, singling out of the millions of volumes written upon that occasion the two or three most authentic ones, and particularly the letters, which are the best authorities in matters of negotiation. Next come the Treaties of Nimegun and Nrisic, Postscripts in, in a manner to those of Munster and the Pyrenees. Those two transactions have had great light thrown upon them by the publication of many authentic and original letters and pieces. The concessions made at the Treaty of Nrisic by the then triumphant Louis XIV astonished all those who viewed things only superficially, but I should think must have been easily accounted for by those who knew the state of the Kingdom of Spain, as well as of the health of its King, Charles II, at that time. The interval between the conclusion of the Peace of Nrisic and the breaking out of the Great War in 1702, though a short, is a most interesting one. Every week of it almost produced some great event. Two partition treaties, the death of the King of Spain, his unexpected will, and the acceptance of it by Louis XIV, in violation of the Second Treaty of Partition, just signed and ratified by him. Philip V quietly and cheerfully received in Spain and acknowledged as King of it by most of those powers who afterwards joined in an alliance to dethrone him. I cannot help making this observation upon that occasion, that character has often more to do in great transactions than prudence and sound policy, for Louis XIV gratified his personal pride by giving a bourbon King to Spain at the expense of the true interest of France, which would have acquired much more solid and permanent strength by the addition of Naples, Sicily, and Lorraine upon the footing of the Second Partition Treaty. And I think it was fortunate for Europe that he preferred the will. It is true he might hope to influence his bourbon posterity in Spain. He knew too well how weak the ties of blood are among men, and how much weaker still they are among princes. The memoirs of Count Harach and of La Torres give a good deal of light into the transactions of the Court of Spain previous to the death of that weak King, and the letters of the Maréchal d'Arcourt, then the French ambassador in Spain, of which I have authentic copies and manuscript from the years 1698 to 1701, have cleared up that whole affair to me. I keep that book for you. It appears by those letters that the impudent conduct of the House of Austria, with regard to the King and Queen of Spain, and Madame Berlip, her favourite, together with the Knowledge of the Partition Treaty, which incensed all Spain, were the true and only reasons of the will in favour of the Duke of Anjou. Cardinal Porto Corero, nor any of the grandees, were bribed by France, as was generally reported and believed at that time, which confirms Voltaire's anecdote upon that subject. Then opens a new scene in a new country. Louis XIV's good fortune forsakes him, till the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene make him amends for all the mischief they had done him, by making the Allies refuse the terms of peace offered by him at Grütüdenberg. How the disadvantageous peace of Utrecht was afterward brought on, you have lately read, and you cannot inform yourself too minutely of all those circumstances, that treaty being the freshest source from whence the late transactions of Europe have flowed. The altercations that have since happened, whether by wars or treaties, are so recent, that all the written accounts are to be helped out, proved or contradicted, by the oral ones of almost every informed person, of a certain age or rank in life. For the facts, dates, and original pieces of this century, you will find them in Lemberty, till the year 1715, and after that time, in Roussée's recue. I do not mean that you should plot hours together in researches of this kind. No, you may employ your time more usefully. But I mean that you should make the most of the moments you do employ, by method and the pursuit of one single object at a time. Nor should I call it a digression from that object. When you meet with clashing and jarring pretensions of different princes to the same thing, you had immediately recourse to other books, in which those several pretensions were clearly stated. On the contrary, that is the only way of remembering those contested rights and claims. Four, were a man to read, too sweet, Sherdois's Theatrum Prensononium, he would only be confounded by the variety and remember none of them. Whereas by examining them occasionally, as they happen to occur, either in the course of your historical reading, or as they are agitated in your own times, you will retain them by connecting them with those historical facts which occasioned your inquiry. For example, had you read in the course of two or three folios of pretensions, those, among others, of the two kings of England and Prussia, to Oost-Freeze, it is impossible that you should have remembered them. But now that they are become the debated object at the Deat at Rattusbone, and the topic of all political conversations, if you consult both books and persons concerning them, and inform yourself thoroughly, you will never forget them as long as you live. You will hear a great deal of them on one side at Hanover, and as much on the other side afterward at Berlin. Hear both sides and form your own opinion, but dispute with neither. Letters from foreign ministers to their courts, and from their courts to them, are, if genuine, the best and most authentic records you can read, as far as they go. Cardinal Dossatz, President Genines, Destrads, Sir William Temples, will not only inform your mind, but form your own opinion. Will not only inform your mind, but form your style, which in letters of business should be very plain and simple, but at the same time exceedingly clear, correct, and pure. All that I have said may be reduced to these two or three plain principles. First, that you should now read very little, but converse a great deal. Second, to read no useless, unprofitable books. And third, that those which you do read may all tend to a certain object and be relative to and consequential of each other. In this method half an hour's reading every day will carry you a great way. People seldom know how to employ their time to the best advantage till they have too little left to employ. But if at your age, in the beginning of life, people would but consider the value of it and put every moment to interest, it is incredible what an additional fund of knowledge and pleasure such an economy would bring in. I look back with regret upon that large sum of time, which in my youth I lavished away idly, without either improvement or pleasure. Take warning but times, and enjoy every moment. Pleasures do not commonly last so long as life, and therefore should not be neglected. And the longest life is too short for knowledge. Consequently every moment is precious. I am surprised at having received no letter from you since you left Paris. I still direct this to Strasbourg as I did my two last. I shall direct my next to the post house at Mayennes, unless I receive in the meantime contrary instructions from you. Adieu. Remember, les attentions. They must be your passports into good company. End of Section 137. Read by Professor Heather and By. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Section 138 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibreVox.org into the public domain. Letter 169. London, June. Old Style, 1752. My dear friend, very few celebrated negotiators have been eminent for their learning. The most famous French negotiators, and I know no nation that can boast of Abler, have been military men, as Monsieur Darkor, Comte Destrade, Michel Ducceau, and others. The late Duke of Marlborough, who was at least as Abel a negotiator as a general, was exceedingly ignorant of books, but extremely knowing in men, whereas the learned Grosius appeared, both in Sweden and in France, to be a very bungling minister. This is, in my opinion, very easily to be accounted for. A man of very deep learning must have employed the greatest part of his time in books, and a skillful negotiator must necessarily have employed much the greater part of his time with man. The sound scholar, when dragged out of his dusty closet into business, acts by book, and deals with men as he has read of them, not as he has known them by experience. He follows Spartan and Roman precedents in what he falsely imagines to be similar cases, whereas two cases never were, since the beginning of the world, exactly alike, and he would be capable, where he thought spirit and vigor necessary, to draw a circle round the persons he treated with, and to insist upon a categorical answer before they went out of it, because he had read in the Roman history that once upon a time some Roman ambassador did so. No, a certain degree of learning may help, but no degree of learning will ever make a skillful minister, whereas a great knowledge of the world, of the characters, passions, and habits of mankind, has, without one grain of learning, made a thousand. Military men have seldom much knowledge of books. Their education does not allow it. But what makes great amends for that want is that they generally know a great deal of the world. They are thrown into it young. They see a variety of nations and characters, and they soon find that to rise, which is the aim of them all, they must first please. These concurrent causes almost always give them manners and politeness, in consequence of which you see them always distinguished at courts and favored by the women. I could wish that you had been of an age to have made a campaign or two as a volunteer. It would have given you an attention, a versatility, and an alertness, all which I doubt you want, and a great want it is. A foreign minister has not great business to transact every day, so that his knowledge and his skill in negotiating are not frequently put to the trial. But he has that to do every day and every hour of the day, which is necessary to prepare and smooth the way for his business, that is, to insinuate himself by his manners, not only into the houses, but into the confidence of the most considerable people of the place. To contribute to their pleasures and insensibly not to be looked upon as a stranger himself. A skillful minister may very possibly be doing his master's business full as well, in doing the honors gracefully and gentially of a ball or a supper, as if he were laboriously riding a protocol in his closet. The Marachal d'Arcours, by his magnificence, his manners, and his politeness, blunted the edge of the long aversion which the Spaniards had to the French. The court and the grandees were personally fond of him, and frequented his house, and were at least insensibly brought to prefer a French to a German yoke, which I am convinced would never have happened, had Comte-Tarache been Marchal d'Arcours, or the Marachal d'Arcours Comte-Tarache. The Comte-Distrade had, by ses maniers, polis, et liens, formed such connections, and gained such an interest in the Republic of the United Provinces, that Monsieur de Witt, the then-pensionary of Holland, often applied to him to use his interest with his friend, both in Holland and the other provinces, whenever he, de Witt, had a difficult point which he wanted to carry. This was certainly not brought about by his knowledge of books but of men, dancing, fencing, and riding with a little military architecture were no doubt the top of his education, and if he knew that Collegium in Latin signified college in French, it must have been by accident. But he knew what was more useful. From thirteen years old he had been in the great world, and had read men and women so long that he could then read them at sight. Talking the other day upon this and other subjects, with one who knows and loves you very well, and expressing my anxiety and wishes that your exterior accomplishments, as a man of fashion, might adorn, and at least equal your intrinsic merit as a man of sense and honour, the person interrupted me and said, Set your heart at rest, that never will or can happen. It is not in character that gentleness, that dossure, those attentions which you wish him to have, are not in his nature. And do what you will, nay, let him do what he will, he can never acquire them. Nature may be a little disguised and altered by care, but can by no means whatsoever be totally forced and changed. I denied this principle to a certain degree, but admitting, however, that in many respects our nature was not to be changed, and asserting at the same time that in others it might by care be very much altered and improved, so as in truth to be changed, that I took those exterior accomplishments, which we had been talking of, to be mere modes, and absolutely depending upon the will and upon custom, and that therefore I was convinced that your good sense, which must show you the importance of them, would make you resolve at all events to acquire them, even in spite of nature, if nature be in the case. Our dispute, which lasted a great while, ended as Voltaire observes that disputes in England are apt to do, in a wager of fifty guineas, which I myself am to decide upon honour, and of which this is a faithful copy. If you think I shall win it, you may go my halves, if you please, declare yourself in time. This I declare that I would most cheerfully give a thousand guineas to win those fifty. You may secure them me, if you please. I grow very impatient for your future letters from the several courts of Mannheim, Bonn, Hanover, etc., and I desire that your letters may be to me, what I do not desire they should be to anybody else, I mean full of yourself. Let the egotism, a figure which upon all other occasions I detest, be your only one to me. Trifles that concern you are not trifles to me, and my knowledge of them may possibly be useful to you. Adieu. Les Gras, les Gras, les Gras. End of Section 138. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 139 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 170. London, June 23, Old Style, 1752. My dear friend, I direct this letter to Mayence, where I think it is likely to meet you. Supposing as I do that you stayed three weeks at Mannheim, after the date of your last from thence. But should you have stayed longer at Mannheim, to which I have no objection, it will wait for you at Mayence. Mayence will not, I believe, have charms to detain you above a week, so that I reckon you will be at Bonn at the end of July, New Style. There you may stay just as little or as long as you please, and then proceed to Hanover. I had a letter by the last post from a relation of mine at Hanover, Mr. Stanhope Aspenwall, who is in the Duke of Newcastle's office, and has lately been appointed the king's minister to the day of Algiers, a post which, notwithstanding your views of foreign affairs, I believe you do not envy him. He tells me in that letter there are very good lodgings to be had at one Mrs. Myers's, the next door to the Duke of Newcastle's, which he offers to take for you. I have desired him to do it, in case Mrs. Myers will wait for you till the latter end of August, or the beginning of September, New Style, which I suppose is about the time when you will be at Hanover. You will find this Mr. Aspenwall of great use to you there. He will exert himself to the utmost to serve you. He has been twice or thrice at Hanover, and knows all the allures there. He is very well with the Duke of Newcastle, and will puff you there. Moreover, if you have a mind to work there as a volunteer in that bureau, he will assist and inform you. In short, he is a very honest, sensible, and informed man. Mais me pays pas beaucoup de sa figure, il abuse même du privilage, compte les hommes d'être l'âde, et il ne sera pas une reste avec les liens et les larmes qu'il trouverait à algir. As you are entirely master of the time when you will leave Bonn and go to Hanover, so you are master to stay at Hanover as long as you please, and to go from thence where you please, provided that at Christmas you are at Berlin, for the beginning of the Carnival. This I would not have you say at Hanover, considering the mutual disposition of those two courts. But when anybody asks you where you are to go next, say that you propose rambling in Germany, at Brunswick, Castle, etc., till the next spring, when you intend to be in Flanders, in your way to England. I take Berlin at this time to be the politest, the most shining, and the most useful court in Europe for a young fellow to be at, and therefore I would upon no account not have you there for at least a couple of months of the Carnival. If you are as well received and past your time as well at Bonn as I believe you will, I would advise you to remain there till about the 20th of August Newstile. In four days you will be at Hanover. As for your stay there, it must be shorter or longer according to certain circumstances which you know of. Supposing them, at the best then, stay within a week or ten days of the King's return to England. But supposing them at the worst, your stay must not be too short, for reasons which you also know. No resentment must either appear or be suspected. Therefore at worst I think you must remain there a month, and at best as long as ever you please. But I am convinced that all will turn out very well for you there. Everybody is engaged or inclined to help you, the ministers, English and German, the principal ladies, and most of the foreign ministers, so that I may apply to you Nullam numen abest, c'est prudentia. Du Péran will, I believe, be back there from Turin much about the time you get there. Pray be very attentive to him, and connect yourself with him as much as ever you can. For besides that he is a very pretty and well-informed man, he is very much in fashion at Hanover, is personally very well with the King and certain ladies, so that a visible intimacy and connection with him will do you credit and service. Pray cultivate, Monsieur Hope, the Dutch minister, who has always been very much my friend, and will, I am sure, be yours. His manners, it is true, are not very engaging. He is rough, but he is sincere. It is very useful sometimes to see things which one ought to avoid, as it is right to see very often those which one ought to imitate, and my friend Hope's manners will frequently point out to you what yours ought to be by the rule of contraries. Congrief points out a sort of critics, to whom he says that we are doubly obliged. Rules for good writing they with pains indict, then show us what is bad by what they write. It is certain that Monsieur Hope, with the best heart in the world, and a thousand good qualities, has a thousand enemies, and hardly a friend, simply from the roughness of his manners. Enby, I hardly wish you could have stayed long enough at Mannheim to have been seriously and desperately in love with Madame de Taxis, who, I suppose, is a proud, insolent, fine lady, one who would consequently have expected attention's little short of adoration. Nothing would do you more good than such a passion, and I live in hopes that somebody or other will be able to excite such a one in you. Your hour may not yet become, but it will come. Love has not been unactly compared to the smallpox, which most people have sooner or later. Ifigenia had a wonderful effect upon Simon, I wish some handover ifigenia may try her skill upon you. I recommend to you again, though I have already done it twice or thrice, to speak German, even effectively, while you are at handover, which will show that you prefer that language, and be of more use to you there with somebody than you can imagine. When you carry my letters to Monsieur Munchhausen and Monsieur Swigelt, address yourself to them in German. The latter speaks French very well, but the former extremely ill. Show great attention to Madame Munchhausen's daughter, who is a great favourite. Those little trifles please mothers and sometimes fathers extremely. Observe, and you will find, almost universally, that the least things either please or displease most, because they necessarily imply either a very strong desire of obliging or an unpardonable indifference about it. I will give you a ridiculous instance enough of this truth, from my own experience. When I was ambassador the first time in Holland, Komp de Vussener and his wife, people of the first rank in consideration, had a little boy of about three years old, of whom they were exceedingly fond. In order to make my court to them, I was so too, and used to take the child often upon my lap and play with him. One day his nose was very dirty, upon which I took out my handkerchief and wiped it for him. This raised a loud laugh, and they called me a very handy nurse, but the father and mother were so pleased with it, that to this day it is an anecdote in the family, and I never receive a letter from Komp de Vussener, but that he makes me compliments, du mauvais que j'ai mouche autrefois. Who, by the way, I am assured, is now the prettiest young fellow in Holland. Where one would gain people, remember that nothing is little. Adieu. Letter 171 London, June 26, Old Style, 1752 My dear friend, as I have reason to fear from your last letter of the eighteenth new style from Mannheim, that all or at least most of my letters to you, since you left Paris, have miscarried, I think it requisite, at all events, to repeat in this the necessary parts of those several letters, as far as they relate to your future motions. I suppose that this will either find you, or be but a few days before you at Bonn, where it is directed, and I suppose, too, that you have fixed your time for going from thence to Hanover. If things turn out well at Hanover, as in my opinion they will, ci sta bene non si muova. Stay there till a week or ten days before the king sets out for England, but should they turn out ill, which I cannot imagine, stay, however, a month, that your departure may not seem a step of discontent or peevishness, the very suspicion of which is by all means to be avoided. Whenever you leave Hanover, be it sooner or be it later, where would you go? Le Padrone, and I give you your choice. Would you pass the months of November and December at Brunswick, Castle, etc.? Would you choose to go for a couple of months to Ratisbonne, where you would be very well recommended to and treated by the king's electoral minister, the Baron de Baer, and where you would improve your just publicum? Or would you rather go directly to Berlin and stay there till the end of the Carnival? Two or three months at Berlin are, considering all circumstances, necessary for you. And the Carnival months are the best. Pour le reste d'ici d'un dernier ressort, est-ce un appel comme d'abus? Let me know your decree when you have formed it. Your good or ill-success at Hanover will have a very great influence upon your subsequent character, figure, and fortune in the world. Therefore I confess that I am more anxious about it than ever bride was on her wedding night, when wishes, hopes, fears, and doubts tumultuously agitate, please, and terrify her. It is your first crisis. The character which you will acquire there will, more or less, be that which will abide by you for the rest of your life. You will be tried and judged there, not as a boy, but as a man, and from that moment there is no appeal for character. It is fixed. To form that character advantageously, you have three objects particularly to attend to. Your character as a man of morality, truth, and honor. Your knowledge in the objects of your destination as a man of business. Your engaging and insinuating address, air, and manners as a courtier. The sure and only steps to favor. Merit at courts without favor will do little or nothing. Favor without merit will do a good deal. But favor and merit together will do everything. Favor at courts depends upon so many such trifling, such unexpected and unforeseen events that a good courtier must attend to every circumstance, however little that either does or can happen. He must have no absences, no distractions. He must not say, I did not mind it, who would have thought it. He ought to have minded and ought to have thought it. A chambermaid has sometimes caused revolutions in courts which have produced others in kingdoms. Were I to make my way to favor in a court, I would neither willfully nor by negligence give a dog or a cat their reason to dislike me. Two pies grèche well instructed, you know, made the fortune of De Nune with Louis XIII. Every step a man makes at court requires as much attention and circumspection as those which were made formerly between hot plowshares in the ordeal, or fiery trials, which in those times of ignorance and superstition were looked upon as demonstrations of innocence or guilt. Direct your principal battery at Hanover at the D of Ends. There are many very weak places in that citadel where, with a very little skill, you cannot fail making a great impression. Ask for his orders in everything you do. Talk Austrian and anti-Galican to him, and as soon as you are upon a foot of talking easily to him, tell him, and bata not, that his skill and success in thirty or forty elections in England leave you no reason to doubt of his carrying his election for Frankfurt, and that you look upon the Archduke in his hours of festivity and computation, drop that he puts you in mind of what Sir William Temple says of the Pensionary DeWitt, who at that time governed half Europe, that he appeared at balls, assemblies and public places as if he had nothing else to do or to think of. When he talks to you upon foreign affairs, which he will often do, say that you really cannot presume to give any opinion of your own upon those matters, looking upon yourself at present only as a post-script to the Chord Diplomatique, but that if his grace will be pleased to make you an additional volume to it, though but into a decimal, you will do your best that he shall neither be ashamed nor repent of it. He loves to have a favourite and to open himself to that favourite. He has now no such person with him, the place is vacant, and if you have dexterity you may fill it. In one thing alone do not humour him, I mean drinking, for as I believe you have never yet been drunk. You do not yourself know how you can bear your wine, and what a little too much of it may make you do or say. You might possibly kick down all you had done before. You do not love gaming, and I thank God for it, but at Hanover I would have you show and profess a particular dislike to play, so as to decline it upon all occasions unless where one may be wanted to make a forth at twist or quadril. And then take care to declare the result of your complacence, not of your inclinations. Without such a precaution you may very possibly be suspected, though unjustly of loving play, upon account of my former passion for it, and such a suspicion would do you a great deal of hurt, especially with the king who detests gaming. I must end this abruptly, God bless you. Section 141 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 172 My dear friend, versatility as a courtier may be almost decisive to you hereafter. That is, it may conduce to or retard your preferment in your own destination. The first reputation goes a great way, and if you fix a good one at Hanover it will operate also to your advantage in England. The trade of a courtier is as much a trade as that of a shoemaker, and he who applies himself the most will work the best. The only difficulty is to distinguish what I am sure you have sense enough to distinguish between the right and proper qualifications and their kindred faults, for there is but a line between every perfection and its neighboring imperfection. As, for example, you must be extremely well-bred and polite, troublesome forms and stiffness of ceremony. You must be respectful and assenting, but without being servile and abject. You must be frank, but without indiscretion, and close without being causative. You must keep up dignity of character without the least pride of birth or rank. You must be gay within all the bounds of decency and respect, and grave without the affectation of wisdom, which does not become the age of twenty. You must be essentially secret without being dark and mysterious. You must be firm and even bold, but with great seeming modesty. With these qualifications, which, by the way, are all in your own power, I will answer for your success, not only at Hanover, but at any court in Europe. And I am not sorry that you begin your apprenticeship at a little one because you must be more circumspect and more upon your guard there because every little thing is not known nor reported. When you write to me, or to anybody else, from thence, take care that your letters contain commendations of all that you see and hear there, for they will most of them be opened in red. But as frequent couriers will come from Hanover to England, you may sometimes write to me without reserve and put your letters into a very little box, which you may send safely by some of them. I must not omit mentioning to you the Tassel's Table where you will frequently dine. There is a great deal of drinking. Be upon your guard against it, both upon account of your health, which would not bear it, and of the consequences of your being flustered and heated with wine. It might engage you in scrapes and frolics, which the King, who is a very sober man himself, detests. On the other hand, you should not seem too grave and too wise to drink like the rest of the company. Therefore use art. Mix water with wine. Do not drink all that is in the glass. And if detected and pressed to drink more, do not cry out sobriety. But say that you have lately been out of order, that you are subject to inflammatory complaints, and that you must beg to be excused for the present. A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be, and an old fellow ought to seem wiser whether he really be so or not. During your stay at Hanover I would have you make two or three excursions to parts of that electorate. The hearts where the silver minds are, gotting-gen for the university, stod for what commerce there is. You should also go to Zell. In short, see everything that is to be seen there and inform yourself well of all the details of that country. Go to Hamburg for three or four days and know the constitution of that little Hanseatic Republic, and inform yourself well of the nature of the King of Denmark's pretensions to it. If all things turn out right for you at Hanover, I would have you make it your headquarters, till about a week or ten days before the King leaves it, and then go to Brunswick, which though a little, is a very polite, pretty court. You may stay there a fortnight or three weeks, as you like it, and from thence go to Castle, and stay there till you go to Berlin, where I would have you be by Christmas. At Hanover you will very easily get good letters of recommendation to the King to Castle. You do not want any to Berlin, however, I will send you one for Voltaire. A propos of Berlin be very reserved and cautious while at Hanover, as to that King and that country, both which are detested, because feared by everybody there, from His Majesty down to the meanest peasant. But, however, they both extremely deserve your utmost attention, and you will see the arts and wisdom of government better in that country and in Europe. You may stay three months at Berlin, if you like it, as I believe you will, and after that I hope we shall meet there again. Of all the places in the world, I repeat it once more. Establish a good reputation at Hanover, et fais vos valeurs là autant qu'il reste possible par le bouillon, les maniers, et les grâces. Indeed it is of the greatest importance to you, and will make your path very easy. He is more taken by those little things than any man or even woman that I ever knew in my life, and I do not wonder at him. In short, exert to the utmost all your means and powers to please, and remember that he who pleases the most will rise the soonest and the highest. Try but once the pleasure and advantage of pleasing, and I will answer that you will never more neglect the means. I send you here with two letters, one to Monsieur Manchhausen, the other to Monsieur Swigeld, an old friend of mine, and a very sensible, knowing man. They will both, I am sure, be extremely civil to you, and carry you into the best company, and then it is your business to please that company. I never was more anxious about any period of your life than I am about this, your Hanover expedition, it being of so much more consequence to you than any other. If I hear from thence that you are for air, your manners and address, as well as esteemed for your knowledge, I shall be the happiest man in the world. Judge then what I must be if it happens otherwise. Adieu. London, July 21st, Old Style, 1752 My dear friend, by my calculation this letter may probably arrive at Hanover three or four days before you, and as I am sure of its arriving there safe, it shall contain the most material points that I have mentioned in my several letters to you since you left Paris, as if you had received but few of them, which may very probably be the case. As for your stay at Hanover, it must not in all events be less than a month, but if things turn out to your satisfaction it may be just as long as you please. From thence you may go wherever you like, for I have so good an opinion of your judgment that I think you will combine and weigh all circumstances and choose the properest places. Would you saunter at some of the small courts as at Brunswick, Castle, etc., till the carnival at Berlin? You are master. Would you pass a couple of months at Ratisbonne, which might not be ill-employed? Would you go to Brussels and stay a month or two there with Derroi and from thence to Mr. York at the Hague, with all my heart? Or lastly, would you go to Copenhagen and Stockholm? Choose entirely for yourself without any further instructions from me. Only let me know your determination in time that I may settle for your credit, in case you go to places where at present you have none. Your object should be to see the mores, maltorum, hominem, et herbis. Begin and end it where you please. By what you have already seen of the German courts, I am sure you must have observed that they are much more nice and scrupulous in points of ceremony, respect, and attention than the greater courts of France and England. You will therefore, I am persuaded, attend to the minutest sentences of address and behavior, particularly during your stay at Hanover, which, I will repeat it, though I have said it often to you already, is the most important preliminary period of your whole life. Nobody in the world is more exact in all points of good breeding than the king, and it is the part of every man's character that he informs himself of first. The least negligence or the slightest inattention reported to him may do you infinite mistakes, as their contraries would service. If Lord Abomarle, as I believe he did, trusted you with the secret affairs of his department, let the Duke of Newcastle know that he did so, which would be an inducement to him to trust you too, and possibly to employ you in affairs of consequence. Tell him that, though you are young, you know the importance of secrecy in business, and can keep a secret, that I have always inculcated and have, moreover, strictly forbidden you ever to communicate, even to me, any matters of a secret nature, that you may happen to be trusted with in the course of business. As for business, I think I can trust you to yourself, but I wish I could say as much for you with regard to those exterior accomplishments, which are absolutely necessary to smooth and shorten the way to it. Half the business is done when one has gained the heart and the affections of those with whom one is to transact it. Air and address must begin, manners and attention must finish that work. I will let you into one secret concerning myself, which is that I owe much more of the success which I have had in the world to my manners than to any superior degree of merit or knowledge. I desired to please, and I neglected none of the means. This I can assure you without any false modesty is the truth. You have more knowledge than I had at your age, but then I had much more attention and good breeding than you. Call it vanity, if you please, and possibly it was so, but my great object was to make every man I met with like me, and every woman loved me. I often succeeded, but why? By taking great pains, for otherwise I never should. My figure by no means entitled me to it, and I had certainly an uphill game, whereas your countenance would help you if you made most of it, and prescribed forever the guilty, gloomy, and funerial part of it. Dress, address, and air would become your best countenance, and make your little figure pass very well. If you have time to read at Hanover, pray let the books you read be all relative to the history and constitution of that country, which I would have you know as correctly as any Hanoverian in the whole electorate. Inform yourself of the powers of the states, and of the nature and extent of the several judicatures. The particular articles of trade and commerce of Bremen, Harburg, and Stad, the details and value of the minds of the hearts. Two or three short books will give you the outlines of all these things, and conversation turned upon those subjects will do the rest, and better than books can. Remember of all things to speak nothing but German there. Make it, to express myself pedantically, your vernacular language. Seem to prefer it to any other. Call it your favorite language, and study to speak it with purity and elegance if it has any. This will not only make you perfect in it, but will please, and make your court there the better than anything. Apropos of languages, did you improve your Italian while you were at Paris, or did you forget it? Had you a master there? And what Italian books did you read with him? If you are master of Italian, I would have you afterward by the first convenient opportunity, Learn Spanish, which you may very easily and in a very little time do. You will then, in the course of your foreign business, never be obliged to employ, pay, or trust any translator for any European language. As I love to provide eventually for everything that can possibly happen, I will suppose the worst that can befall you at Hanover. In that case I would have you go immediately to the Duke of Newcastle and beg his gracious advice, or rather orders what you should do. Adding that his advice will always be orders to you. You will tell him that, though you are exceedingly mortified, you are much less so than you should otherwise be, from the consideration that being utterly unknown to his M, his objection could not be personal to you, and could only arise from circumstances which it was not in your power either to prevent a remedy. That if his grace thought that you're continuing any longer there would be disagreeable, you entreated him to obey, and that upon the whole you referred yourself entirely to him, whose orders you should most scrupulously obey. But this precaution I dare say is ex-abundante, and will prove unnecessary. However, it is always right to be prepared for all events, the worst as well as the best. It prevents hurry and surprise, two dangerous situations in business, for I know no one thing so useful, so necessary in all business, as great fullness, steadiness, and sang-fois. They give an incredible advantage over whoever one has to do with. I have received your letter of the fifteenth new-style from Mayence, where I find that you have diverted yourself much better than I expected. I am very well acquainted with Comte-Cobence's character, both of parts and business. He could have given you letters to Bonn, having formally resided there himself. You will not be so concerned where this letter will find you, as you were both at Mannheim and Mayence. But I hope you may meet with a second German, Mrs. F.D., who may make you forget the two former ones and practice your German. Such transient passions will do you no harm, but on the contrary a great deal of good. They will refine your manners and quicken your attention. They give a young fellow du bruyant and bring him into fashion, which last is a great article at setting out in the world. I have wrote about a month ago to Lord Abomarle to thank him for all his kindnesses to you. But pray, have you done as much? Those are the necessary attentions which should never be omitted, especially in the beginning of life, when a character is to be established. That ready wit, which you so partially allow me, and so justly Sir Charles Williams, may create many admirers, but take my word for it, it makes few friends. It shines and dazzles like the noonday sun, but like that too is very apt to scorch, and therefore is always feared. The milder morning and evening light and heat of that planet soothe and calm our minds. Good sense, complacence, gentleness of manners, attentions and graces are the only things that truly engage, and durably keep the heart at long run. Never seek for wit, if it presents itself well and good, but even in that case let your judgment interpose, and take care that it be not at the expense of anybody. Pope says, very truly, there are whom heaven has blessed with store of wit, yet want as much again to govern it. And in another place, I doubt with too much truth, for wit and judgment are ever at strife, though meant to each other's aid, like man and wife. The Germans are very seldom troubled with any extraordinary abolition or effervescences of wit, and it is not prudent to try it upon them. Whoever does offendent solito. Remember to write me very minute accountants of all your transactions at Hanover, for they excite both my impatience and anxiety. Adieu. Letter 174 London, August 4, Old Style, 1752 My dear friend, I am extremely concerned at the return of your old asthmatic complaint, of which your letter from Castle of the 28th July New Style informs me. I believe it is chiefly owing to your own negligence, for notwithstanding the season of the year, and the heat and agitation of traveling, I dare swear you have not taken one single dose of gentle cooling-physic, since that which I made you take a bath. I hope you are now better and in better hands. I mean, in Dr. Hugo's at Hanover, he is certainly a very skillful physician, and therefore I desire that you will inform him most minutely of your own case, from your first attack in Carniola to this last at Marburg. And not only follow his prescriptions exactly at present, but take his directions with regard to the regimen that he would have you observe to prevent the returns of this complaint, and in case of any returns, the immediate applications, whether external or internal, that he would have you make use of. Consider it is very worth your while to submit it present to any course of medicine or diet, to any restraint or confinement for a time, in order to get rid, once for all, of so troublesome and painful a distemper, the returns of which you would equally break in upon your business or your pleasures. Notwithstanding all this, which is plain sense and reason, I much fear that, as soon as ever you are got out of your present distress, you will take no preventive care by a proper course of medicines and regimen, but like most people of your age, think it impossible that you ever should be ill again. However, if you would not be wise for your own sake, I desire you will be so for mine, and most endlessly observe Dr. Hugo's present and future directions. Hanover, where I take it for granted you are, is at present the seat and center of foreign negotiations. There are ministers from almost every court in Europe, and you have a fine opportunity of displaying with modesty, in conversation, your knowledge of the matters now in agitation. The chief I take to be are the election of the King of the Romans, which, though I despair of, heartily brought about for two reasons. The first is that I think it may prevent a war upon the death of the present emperor, who though young and healthy may possibly die, as young and healthy people often do. The other is the very reason that makes some powers oppose it, and others dislike it, who do not openly oppose it. I mean that it may tend to make the imperial dignity hereditary in the House of Austria, which I heartily wish, together with a very great increase of power in the empire, till when Germany will never be anything near a match for France. Cardinal Richelieu showed his superior abilities in nothing more than in thinking no pains or expense too great to break the power of the House of Austria in the empire. Ferdinand had certainly made himself absolute, and the empire consequently formidable to France. If that cardinal had not piously adopted the Protestant cause and put the empire by treaty of best failure, in pretty much the same disjointed situation in which France itself was before Louis XI, when princes of the blood, at the head of provinces, and dukes of Brittany, etc., always opposed and often gave laws to the crown. Nothing but making the empire hereditary in the House of Austria can give it that strength and efficiency, which I wish it had, for the sake of the balance of power. For while the princes of the empire are so divided among themselves, and so open to the corruption of the best bidders, it is ridiculous to expect that Germany ever will or can act as a compact and well-united body against France. But as this notion of mine would as little please some of our friends as many of our enemies, I would not advise you, though you should be of the same opinion, to declare yourself too freely so. Could the elector Palantine be satisfied, which I confess will be difficult, considering the nature of his pretensions, the tenaciousness and haughtiness of the court of Vienna, and our inability to do, as we have too often done their work for them? I say, if the elector Palantine could be engaged to give his vote, I should think it would be right to proceed to the election with a clear majority of five votes, and leave the king of Prussia and the elector of Cologne to protest and remonstrate as much as possible. The former is too wise and the latter too weak in every respect, to act in consequence of these protests. The distracted situation of France, with its ecclesiastical and parliamentary quarrels, not to mention the illness and possibly the death of the Dauphin, will make the king of Prussia, who is certainly no Frenchman in his heart, very cautious how he acts as one. The elector of Saxony will be influenced by the king of Prussia, considering his views upon Poland, which by the by I hope he will never obtain. I mean as to making that crown hereditary in his family. As for his sons having it by precarious tenure of election, by which his father now holds it, à la bonne heure. But should Poland have a good government under hereditary kings there would be a new devil raised in Europe that I do not know who could slay. I am sure I would not raise him, though on mind for the present. I do not know how I came to trouble my head so much about politics today, which has been so very free from them for some years. I suppose it was because I knew that I was writing to the most consummate politician of this and his age. If I air you will set me right. Sit quo novesti rectius ristus, candidus imperiti etc. I am excessively impatient for your next letter, which I will write by the first post from Hanover to remove my anxiety, as I hope it will, not only with regard to your health, but likewise to other things. In the meantime in the language of a penant, but with the tenderness of a parent, giubio te bene valeri. Lady Chesterfield makes you many compliments and is much concerned at your indisposition. End of section 143 read by Professor Heather M. By. For more free audio books and to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Section 144 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 175 To Monsieur de Voltaire, now staying at Berlin, London, August 27th old style, 1752. Sir, as a most convincing proof how infinitely I am interested in everything which concerns Mr. who will have the honour of presenting you this letter, I take the liberty of introducing him to you. He has read a great deal. He has seen a great deal. Whether or not he has made a proper use of that knowledge is what I do not know. He is only twenty years of age. He was at Berlin some years ago and therefore he returns thither, for at present people are attracted toward the north by the same motives which but lately drew them to the south. Permit me, sir, to return you thanks for the pleasure and instruction I have received from your history of Louis XIV. I have as yet read it but four times because I wish to forget it a little before I read it a fifth, but I find that impossible. I shall therefore only wait till you give us the augmentation which you promised. Let me entreat you not to defer it long. I thought myself pretty conversant in the history of the reign of Louis XIV by means of those innumerable histories, memoirs, anecdotes, etc., which I had read relative to that period of time. You have convinced me that I was mistaken and had upon that subject very confused ideas in many respects and very false ones in others. Above all, I cannot but acknowledge the obligation we have to you, sir, for the light which you have thrown upon the follies and outrages of the different sects, the weapons you employ against those madmen or those imposters, are the only suitable ones. To make use of any others would be imitating them. They must be attacked by ridicule and punished with contempt. Apropos of those fanatics I send you here in close to peace upon that subject, written by the late Dean Swift. I believe you will not dislike it. You will easily guess why it was never printed. It is authentic and I have the original in his own handwriting. His Jupiter at the day of judgment treats them much as you do and as they deserve to be treated. Give me leave, sir, to tell you freely that I am embarrassed upon your account, as I cannot determine what it is that I wish from you. When I read your last history I am desirous that you should always write history, but when I read your Rome Sauvet, though ill-printed and disfigured, yet I then wish you never to deviate from poetry. However, I confess that there still remains one history worthy of your pen, and of which your pen alone is worthy. You have long ago given us the history of the greatest and most outrageous madman. I ask your pardon if I cannot say the greatest hero of Europe. You have given us laterally the history of the greatest king. Give us now the history of the greatest and most virtuous man in Europe. I should think it degrading to call him king. To you this cannot be difficult. He is always before your eyes. Your poetical invention is not necessary to his glory, and it may safely rely upon your historical candor. The first duty of an historian is the only one he need require from his Niquid falsi de serre odiat, Niquid veri non-odiat. Adjuser, I find that I must admire you every day more and more, but I also know that nothing can ever add to the esteem and attachment with which I am actually your most humble and most obedient servant, Chesterfield. End of section 144 Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audio books or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Section 145 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 176 London, September 19th, 1752 My dear friend, Since you have been at Hanover, your correspondence has been both iconic. You made one indeed one great effort in folio on the 18th, with a post-script of the 22nd August New-Style, and since that, vous avez gât un courto. On the 31st August New-Style you give me no informations of what I want chiefly to know, which is what Dr. Hugo, whom I charged you to consult, said of your asthmatic complaint and what he prescribed you to prevent the returns of it, and also what is the company that you keep there, who has been kind and civil to you and who not. You say that you go constantly to the parade and you do very well for though you are not of that trade yet military matters make so great a part both of conversation and negotiation, that it is very proper not to be ignorant of them. I hope you mind more than the mere exercise of the troops you see and that you inform yourself at the same time of the more material details, such as their pay and the difference of it when in and out of quarters, what is furnished them by the country when in quarters and what is allowed them of ammunition, bread, etc., when in the field, the number of men and officers in the several troops and companies together with the non-commissioned officers, as capitals, fray-couperoles, ans-pissades, sergeants, quarter-masters, etc., the clothing, how frequent, how good and how furnished, whether by the Colonel, as here in England, from what we call the off-reconings, that is, deductions from the men's pay, or by commissaries appointed by the government for that purpose, as in France and Holland. By these inquiries you will be able to talk military with military men, who in every country in Europe, except England, make at least half of all the best companies. Your attending the parades has also another good effect, which is that it brings you, of course, acquainted with the officers, who, when of a certain rank and service, are generally very polite, well-bred people, et du bon ton. They have commonly seen a great deal of the world and of its courts, and nothing else can form a gentleman let people say what they will of sense and learning, with both which a man may contrive to be a very disagreeable companion. I daresay there are very few captains of foot, who are not much better company than Everdeckart or Sir Isaac Newton were. I honour and respect such superior geniuses, but I desire to converse with people of this world, who bring into company their share, at least, of cheerfulness, good-breeding, and knowledge of mankind. In common life one much oftener wants small money and silver than gold. Give me a man who has ready cash about him for present expenses, sixpences, shillings, half-crowns and crowns, which circulate easily. A man who has only an ingot of gold about him is much above common purposes, and his riches are not handy nor convenient. Have as much gold as you please in one pocket, but take care always to keep change in the other, for you will much oftener have occasion for a shilling than for a guinea. In this the French must be allowed to excel all people in the world. They have a certain entre-genre, an enjouement, an amiable légérat an politice assez et naturel qui paro ne lui rien côte, which give society all its charms. I am sorry to add, but it is true-true, that the English and the Dutch are the farthest from this, of all the people in the world. I do by no means except even the Swiss. Though you do not think proper to inform me, I know from other hands that you were to go to Goer with Comte Schillenburg for eight or ten days only to see the reviews. I also know that you had a blister upon your arm, which did you a great deal of good. I know too you have contracted a great friendship with Lord Essex, and that you too were inseparable at Hanover. All these things I would rather have known from you than from others, and they are the sorts of things that I am the most desirous of knowing, as they are more immediately relative to yourself. You are such as of Newcastle's illness, full as much upon your as upon her account, as it has hindered you from being so much known to the Duke as I could have wished. Use and habit going a great way with him, as, indeed, they do with most people. I have known many people patronized, pushed up, and preferred by those who could have given no other reason for it than that they were used to them. We must never seek for motives by deep reasoning, but we must find them out and attention, no matter what they should be, but the point is what they are. Trace them up, step by step, from the character of the person. I have known de Parlement, as Brunthome says, great effects from causes too little ever to have been suspected. Some things must be known and can never be guessed. God knows where this letter will find you, or follow you, not at handover, I suppose, but wherever it does may it find you in health and pleasure. Adieu. End of Section 145. Read by Professor Heather M. Bye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 146 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 177. London, September 22nd, Old Style, 1752. My dear friend. The day after the date of my last I received your letter of the Eighth. I approve extremely of your intended progress, and I am very glad that you go to the gore with Comte Schillenburg. I would have you see everything with your own eyes and hear everything with your own ears, for I know, by very long experience, that it is very unsafe to trust to other peoples. Vanity and interest cause many misrepresentations, and folly causes many more. Few people have parts enough to relate exactly and judiciously, and those who have, for some reason or other, never fail to sink, or to add some circumstances. The reception which you have met with at Hanover I look upon as an omen of your being well received everywhere else. For to tell you the truth, it was the place that I distrusted the most in that particular. But there is a certain conduct, there are certain manières that will and must get the better of all difficulties of that kind. It is to acquire them that you still continue abroad, and go from court to court. They are personal, local, and temporal. They are modes which vary, and owe their existence to accidents, whim, and humor. All the sense and reason in the world will never point them out. Nothing but experience, observation, and what is called knowledge of the world can possibly teach them. For example, it is respectful to bow to the King of England, it is disrespectful to bow to the King of France, it is the rule to courtesy to the Emperor, and the prostration of the whole body is required by Eastern monarchs. These are established ceremonies and must be complied with. But why they were established I defy sense and reason to tell us. It is the same among all ranks, where certain customs are received and must necessarily be complied with, though by no means the result of sense and reason. As for instance, the very absurd, though almost universal, custom of drinking people's healths. Can there be anything in the world less relative to any other man's health than my drinking a glass of wine? Common sense certainly never pointed it out, but yet common sense tells me I must conform to it. Good sense bids one be civil and endeavor to please, though nothing but experience and observation can teach one the means, properly adapted to time, place and persons. This knowledge is the true object of a gentleman's traveling, if he travels as he ought to do. By frequently good company in every country he himself becomes of every country. He is no longer an Englishman, a Frenchman, or an Italian, but he is an European. He adopts respectively the best manners of every country, and is a Frenchman at Paris, an Italian at Rome, and Englishman at London. This advantage I must confess very seldom accrues to my countrymen from their traveling, as they have neither the desire nor the means of getting into good company abroad, for in the first place they are confoundedly bashful, and in the next place they either speak no foreign language at all, or if they do it is barbarously. You possess all the advantages that they want. You know the language is imperfection, and have constantly kept the best company in the places where you have been, so that you ought to be an European. Your canvas is solid and strong, your outlines are good, but remember that you still want the beautiful coloring of Titian and the delicate, graceful touches of Guido. Now is your time to get them. There is in all good company a fashionable heir, countenance, manner and phraseology, which can only be acquired by being in good company, and very attentive to all that passes there. When you dine or suppot any well-bred man's house, observe carefully how he does the honors of his table to the different guests. Attend to the compliments of congratulation or condolence that you hear a well-bred man make to his superiors, to his equals, and to his inferiors. Watch even his countenance and his tone of voice, for they all conspire in the main point of pleasing. There is a certain distinguishing diction of a man of fashion. He will not content himself with saying, like John Trott, to a newly married man, Sir, I wish you much joy, or to a man who lost his son, Sir, I am sorry for your loss, and both with a countenance equally unmoved. But he will say, in effect, the same thing in a more elegant and less trivial manner, and with a countenance adapted to the occasion. He will advance with warmth, vivacity, and a cheerful countenance to the newly married man, and embracing him, perhaps say to him, if you do justice to my attachment to you, you will judge of the joy that I feel upon this occasion better than I can express it, etc. To the other in affliction he will advance slowly, with a grave composure of countenance, in a more deliberate manner, and with a lower voice, perhaps say, I hope you do me the justice to be convinced that I feel whatever you feel, and shall ever be affected where you are concerned. For a board, I must tell you, was too cold and uniform. I hope it is now mended. It should be respectfully open and cheerful with your superiors, warm and animated with your equals, hearty and free with your inferiors. There is a fashionable kind of small talk which you should get, which, trifling as it is, is of use in mixed companies, and at table, especially in your foreign department, where it keeps off certain serious subjects that might create disputes, or at least coldness for a time. Upon such occasions it is not amiss to know how to parley cuisine, and to be able to dessert upon the growth and flavor of wines. These it is true are very little things, but there are little things that occur very often, and therefore should be said, avec gentilès et grasse. I am sure they must often fall in your way. Pray take care to catch them. There is a certain language of conversation, a fashionable diction, of which every gentleman ought to be perfect master, in whatever language he speaks. The French attend to it carefully and with great reason, and their language, which is a language of phrases, helps them out exceedingly. That delicacy of diction is characteristical of a man of fashion and good company. I could write folios upon this subject and not exhaust it, but I think and hope that to you I need not. You have heard and seen enough to be convinced of the truth and importance of what I have been so long inculcating into you upon these points. How happy am I, and how happy are you, my dear child, that these Titian tints and Guido graces are all that you want to complete my hopes and your own character. But then on the other hand, what a drawback would it be to that happiness if you should never acquire them. I remember when I was of age, though I had not near so good an education as you have, or seen a quarter so much of the world, I observed those masterly touches and irresistible graces and others, and saw the necessity of acquiring them myself. But then an awkward mauveillante, of which I had brought a great deal with me from Cambridge, made me ashamed to attempt it, especially if any of my countrymen and particular acquaintances were by. This was extremely absurd in me, for without attempting I could never succeed. But at last, insensibly, by frequenting a great deal of good company, and imitating those whom I saw that everybody liked, I formed myself, ta bien qu'mal. For God's sake, let this last fine varnish, so necessary to give luster to the whole piece, be the sole and single object now of your utmost attention. Berlin may contribute a great deal to it, if you please. There are all the ingredients that compose it. Apropos of Berlin, while you are there, take care to seem ignorant of all political matters between the two courts, such as the affairs of Ostfries and Sachs-Lohenberg, etc., and enter into no conversations upon those points. But however, be as well at court as you possibly can, live at it and make one of it. Should General Keith offer you civilities, do not decline them, but return them, however, without being enfant de la maison chez lui. S'est des chocs flatus of the royal family, and especially of his Prussian majesty, to those who are the most like to repeat them. In short, make yourself well there without making yourself ill somewhere else. Make compliments from me to Algarotti, and converse with him in Italian. I go next week to the Bath for a deafness which I have been plagued with these four or five months, and which I am assured that pumping my head will remove. The deafness I own has tried my patience, as it has cut me off from society, at an age when I had no pleasures but those left. In the meantime I have, by reading and writing, made my eyes supply the defect of my ears. Madame H., I suppose, entertained both yours alike. However, I am very glad that you were well with her, for she is a good pro-news, and puffs are very useful to a young fellow at his entrance into the world. If you should meet with Lord Pembroke again, anywhere, make him many compliments from me, and tell him that I should have written to him, but that I knew how troublesome an old correspondent must be to a young one. He is much commended in the accounts from Hanover. You will stay at Berlin just as long as you like it and no longer, and from thence you are absolutely master of your own motions, either to the Hague or to Brussels. But I think that you had better go to the Hague first, because that from thence Brussels will be in your way to Calais, which is a much better passage to England than from Helvos-Lus. The two courts of the Hague and Brussels are worth your seeing, and you will see them both to advantage by means of Colonel York and de Rol. Adieu. Here is enough for this time. End of Section 146. Read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Section 147 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibreVox.org into the public domain. Letter 178. London, September 26th, 1752. My dear friend, as you chiefly employ, or rather wholly engrossed, my thoughts, I see every day with increasing pleasure the fair prospect which you have before you. I had two views in your education. They draw nearer and nearer, and I have now very little reason to distrust your answering them fully. Those two were Parliamentary and Foreign Affairs. In consequence of those views I took care first to give you a sufficient stock of sound learning, and next an early knowledge of the world. Without making a figure in Parliament no man can make any in this country, and eloquence alone enables a man to make a figure in Parliament, unless it be a very mean and contemptible person, which those make there who silently vote and who do pettibus erae in sententium. Foreign Affairs, when skillfully managed and supported by a Parliamentary reputation, lead to whatever is most considerable in this country. You have the languages necessary for that purpose, with a sufficient fund of historical and treaty knowledge. That is to say, you have the matter ready and only want the manner. Your objects being thus fixed, I recommend to you to have them constantly in your thoughts, and to direct your reading, your actions, and your words to those views. Most people think only ex re nata, and few ex professo. I would have you do both, but begin with the latter. I explain myself. Lay down certain principles and reason and act consequently from them. As for example say to yourself, I will make a figure in Parliament, and in order to do that I must not only speak, but speak very well. Speaking mere common sense will by no means do, and I must speak not only correctly but elegantly, and not only elegantly but eloquently. In order to do this I will first take pains to get an habitual but unaffected purity, correctness, and elegance of style in my common conversation. I will seek for the best words, and take care to reject improper, inexpressive, and vulgar ones. I will read the greatest masters of oratory, both ancient and modern, and I will read them singly in that view. I will study Demosthenes and Cicero, not to discover an old Athenian or Roman custom, nor to puzzle myself with the value of talents, minds, drachmas, and cisterces, like the learned blockheads in a stew, but to observe their choice of words, their harmony of diction, their method, their distribution, their exordia, to engage the favor and attention of their audience, and their prerations, to enforce what they have said, and to leave a strong impression upon the passions. Nor will I be pedant enough to neglect the modern, for I will likewise study Atterbury, Dryden, Pope, and Bollingbroke. Nay, I will read everything that I do read in that intention, and never cease improving and refining my style upon the best models, till at last I become a model of eloquence myself, which by care it is in every man's power to be. If you set out upon this principle, and keep it constantly in your mind, every company you go into and every book you read will contribute to your improvement, either by showing you what to imitate or what to avoid. Are you to give an account of anything to a mixed company, or are you to endeavor to persuade either man or woman? This principle, fixed in your mind, will make you carefully attend to the choice of your words, and to the clearness and harmony of your diction. So much for your parliamentary object, now to the foreign one. Lay down first those principles which are absolutely necessary to form a skillful and successful negotiator, and form yourself accordingly. What are they? First, the clear historical knowledge of past transactions of that kind. That you have pretty well already, and will have daily more and more. For in consequence of that principle, you will read history, memoirs, anecdotes, etc., in that view chiefly. The other necessary talents for negotiation are the great art of pleasing and engaging the affection and confidence, not only of those with whom you are to cooperate, but even of those whom you are to oppose. To conceal your own thoughts and views, and to discover other peoples. To engage other peoples' confidence by a seeming, fearful frankness and openness, without going a step too far. To get the personal favour of the king, prince, ministers, or mistresses of the court to which you are sent. To gain the absolute command over your temper and your countenance, that no heat may provoke you to say, nor no change of countenance to betray, what should be a secret. To familiarize and domesticate yourself in the houses of the most considerable people of the place, so as to be received there rather as a friend to the family than as a foreigner. Having these principles constantly in your thoughts, everything you do and everything you say will in some way or other tend to your main view, and common conversation will gradually fit you for it. You will get a habit of checking any rising heat, and you will be upon your guard against any indiscreet expression. You will, by degrees, get the command of your countenance, so as not to change it upon any the most sudden accident. And you will, above all things, labor to acquire the great art of pleasing, without which nothing is to be done. Company is, in truth, a constant state of negotiation, and if you attend to it in that view, will qualify you for any. By the same means that you make a friend, guard against an enemy, or gain a mistress, you will make an advantageous treaty, baffle those who counteract you, and gain the court you are sent to. Make this use of all the company you keep, and your very pleasures will make you a successful negotiator. Please all who are worth pleasing offend none. Keep your own secret, and get out other peoples. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other peoples. Counterwork your rivals, with diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them, and be firm without heat. I must make one observation, in confirmation of this assertion, which is that the most eminent negotiators have always been the politest and best-bred men in company, even what the women call the prettiest men. For God's sake, never lose view of these your two capital objects. Bend everything to them. Try everything by their rules, and calculate everything for their purposes. What is peculiar to these two objects is that they require nothing but what one's own vanity, interest, and pleasure would make one do independently of them. If a man were never to be in business, and always to lead a private life, would he not desire to please and to persuade? So that, in your two destinations, your fortune and figure luckily conspire with your vanity and your pleasures. Name more. A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure, too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures. His views are carried on, and perhaps best and most unsuspectedly at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure, by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement. These objects now draw very near you, and you have no time to lose in preparing yourself to meet them. It will be in Parliament almost as soon as your age will allow, and I believe you will have a foreign department still sooner, and that will be earlier than ever any other body had one. If you set out well at one and twenty, what may you not reasonably hope to be at one and forty? All that I could wish you. Adjou. My dear friend, there is nothing so necessary, but at the same time there is nothing more difficult, I know it by experience, for you young fellows, than to know how to behave yourselves prudently toward those whom you do not like. Your passions are warm, and your heads are light. You hate all those who oppose your views, either of ambition or love. And arrival in either is almost a synonymous term for an enemy. Whenever you meet such a man, you are awkwardly cold to him at best, but often rude, and always desirous to give him some indirect slap. This is unreasonable, for one man has as good a right to pursue an employment or a mistress as another, but it is into the bargain extremely imprudent, because you commonly defeat your own purpose by it, and while you are contending with each other a third often prevails. I grant you that the situation is irksome, a man cannot help thinking as he thinks, nor feeling what he feels, and it is a very tender and sore point to be thwarted and counter-worked in one's pursuits at court, or with a mistress. But prudence and abilities must check the effects, though they cannot remove the cause. Both the pretenders make themselves disagreeable to their mistress, when they spoil the company by their pouting or their sparring. Whereas if one of them has command enough over himself, whatever he may feel inwardly, to be cheerful, gay, and easily and uneffectedly civil to the other, as if there were no manner of competition between them, the lady will certainly like him the best, and his rival will be ten times more humbled and discouraged, for he will look upon such a behavior as a proof of the triumph and security of his rival. He will grow outrageous with the lady, and the warmth of his reproaches will probably bring on a quarrel between them. It is the same in business, where he who can command his temper and his countenance the best will always have an infinite advantage over the other. This is what the French call une crusade ennête et gulante, to pique yourself upon showing particular civilities to a man, to whom lesser minds would, in the same case, show dislike or perhaps rudeness. I will give you an instance of this in my own case, and pray remember it, whenever you come to be, as I hope you will, in a like situation. When I went to the Hague in 1744, it was to engage the Dutch to come roundly into the war, and to stipulate their quotas of troops, etc. Your acquaintance, the Abbe de la Ville, was there on the part of France to endeavour to hinder them from coming into the war at all. I was informed, and very sorry to hear it, that he had abilities, temper, and industry. We could not visit our two masters being at war, but the first time I met him in a third place I got somebody to present me to him. And I told him that, though we were to be national enemies, I flattered myself we might be, however, personal friends, and with a good deal more of the same kind, which he returned in full as polite a manner. Two days afterward I went early in the morning to solicit the deputies of Amsterdam, where I found la Abbe de la Ville, who had been beforehand with me, upon which I addressed myself to the deputies, and said smilingly, I am very sorry, gentlemen, to find my enemy with you. My knowledge of his capacity is already sufficient to make me fear him. We are not upon equal terms, but I trust to your own interest against his talents. If I have not this day had the first word, I shall at least have the last. They smiled, the Abbe was pleased with the compliment and the manner of it, stayed about a quarter of an hour, and then left me to my deputies, with whom I continued upon the same tone, though in a very serious manner, and told them that I was only come to state their own true interest to them, plainly and simply, without any of those arts, which it was very necessary for my friend to make use of to deceive them. I carried my point, and continued my proceed with the Abbe, and by this easy and polite commerce with him at third places I often found means to fish out of him whereabouts he was. However there are but two proceeds in the world for a gentleman and a man of parts, either extreme politeness or knocking down. If a man notoriously and designantly insults and affronts you, knock him down. But if he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him and your outward behavior, though at the same time you counter-work him, and return him the compliment, perhaps with interest. This is not perfidity nor dissimulation. It would be so if you were, at the same time, to make professions of esteem and friendship to this man, which I by no means recommend, but on the contrary abhor. But all acts of civility are, by common consent, understood to be no more than a conformity to custom, for the quiet and conveniency of society, the aggrimant of which are not to be disturbed by private dislikes and jealousies. Only women and little minds pout and spar for the entertainment of the company, that always laugh-sat and never pities them. For my own part, though I would by no means give up any point to a competitor, yet I would pique myself upon showing him rather more civility than to another man. In the first place, this proceed infallibly makes all the career of your side, which is a considerable party, and in the next place it certainly pleases the object of the competition, be it either man or woman, who never fail to say, upon such an occasion, that they must own you have behaved yourself very handsomely in the whole affair. The world judges from the appearance of things, and not from the reality, which few are able and still few are inclined to fathom, and a man who will take care always to be in the right in those things, may afford to be sometimes a little in the wrong in more essential ones. There is a willingness, a desire to excuse him. With nine people in ten, good breeding passes for good nature, and they take attentions for good offices. At courts there will be always coldnesses, dislikes, jealousies, and hatred, the harvest being but small in proportion to the number of laborers. But then as they arise often they die soon, unless they are perpetuated by the manner in which they have been carried on, more than by the matter which occasioned them. The turns and vicissitudes of courts frequently make friends of enemies and enemies of friends. You must labor, therefore, to acquire that great and uncommon talent of hating with good breeding, and loving with prudence, to make no quarrel irreconcilable by silly and unnecessary indications of anger, and no friendship dangerous, in case it breaks, by a wanton, indiscreet, and unreserved confidence. You, especially young people, know how to love or how to hate. Their love is an unbounded weakness, fatal to the person they love. Their hate is a hot, rash, and imprudent violence, always fatal to themselves. Nineteen fathers and twenty and every mother who had loved you half as well as I do would have ruined you, whereas I always made you feel the weight of my authority, that you might one day know the force of my love. Now I both hope and believe my advice will have the same weight with you from choice that my authority had from necessity. My advice is just eight and twenty years older than your own, and consequently I believe you think rather better. As for your tender and pleasurable passions, manage them yourself, but let me have the direction of all the others. Your ambition, your figure, and your fortune will, for some time at least, be rather safer in my keeping than in your own. Adjou. I consider you now as at the court of Augustus, where, if ever the desire of pleasing animated you, it must make you exert all the means of doing it. You will see there, full as well, I dare say, as Horus did at Rome, how states are defended by arms, adorned by manners, and improved by laws. Nay, you have an Horus there as well as in Augustus. I need not name Voltaire, quenille moluture inept, as Horus himself said of another poet. I have lately read over all his works that are published, though I had read them more than once before. I was induced to this by his Siakla de Louis Catoires, which I have yet read but four times. In reading over all his works, with more attention I suppose than before, my former admiration of him is, I own, turned into astonishment. There is no one kind of writing in which he has not excelled. You are so severe a classic that I question whether you will allow me to call his Angliade an epic poem, for want of the proper number of gods, devils, witches, and other absurdities, requisite for the machinery, which machinery is, it seems, necessary to constitute the epopee. But whether you do or not, I will declare, though possibly to my own shame, that I have never read any epic poem with near so much pleasure. I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke. But now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones. In this disposition of mind, judge whether I can read all home or through too sweet. I admire its beauties, but to tell you the truth, when he slumbers I sleep. Virgil I confess is all sense, and therefore I like him better than his model. But he is often languid, especially in his five or six last books, during which I am obliged to take a good deal of snuff. Besides, I profess myself an ally of turnis against the pious anias, who, like so many sois descent pious people, does the most flagrant injustice and violence in order to execute what they impudently call the will of heaven. But what will you say, when I tell you truly, that I cannot possibly read our countrymen Milton through? I acknowledge him to have some most sublime passages, some prodigious flashes of light. But then you must acknowledge that light is often followed by darkness visible, to use his own expression. Besides, not having the honour to be acquainted with any of the parties in the poem, except the man and the woman, the characters and speeches of a dozen or two of angels, and of as many devils, are as much above my reach as my entertainment. Keep this secret for me, for if it should be known I should be abused by every tasteless pedant and every solid divine in England. Whatever I have said to the disadvantage of these three poems holds much stronger against Tasso's Jerusalem. It is true he has very fine and glaring rays of poetry, but then they are only meteors, they dazzle, then disappear, and are succeeded by false thoughts, poor conchetti, and absurd impossibilities, witness the fish in the parrot, extravagancies unworthy of an heroic poem, and would much rather have become Ariosto, who professes the co-plioneri. I have never read the Luciade of Camon, except in prose translation. Consequently I have never read it at all, so shall say nothing of it. But the Henriade is all-sense from the beginning to the end, often adorned by the just and liveliest reflections, the most beautiful descriptions, the noblest images, and the sublimest sentiments. To mention the harmony of the verse, in which Voltaire undoubtedly exceeds all the French poets. Should you insist upon an exception in favor of Racine, I must insist, on my part, that he at least equals him. What hero ever interested more than Henry IV, who according to the rules of epic poetry carries on one great and long action, and succeeds in it at last? What descriptions ever excited more horror than those, most of the massacre, and then of the famine at Paris? Was love ever painted with more truth and morbidezza than in the ninth book? Not better in my mind, even in the fourth of Virgil. Upon the whole, with all your classical rigor, if you will but suppose St. Louis a god, a devil, or a witch, and that he appears in person and not in a dream, the Henriade will be an epic poem, according to the strictest statute-laws of the epopee. But in my court of equity it is one as it is. I could expiate as much upon all his different works, but then I should exceed the bounds of a letter and run into a dissertation. How delightful is his history of that northern brute, the king of Sweden, for I cannot call him a man, and I should be sorry to have him pass for a hero out of regard to those true heroes, such as Julius Caesar, Titus, Trajan, and the present king of Prussia, who cultivated and encouraged arts and sciences, whose animal courage was accompanied by the tender and social sentiments of humanity, and who had more pleasure in improving than in destroying their fellow creatures. What can be more touching or more interesting? What more nobly thought or more happily expressed than all his dramatic pieces? What can be more clear and rational than all his philosophical letters? And whatever was so graceful and gentle as all his little poetical trifles? You are fortunate a portet of verifying, by your knowledge of the man, all that I have said of his works. Monsieur de Mauperties, whom I hope you will get acquainted with, is what one rarely meets with, deep in philosophy and mathematics, and yet honnête est amieable. Algorati is young fontanelle. Such men must necessarily give you the desire of pleasing them, and if you can frequent them, their acquaintance will furnish you the means of pleasing everybody else. Apropos of pleasing, your pleasing Mrs. F. D. is expected here in two or three days. I will do all that I can for you with her. I think you carried on the romance to the third or fourth volume. I will continue it to the eleventh. But as for the twelfth and last, you must come and conclude it yourself. Nonsum qualis erum. Good night to you, child, for I am going to bed, just at the hour which I suppose you are going to live at Berlin. End of Section 149. Read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 150 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 181. Bath. November 11. Old Style. 1752. My dear friend, it is a very old and very true maxim that those kings reign the most secure and the most absolute, who reign in the hearts of their people. Their popularity is a better guard than their army, and the affections of their subjects a better pledge of their obedience than their fears. This rule is, in proportion, full as true, though upon a different scale, with regard to private people. A man who possesses that great art of pleasing universally and of gaining the affections of those with whom he converses possesses a strength which nothing else can give him, a strength which facilitates and helps his rise, and which, in case of accidents, breaks his fall. Few people of your age sufficiently consider this great point of popularity, and when they grow older and wiser, strive in vain to recover what they have lost by their negligence. There are three principal causes that hinder them from acquiring this useful strength. Pride, inattention, and mauvaison. The first I will not, I cannot suspect you of. It is too much below your understanding. You cannot, and I am sure you do not, think yourself superior by nature to the savoyard who cleans your room, or the footman who cleans your shoes, but you may rejoice and with reason at the difference that fortune has made in your favor. Enjoy all those advantages, but without insulting those who are unfortunate enough to want them, or even doing anything unnecessarily that may remind them of that want. For my own part, I am more upon my guard as to my behavior to my servants and others who are called my inferiors than I am toward my equals, for fear being suspected of that mean and ungenerous sentiment of desiring to make others feel that difference which fortune has, and perhaps too undeservedly, made between us. Young people do not enough attend to this, and falsely imagine that the imperative mood and a rough tone of authority and decision are indications of spirit and courage. Inattention is always looked upon, though sometimes unjustly, as the effect of pride and contempt, and where it is thought so is never forgiven. In this article young people are generally exceedingly to blame and offend extremely. Their whole attention is engrossed by their particular set of acquaintance, and by some few glaring and exalted objects of rank, beauty, or parts. All the rest they think so little worth their care that they neglect even common civility toward them. I will frankly confess to you that this was one of my great faults when I was your age, very attentive to please that narrow court circle in which I stood enchanted I considered everything else as bourgeois and unworthy of common civility. I paid my court assiduously and skillfully enough to shining and distinguished figures, such as ministers, wits, and beauties, but then I most absurdly and imprudently neglected and consequently offended all others. By this folly I made myself a thousand enemies of both sexes, who though I thought them very insignificant, found means to hurt me essentially where I wanted to recommend myself the most. I was thought proud, though I was only imprudent. A general easy civility and attention to the common run of ugly women and of middling men, both which I sillily thought, called and treated as odd people, would have made me as many friends as by the contrary conduct I made myself enemies. All this, too, was up your put, for I might equally and even more successfully have made my court where I had particular views to gratify. I will allow that this task is often very unpleasant, and that one pays, with some unwillingness, that tribute of attention to dull and tedious men, and to old and ugly women. But it is the lowest price of popularity in general applause, which are very well worth purchasing, were they much dearer. I conclude this head with this advice to you. Gain, by particular assiduity and address, the men and women you want, and by an universal civility and attention, please everybody so far as to have their good word, if not their good will, or at least as to secure a partial neutrality. Mauvaison not only hinders young people from making a great many friends, but makes them a great many enemies. They are ashamed of doing the thing they know to be right, and would otherwise do, for fear of the momentary lap of some fine gentleman or lady, or of some mauvais plaisson. I have been in this case, and have often wished an obscure acquaintance at the devil for meeting and taking notice of me when I was in what I thought and called fine company. I have returned their notice shyly, awkwardly, and consequently offensively, for fear of a momentary joke, not considering, as I ought to have done, that the very people who would have joked upon me first would have esteemed me the more for it afterward. An example explains a rule best. Suppose you were walking in the tuileries with some fine folks, and that you should unexpectedly meet with your old acquaintance, little crooked greerson. What would you do? I will tell you what you should do, by telling you what I would do now in that case myself. I would run up to him and embrace him, say some kind of things to him, and then return to my company. There I should be immediately asked, mais qu'est-ce que c'est donc qui ce petit sapeux jus, que vous avez embrassé tendrement? Pour cela, la collède a été charmant, with a great deal more festivity of that sort. To this I should answer, without being the least ashamed, but, embandonnant, au je ne vous dirais, ta qui c'est, c'est un petit ami que je tiens incognito, qui a son meriteur, et qui, à force d'être connu, fait oublier sa figure, que me donnerai-vous, et je vous le présenterai? And then, with a little more seriousness, I would add, d'aller, c'est que je ne vous décevaux jamais mes connaissons, à cause de leur état ou de leur figure. Il faut avoir bien peu de sentiment pour le faire. This would at once put an end to that momentary pleasantry, and give them all a better opinion of me than they had before. Suppose in another case, and that some of the finest ladies du bon ton should come into a room, and find you sitting by and talking politely to la vielle. Marquise de belles fonds, the joke would, for a moment, turn upon that tête-à-tête. Eh bien, avez-vous à la fin, fixe de la belle marquise, la partie est faite pour la petite maison? Le suppé sert à qu'à l'encendue. Ménifest-tu, donc, points groupers, de se dire une jeune et amiable personne comme celle-là? To this I should answer, la partie ne toit pas encore tout à fait lui. Vous nous avez interrompu, mais avec les tombes, que fais-t-on? D'ailleurs moque vous de mes amours, tant qu'il vous plairait. Je vous dirai que je respecte tant les jeunes d'âme, que je respecte même les vielles pour l'avoir été. Après cela, il y a souvent des liaisons entre les vielles et les gens. This would at once turn the pleasantry into an esteem for your good sense and your good breeding. Pursue steadily and without fear or shame, whatever your reason tells you is right, and what you see is practised by people of more experience than yourself, and of established characters of good sense and good breeding. After all this perhaps you will say that it is impossible to please everybody. I grant it, but it does not follow that one should not endeavor to please as many as one can. Nay, I will go further, and admit that it is impossible for any man not to have some enemies. But this truth, from long experience I assert, that he who has the most friends and the fewest enemies is the strongest, will rise the highest with the least envy, and fall, if he does fall, the gentlest and the most pitied. This is surely an object worth pursuing. Pursue it according to the rules I have here given you. I will add one observation more, and two examples to enforce it, and then as the Parsons say, conclude. There is no one creature so obscure, so low or so poor, who made not, by the strange and unaccountable changes and vicissitudes of human affairs, somehow or other, and some time or other, become a useful friend or a troublesome enemy to the greatest and the richest. The late Duke of Vormonde was almost the weakest, but at the same time the best bread and most popular man in this kingdom. His education in courts and camps, joined to an easy, gentle nature, had given him that habitual effability, those engaging manners, and those mechanical attentions that almost supplied the place of every talent he wanted, and he wanted almost every one. They procured him the love of all men without the esteem of any. He was impeached after the death of Queen Anne, only because that, having been engaged in the same measures with those who were necessarily to be impeached, his impeachment for Vorm's sake became necessary. But he was impeached without acrimony, and without the least intention that he should suffer, notwithstanding the party violence of those times. The question for his impeachment in the House of Commons was carried by many fewer votes than any other question of impeachment, and Earl Stanhope, then Mr. Stanhope and Secretary of State, who impeached him, very soon after negotiated and concluded his accommodation with the late King, to whom he was to have been presented the next day. But the late Bishop of Rochester, Adderbury, who thought that the Jacobite cause might suffer by losing the Duke of Ormond, went in all haste and prevailed with the poor weak man to run away, assuring him that he was only to be gulled into a disgraceful submission and not to be pardoned in consequence of it. When his subsequent attainer passed, it excited mobs and disturbances in town. He had not a personal enemy in the world and had a thousand friends. All this was simply owing to his natural desire of pleasing and to the mechanical means that his education, not his parts, had given him of doing it. The other instance is the late Duke of Marlborough, who studied the art of pleasing because he well knew the importance of it. He enjoyed and used it more than ever man did. He gained whoever he had a mind to gain and he had a mind to gain everybody because he knew that everybody was more or less worth gaining. Though his power, as minister in general, made him many political and party enemies, they did not make him one personal one. And the very people who would gladly have displaced, disgraced and perhaps attainted the Duke of Marlborough at the same time personally loved Mr. Churchill, even though his private character was blemished by sordid avarice, the most unamiable of all vices. He had wound up and turned his whole machine to pleasing and engage. He had an inimitable sweetness and gentleness in his countenance, a tenderness in his manner of speaking, a graceful dignity in every motion, and an universal and minute attention to the least things that could possibly please the least person. This was all art in him, art of which he well knew and enjoyed the advantages, for no man had ever had more interior ambition, pride, and avarice than he had. Though you have more than most people of your age and have yet very little experience in knowledge of the world, now I wish to inoculate mine upon you, and thereby prevent both the dangers and the marks of youth in inexperience. If you receive the matter kindly and observe my prescription scrupulously, you will secure the future advantages of time and join them to the present inestimable ones of one and twenty. I most earnestly recommend one thing to you during your present stay at Paris. I own it is not the most agreeable, but I affirm it to be the most useful thing in the world to one of your age, and therefore I do hope that you will force and constrain yourself to do it. I mean to converse frequently, or rather to be in company frequently with both men and women mature superiors in age and rank. I am very sensible that, at your age, vous y entrez pour plus de choses, et même souvent pour rien, et que vous y passerez même quelques mauvais cratures. But no matter, you will be a solid gainer by it. You will see, hear, and learn the truth and manners of those people. You will gain premature experience by it, and it will give you a habit of engaging and respectful attentions. Versailles, as much as possible, though probably un- entertaining, the Palais Royale often, however dull, foreign ministers of the first rank frequently, and women, though old, who are respectable and respected for their rank or parts, such as Madame de Pousseau, Madame de Nivernoye, Madame d'Aguillon, Madame Joffrin, et cetera. This suggestion, if it be one to you, will cost you but very little in these three or four months that you are yet to pass in Paris, and will bring you in a great deal. Nor will it, nor audit, hinder you from being in a more entertaining company a great part of the day. Vous pouvez, si vous voulez, tirer une grande partie des séquartements. May God make you so, and bless you. Adieu. End of section 150, read by Professor Heather Mbaye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Section 151 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for Librevox.org into the public domain. Letter 182, Bath, November 16th, old style 1752. My dear friend, vanity, or to call it by a gentler name, the desire of admiration and applause, is perhaps the most universal principle of human actions. I do not say that it is the best, and I will own that it is sometimes the cause of both foolish and criminal effects. But it is so much often, or the principle of right things, that though they ought to have a better, yet considering human nature, that principle is to be encouraged and cherished in consideration of its effects. Where that desire is wanting, we are apt to be indifferent, listless, indolent, and inert. We do not exert our powers, and we appear to be as much below ourselves as the vainest man living can desire to appear above what he really is. As I have made you my confessor, and do not scruple to confess even my weaknesses to you, I will fairly own that I had that vanity, that weakness, if it be one, to a prodigious degree. And what is more, I confess it without repentance. Nay, I am glad I had it, since if I have had the good fortune to please in the world, it is to that powerful and active principle that I owe it. I began the world, not with a bare desire, but with an insatiable thirst, a rage of popularity, applause, and admiration. If this made me do some silly things on one hand, it made me, on the other hand, do almost all the right things that I did. It made me attentive and civil to the women I disliked, and to the men I despised, in hopes of the applause of both. Though I neither desired nor would I have accepted the favors of the one, nor the friendship of the other. I always dressed, looked, and talked my best, and I own was overjoyed whenever I was perceived, that by all three, or by any one of them, the company was pleased with me. To men I talked whatever I thought would give them the best opinion of my parts in learning, and to women, what I was sure would please them, flattery, gallantry, and love. And, moreover, I will own to you under the secrecy of confession, that my vanity has very often made me take great pains to make a woman in love with me, if I could, for whose person I would not have given a pinch of snuff. In company with men I always endeavored to outshine, or at least, if possible, to equal the most shining man in it. This desire elicited whatever powers I had to gratify it, and where I could not, perhaps, shine in the first, enabled me at least to shine in a second or third sphere. By these means I soon grew in fashion, and when a man is once in fashion, all he does is right. It was infinite pleasure to me to find my own fashion and popularity. I was sent for, to all parties of pleasure, both of men or women, where in some measure I gave the tone. This gave me the reputation of having had some women of condition, and that reputation, whether true or false, really got me others. With the men I was a proteus, and assumed every shape, in order to please them all. Among the gay I was the gayest, among the grave the gravest, and I never omitted the least attentions of good-breeding, or the least offices of friendship, that could either please or attach them to me. And accordingly I was soon connected with all the men of fashion or figure in town. To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure that I have made in life. I wish you had as much, but I fear you have too little of it, and you seem to have a degree of laziness and listlessness about you that makes you indifferent as to general applause. This is not in character at your age, and would be barely pardonable in an elderly and philosophical man. It is a vulgar ordinary saying, but a very true one, that one should always put the best foot foremost. One should please shine and dazzle wherever it is possible. At Paris, I am sure you must observe que chacun se fait valeur à tant qu'il est possible, and l'abriere observes, very justly, qu'on ne voit pas dans ce monde que ce qu'on vaut de valeur. Wherever applause is in question, you will never see a French man nor woman remiss or negligent. Observe the eternal attentions and politeness that all people have there for one another. S'en est pas pour le beau use de moi. Know but for their own sakes, for commendations and applause. Let me then recommend this principle of vanity to you. Act upon it, mio puriculo. I promise you it will turn to your account. Practice the arts that ever coquette did to please. Be alert and indefatagable in making every man admire and every woman in love with you. I can tell you, too, that nothing will carry you higher in the world. I've had no letter from you since your arrival at Paris, though you must have been long enough there to have written me two or three. In about 10 or 12 days I propose leaving this place and going to London. I have found considerable benefit by my stay here, but not all that I want. Make my compliments to Lord Abomarle. End of Letter 151, read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please.