 CHESTORFIELD'S LETTERS to his son, Redford LibriVox.org, into the public domain. LETTER 61, LONDON, DECEMBER 30TH OLD STYLE, SEVENTEEN FOURTY EIGHT. DEAR BOY, I direct this letter to Berlin, where, I suppose, it will either find you, or at least wait but a very little time for you. I cannot help being anxious for your success, at this your first appearance upon the great stage of the world. For though the spectators are always candid enough to give great allowances and to show great indulgence to a new actor, yet from the first impression which he makes upon them they are apt to decide in their own minds, at least, whether he will ever be a good one or not. If he seems to understand what he says by speaking it properly, if he is attentive to his part instead of staring negligently about him, and if upon the whole he seems ambitious to please, they willingly pass over little awkwardnesses and inaccuracies, which they ascribe to a commendable modesty in a young and inexperienced actor. They pronounce that he will be a good one in time, and by the encouragement which they give him make him so the sooner. This I hope will be your case. You have sense enough to understand your part, a constant attention and ambition to excel in it, with a careful observation of the best actors, will inevitably qualify you, if not for the first, at least for considerable parts. Your dress, as insignificant a thing as dress is in itself, is now become an object worthy of some attention, for I confess I cannot help forming some opinion of a man's sense and character from his dress, and I believe most people do as well as myself. Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding. Most of our young fellows here display some character or other by their dress. Some affect the tremendous, and wear a great and fiercely cocked hat, an enormous sword, a short waistcoat, and a black cravat. These I should be almost tempted to swear the peace against in my own defence, if I were not convinced that they are but meek asses in lion's skins. Others go in brown frocks, leather breeches, great, oaken cuddles in their hands, their hats uncocked, and their hair unpowdered, and imitate grooms, stage-coachmen, and country bumpkins so well on their outsides, that I do not make the least out of their resembling them equally in their insides. A man of sense carefully avoids any particular character in his dress. He is accurately clean for his own sake, but all the rest is for other peoples. He dresses as well and in the same manner as the people of sense and passion of the place where he is. If he dresses better as he thinks, that is, more than they, he is a phop. If he dresses worse, he is unpardonably negligent. But of the two I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed. The excess on that side will wear off, with a little age in reflection. But if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old. Dress yourself fine where others are fine, and plain where others are plain. But take care always that your clothes are well made and fit you, for otherwise they will give you a very awkward air. When you are once well dressed for the day, think no more of it afterward, and without any stiffness for fear of discomposing that dress, let all your motions be as easy and natural as if you had no clothes on at all. So much for dress, which I maintain to be a thing of consequence in the polite world. As to manners, good breeding, and the graces, I have so often entertained you upon those important subjects that I can add nothing to what I have formerly said. Your own good sense will suggest to you the substance of them, and observation, experience, and good company, the several modes of them. Your great vivacity, which I hear from many people, will be no hindrance to your pleasing and good company. On the contrary, will be of use to you, if tempered by good breeding and accompanied by the graces. But then I suppose your vivacity to be a vivacity of parts, and not a constitutional restlessness, for the most disagreeable composition that I know in the world is that of strong animal spirits with a cold genius. Such a fellow is troublesomely active, frivolously busy, foolishly lively, talks much with little meaning, and laughs more, with less reason, whereas, in my opinion, a warm and lively genius with a cool constitution is the perfection of human nature. Do what you will at Berlin, provided you but do something all day long. All that I desire of you is that you will never slattern away one minute in idleness and in doing of nothing. When you are not in company, learn what either books, masters, or Mr. Hart can teach you, and when you are in company, learn what company can teach you, the characters and manners of mankind. I really ask your pardon for giving you this advice, because if you are a rational creature and thinking being, as I suppose, and verily believe you are, it must be unnecessary, and to a certain degree injurious. If I did not know by experience that some men passed their whole time in doing nothing, I should not think it possible for any being, superior to Monsieur Descartes Automatons, to squander away in absolute idleness one single minute of that small portion of time which is allotted to us in this world. I have lately seen when Mr. Cranmer, a very sensible merchant, who told me that he had dined with you, and seen you often at Leipzig. And yesterday I saw an old footman of mine, whom I made a messenger, who told me that he had seen you last August. You will easily imagine that I was not the less glad to see them because they had seen you, and I examined them both narrowly in their respective departments, the former as to your mind, the latter as to your body. Mr. Cranmer gave me great satisfaction, not only by what he told me of himself concerning you, but by what he was commissioned to tell me from Mr. Mascow. As he speaks German perfectly himself, I asked him how you spoke it, and he assured me, very well for the time, that a very little more practice would make you perfectly master of it. The messenger told me that you were much grown, and to the best of his guests within two inches as tall as I am, that you were plump and looked healthy and strong, which was all that I could expect or hope from the sagacity of the person. I send you, my dear child, and you will not doubt it, very sincerely the wishes of the season. May you deserve a great number of happy new years, and if you deserve may you have them. Many new years indeed you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can procure. D. E. T. B. Dent, Anos. Detenam satara sumes, was a pretty piece of poetical flattery, where it was said, I hope that in time it may be no flattery when said to you, but I assure you that wherever I cannot apply the latter part of the line to you with truth I shall neither say, think, nor wish the former. Adieu. End of Section 36. Read by Professor Heather and Bye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 37 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. 1749. Letter 62. London. January 10th. Old Style. 1749. Dear Boy. I have received your letter of the 31st December New Style. Your thanks for my present, as you call it, exceed the value of the present, but the use, which you assure me that you will make of it, is the thanks which I desire to receive. Do attention to the inside of books, and do contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books. Now that you are going a little more into the world, I will take this occasion to explain my intentions as to your future expenses, that you may know what you have to expect from me, and make your plan accordingly. I shall neither deny nor grudge you any money that may be necessary for either your improvement or your pleasures. I mean the pleasures of a rational being. Under the head of improvement, I mean the best books and the best masters, cost what they will. I also mean all the expense of lodgings, coach, dress, servants, etc., which, according to the several places where you may be, shall be respectfully necessary to enable you to keep the best company. Under the head of rational pleasures I comprehend, first, proper charities to reel and compassionate objects of it, secondly, proper presence to those whom you are obliged, or whom you desire to oblige, thirdly, a conformity of expense to that of the company which you keep, as in public spectacles, your share of little entertainments, a few pistols at games of mere commerce, and other incidental calls of good company. The only two articles which I will never supply are the profusion of low riot and the idle lavishness of negligence and laziness. A fool squanders away, without credit or advantage to himself, more than a man of sense spends with both. The latter employs his money as he does his time, and never spends a shilling of the one, nor a minute of the other, but in something that is either useful or rationally pleasing to himself or others. The former buys whatever he does not want, and does not pay for what he does want. He cannot withstand the charms of a toy shop. Snuff-boxes, watches, heads of cane, etc., are his destruction. His servants and tradesmen conspire with his own indolence to cheat him, and in a very little time he is astonished in the midst of all the ridiculous superfluities to find himself in want of all the real comforts and necessaries of life. Without care and method the largest fortune will not, and with them almost the smallest will, supply all necessary expenses. As far as you can possibly pay ready money for everything you buy and avoid bills. Pay that money to yourself and not through the hands of any servant who always either stipulates poundage or requires a present for his good work, as they call it. Where you must have bills, as for meat and drink, clothes, etc., pay them regularly every month and with your own hand. Never from a mistaken economy buy a thing you do not want, because it is cheap, or from a silly pride because it is dear. Keep an account in a book of all that you receive and of all that you pay, for no man who knows what he receives and what he pays ever runs out. I do not mean that you should keep an account of the shillings and half-crowns which you may spend in chair-hire, operas, etc. They are unworthy of the time and of the ink that they would consume. Use such minutiae to dull penny-wise fellows, but remember in economy as well as in every other part of life, to have a proper attention to proper objects and the proper contempt for little ones. A strong mind sees things in their true proportions. A weak one views them through a magnifying medium, which, like the microscope, makes an elephant of a flea, magnifies all little objects, but cannot receive great ones. I have known many a man past for a miser by saving a penny and wrangling for tuppence, who was undoing himself at the same time by living above his income, and not attending to essential articles which were above his portee. The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind is to find in everything those certain bounds, quos ultra, citravi, necquite, consistere rectum. These boundaries are marked out by a very fine line, which only good sense and attention can discover. It is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In manners this line is good breeding. Beyond it is troublesome ceremony, short of it is unbecoming negligence and inattention. In morals it divides ostentatious puritanism from criminal relaxation, in religion superstition from impiety, and in short every virtue from its kindred vice or weakness. I think you have sense enough to discover the line. Keep it always in your eye and learn to walk upon it. Rest upon Mr. Hart and he will poise you till you are able to go alone. By the way, there are fewer people who walk well upon that line than upon the slack rope, and therefore a good performer shines so much the more. Your friend Comte Pertingu, who constantly inquires after you, has written to Comte Salmore, the Governor of the Academy at Turin, to prepare a room for you immediately after the Ascension, and has recommended you to him in a manner which I hope you will give him no reason to repent or be ashamed of. As Comte Salmore's son, now residing at the Hague, is my particular acquaintance, I shall have regular and authentic accounts of all that you do at Turin. During your stay at Berlin I expect that you should inform yourself thoroughly of the present state of the civil, military, and ecclesiastical government of the King of Precious Dominions, particularly of the military, which is upon a better footing in that country than in any other in Europe. You will attend at the reviews, see the troops exercised, and inquire into the numbers of troops and companies in the respective regiments of horse, foot, and dragoons, the number and titles of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers in the several troops and companies, and also take care to learn the technical military terms in the German language. For though you are not to be a military man, yet these military matters are so frequently the subject of conversation that you will look very awkwardly if you are ignorant of them. Moreover, they are commonly the objects of negotiation, and, as such, fall within your future profession. You must also inform yourself of the reformation which the King of Precious has lately made in the law, by which he is both lessened the number and shortened the duration of lawsuits. A great work, and worthy of so great a prince! As he is indisputably the ableist prince in Europe, every part of his government deserves your most diligent inquiry and your most serious attention. It must be owned that you set out well, as a young politician, by beginning at Berlin, and then going to Turin, where you will see the next ableist monarch to that of Prussia, so that if you are capable of making political reflections, those two princes will furnish you with sufficient matter for them. I would have you endeavour to get acquainted with Monsieur de Maupertus, who is so eminently distinguished by all kinds of learning and merit, that one should be both sorry and ashamed of having been even a day in the same place with him, and not to have seen him. If you should have no other way of being introduced to him, I will send you a letter from hence. Monsieur Cagnoni, at Berlin, to whom I know you are recommended, is a very able man of business, thoroughly informed of every part of Europe, and his acquaintance, if you deserve and improve it as you should do, may be of great use to you. Remember to take the best dancing master at Berlin, more to teach you to sit, stand, and walk gracefully than to dance finally. The graces, the graces, remember the graces, adieu. Letter sixty-three, London, January twenty-fourth, Old Style, seventeen forty-nine Dear boy, I have received your letter of the twelfth, New Style, in which I was surprised if I no mention of your approaching journey to Berlin, which according to the first plan was to be on the twentieth, New Style, and upon which supposition I have for some time directed my letters to you and Mr. Hart at Berlin. I should be glad that yours were more minute with regard to your motions and transactions, and I desire that, for the future, they may contain accounts of what and who you see and hear, in your several places of residence, for I interest myself as much in the company you keep, and the pleasures you take, as in the studies you pursue, and therefore equally desired to be informed of them all. Another thing I desire, which is, that you will acknowledge my letters by their dates, that I may know which you do and which you do not receive. As you found your brain considerably affected by the cold, you were very prudent not to turn it to poetry in that situation, and not lest judicious in declining the borrowed aid of a stove, whose fumigation, instead of inspiration, would at best have produced what Mr. Pope calls a suturkin of wit. I will show your letter to Duvall by way of justification for not answering his challenge, and I think he must allow the validity of it, for a frozen brain is as unfit to answer a challenge in poetry as a blunt sword is for a single combat. You may, if you please, and therefore I flatter myself that you will, profit considerably by your stay at Berlin, in the article of manners and useful knowledge. Attention to what you will see and hear there, together with proper inquiries, and a little care and method in taking notes of what is more material, will procure you much useful knowledge. Many young people are so light, so dissipated, and so incurious, that they can hardly be said to see what they see, or to hear what they hear. That is, they hear in so superficial and inattentive a manner, that they might as well not see nor hear at all. For instance, if they see a public building, as a college, and hospital, and arsenal, etc., they content themselves with the first Kupe Dui, and neither take the time nor the trouble of informing themselves of the material parts of them. Which are the constitution, the rules, and the order and economy on the inside. You will, I hope, go deeper, and make your way into the substance of things. For example, should you see a regiment reviewed at Berlin or Potsdam, instead of contenting yourself with the general glitter of the collective corps, and saying, Parmenier d'Aquit, that is very fine, I hope you will ask what number of troops or companies it consists of, what number of officers of the Etat-Major, and what number of subalterns, how many bas-officiers, or non-commissioned officers, as sergeants, corporals, anspanaise, fray-corpals, etc., their pay, their clothing, and by whom, whether by the colonels, captains, or commissaries appointed for that purpose, to whom they are accountable, the method of recruiting, completing, etc. The same in civil manners. Inform yourself of the jurisdiction of a court of justice, of the rules and numbers and endowments of a college or an academy, and not only of the dimensions of their respective edifices, and let your letters to me contain these informations in proportion as you acquire them. I often reflect, with the most flattering hopes, how proud I shall be of you, if you should profit, as you may, of the opportunities which you have had, still have, and will have, of arriving at perfection, and, on the other hand, with the dread of the grief and shame you will give me if you do not. May the first be the case. God bless you. CHESTORFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON You are now come to an age capable of reflection, and I hope you will do what, however, few people at your age do, exert it for your own sake in the search of truth and sound knowledge. I will confess, for I am not unwilling to discover my secrets to you, that it is not many years since I have presumed to reflect for myself. Till sixteen or seventeen I had no reflection, and for many years after that I made no use of what I had. I adopted the notions of the books I read, or the company I kept, without examining whether they were just or not, and I rather chose to run the risk of easy error than to take the time and trouble of investigating truth. Thus partly from laziness, partly from dissipation, and partly from the mauvaisant of rejecting fashionable notions, I was, as I have since found, hurried away by prejudices, instead of being guided by reason, and quietly cherished error instead of seeking for truth. But since I have taken the trouble of reasoning for myself, and have had the courage to own that I do so, you cannot imagine how much my notions of things are altered, and in how different a light I now see them, from that in which I formerly viewed them, through the deceitful medium of prejudice or authority. Nay, I may possibly still retain many errors, which, from long habit, have perhaps grown into real opinions, for it is very difficult to distinguish habits, early acquired and long entertained, from the result of our reason and reflection. My first prejudice, for I do not mention the prejudices of boys and women, such as hobgoblins, ghosts, dreams, spilling salt, etc., was my classical enthusiasm, which I received from the books I read, and the masters who explained them to me. I was convinced that there had been no common sense nor common honesty in the world for these last fifteen hundred years, but that they were totally extinguished with the ancient Greek and Roman governments. Homer and Virgil could have no faults, because they were ancient. Milton and Tasso could have no merit, because they were modern. And I could almost have said, with regard to the ancients, what Cicero, very absurdly and unbecomingly for a philosopher, says with regard to Plato. Come, co-erare, malam, quam, cum, aliiis, recte, centeri. Whereas now, without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as it is at present, that men were but men then as well as now, that modes and customs very often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better then than they are now. I dare assert, too, in defiance of the favourers of the ancients, that Homer's hero Achilles was both a brute and a scoundrel, and consequently an improper character for the hero of an epic poem. He had so little regard for his country that he would not act in defence of it, because he had quarreled with Agamemnon about a woman, and then afterwards, animated by private resentment only, he went about killing people, basely, I will call it, because he knew himself invulnerable, and yet, invulnerable as he was, he wore the strongest armour in the world, which I humbly apprehend via blunder, for a horseshoe clapped to his vulnerable heel would have been sufficient. On the other hand, with submission to the favourers of the moderns, I assert with Mr. Dryden that the devil is in truth the hero of Milton's poem, his plan which he lays, pursues, and at last executes, being the subject of the poem. From all which considerations I impartially conclude that the ancients had their excellencies and their defects, their virtues and their vices, just like the moderns, pedantry and affectation of learning decide clearly in favour of the former, vanity and ignorance as peremptorily in favour of the latter. Religious prejudices kept pace with my classical ones, and there was a time when I thought it impossible for the honestest man in the world to be saved out of the pale of the Church of England, not considering that matters of opinion do not depend upon the will, and that it is as natural, and as allowable, that another man should differ in opinion from me as that I should differ from him, and that if we are both sincere we are both blameless, and should consequently have mutual indulgence for each other. The next prejudices that I adopted were those of the Beaumont, in which, as I was determined to shine, I took what are commonly called the genteel vices to be necessary. I had heard them reckoned so, and without further inquiry I believed it, or at least should have been ashamed to have denied it, for fear of exposing myself to the ridicule of those whom I considered as the models of fine gentleman. But I am now neither ashamed nor afraid to assert that those genteel vices, as they are falsely called, are only so many blemishes on the character of even a man of the world, and what is called a fine gentleman, and degrade him in the opinions of those very people to whom he hopes to recommend himself by them. Nay, this prejudice often extends so far that I have known people pretend to have vices they had not, instead of carefully concealing those they had. Use and assert your own reason. Reflect, examine, and analyze everything, in order to form a sound and mature judgment. Let no authority impose upon your understanding, mislead your actions, or dictate your conversation. Be early, what, if you are not, you will when too late wish you had been. Consult your reason betimes. I do not say that it will always prove an unerring guide, for human reason is not infallible, but it will prove the least erring guide that you can follow. Books and conversation may assist it, but adopt neither blindly and implicitly. Try both by that best rule, which God has given to direct us reason. Of all the troubles do not decline, as many people do, that of thinking. The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think. Their notions are almost all adoptive, and in general I believe it is better that it should be so, as such common prejudices contribute more and more to order and quiet than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are. We have many of those useful prejudices in this country, which I should be very sorry to see removed. The good Protestant conviction that the Pope is both anti-Christ and the whore of Babylon is a more effectual preservative in this country against potpourri than all the solid and unanswerable arguments of Chillingworth. The idle story of the pretenders having been introduced in a warning-pan into the queen's bed, though as destitute of all probability as of all foundation, has been much more prejudicial to the cause of Jacobitism than all that Mr. Locke and others have written, to show the unreasonable-ness and absurdity of the doctrines of indefeasible hereditary right and unlimited passive obedience. And that silly, sanguine notion, which is firmly entertained here, that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen, encourages, and has sometimes enabled, one Englishman in reality to beat two. A Frenchman ventures his life with alacrity, pour l'honneur du roi, where you to change the object which he has been taught to have in his view, and tell him that it was pour le bien de la patrie, he would very probably run away. Such gross local prejudices prevail with the herd of mankind, and do not impose upon cultivated, informed and reflecting minds. But then they are notions equally false, though not so glaringly absurd, which are entertained by people of superior and improved understandings, merely for want of the necessary pains to investigate, the proper attention to examine, and the penetration requisite to determine the truth. Those are the prejudices which I would have you guard against by a manly exertion and attention of your reasoning faculty. To mention one instance of a thousand that I could give you, it is a general prejudice, and has been propagated for these sixteen hundred years, that arts and sciences cannot flourish under an absolute government, and that genius must necessarily be cramped where freedom is restrained. This sounds plausible, but is false in fact. Mechanic arts, as agriculture, et cetera, will indeed be discouraged where the profits and property are from the nature of the government insecure. But why the despotism of a government should cramp the genius of a mathematician, an astronomer, a poet, or an orator, I confess I never could discover. It may indeed deprive the poet or the orator of the liberty of treating of certain subjects in the manner they would wish, but it leaves them subjects enough to exert genius upon if they have it. Can an author with reason complain that he is cramped and shackled if he is not at liberty to publish blasphemy, pottery, or sedition? All which are equally prohibited in the freest governments, if they are wise and well-regulated ones. This is the present general complaint of the French authors, but indeed chiefly of the bad ones. No wonders say they that England produces so many great geniuses. People there may think as they please and publish what they think. Very true, but what hinders them from thinking as they please? If indeed they think in manner destructive of all religion, morality, or good manners, or to the disturbance of the state, an absolute government will certainly more effectively prohibit them from, or punish them from publishing such thoughts than a free one could do. But how does that cramp the genius of an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet? Or how does it corrupt the eloquence of an orator in the pulpit or at the bar? The number of good French authors, such as Cornille, Racine, Molière, Boilot, and La Fontaine, who seemed to dispute it with the Augustan age, flourished under the despotism of Louis XIV, and the celebrated authors of the Augustan age did not shine till after the fetters were riveted upon the Roman people by that cruel and worthless emperor. The revival of letters was not owing, neither to any free government but to the encouragement and protection of Leo X and Francis I, the one as absolute a pope and the other as despotica princess ever reigned. Do not mistake, and imagine that while I am only exposing a prejudice I am speaking in favor of arbitrary power, which from my soul I abhor, and look upon as a gross and criminal violation of the natural rights of mankind. Adieu. Dear boy, I was very much pleased with the account that you gave me of your reception at Berlin, but I was still better pleased with the account which Mr. Hart sent me of your manner of receiving that reception, for he says that you behaved yourself to those crowned heads with all the respected modesty due to them, but at the same time without being any more embarrassed than if you had been conversing with your equals. This easy respect is the perfection of good-breeding, which nothing but superior good-sense or a long usage of the world can produce. And as in your case it could not be the latter, it is a pleasing indication to me of the former. You will now in the course of a few months have been rubbed at three of the considerable courts of Europe, Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna, so that I hope you will arrive at Turin tolerably smooth and fit for the last polish. There you may get the best, there being no court I know of that forms more well-bred and agreeable people. Remember now that good-breeding, gentile carriage, a dress and even dress to a certain degree, are become serious objects and deserve a part of your attention. The day if well employed is long enough for them all. One half of it bestowed upon your studies and your exercises will finish your mind and your body. The remaining part of it, spent in good company, will form your manners and complete your character. What would I not give to have you read Demosthenes critically in the morning, and understand him better than anybody, and at noon behave yourself better than any person at court, and in the evenings trifle more agreeably than anybody in mixed companies? All this you may compass if you please. You have the means, you have the opportunities. Employ them for God's sake while you may, and make yourself that all-accomplished man that I would wish to have you. It entirely depends upon these two years. They are the decisive ones. I send you here enclosed a letter of recommendation to Mr. Capello at Venice, which you will deliver him immediately upon your arrival, accompanying it with compliments from me to him and madame, both of whom you have seen here. He will, I am sure, be both very civil and very useful to you, as he will also be afterward at Rome, where he is appointed to go, Ambassador. By the way, wherever you are, I would advise you to frequent, as much as you can, the Venetian ministers, who are always better informed of the courts they reside at than any other minister, the strict and regular accounts which they are obliged to give to their own government, making them very diligent and inquisitive. You will stay at Venice as long as the Carnival lasts, for though I am impatient to have you at Turin, yet I would wish you to see thoroughly all that is to be seen at so singular a place as Venice, and at so showish a time as the Carnival. You will take also particular care to view all those meetings of the government which strangers are allowed to see, as the assembly of the Senate, etc., and also to inform yourself of that peculiar and intricate form of government. There are books which give an account of it, among which the best is Amalot de Hose, which I would advise you to read previously. It will not only give you a general notion of that constitution, but also furnish you with materials for proper questions and oral information upon the place, which are always the best. There are likewise many very valuable remains in sculpture and paintings of the best masters which deserve your attention. I suppose you will be at Vienna as soon as this letter will get thither, and I suppose, too, that I must not direct above one more to you there, after which my next shall be directed to you at Venice, the only place where a letter will be likely to find you, till you are at Turin, but you may and I desire that you will write to me from the several places in your way, from whence the post goes. I will send you some other letters for Venice to Vienna, or to your banker at Venice, to whom you will, upon your arrival there, send for them, for I will take care to have you so recommended from place to place that you shall not run through them, as most of your countrymen do, without the advantage of seeing and knowing what best deserves to be seen and known, I mean the men and manners. God bless you, and make you answer my wishes. I will say my hopes. I do. Letter 66 Dear boy, I direct this letter to your banker at Venice, the surest place for you to meet with it, though I suppose that it will be there some time before you, for as your intermediate stay anywhere else will be short, and as the post from hence in this season of easterly winds is uncertain, I direct no more letters to Vienna, or I hope both you and Mr. Hart will have received the two letters which I sent you, respectively, as a letter of recommendation to Mr. Capello at Venice, which was enclosed in mind to you. I will suppose, too, that the inland post on your side of the water has not done you justice, for I received but one single letter from you, and one from Mr. Hart, during your whole stay at Berlin, from whence I hoped for and expected very particular accounts. I persuade myself that the time you stay at Venice will be properly employed in seeing all that is to be seen in that extraordinary place, and in conversing with people who can inform you, not of the rary shows of the town, but of the constitution of the government, for which purpose I send you the enclosed letters of recommendation from Sir James Gray, the king's resident at Venice, who is now in England. These with mine to Mr. Capello will carry you, if you will go, into all the best company at Venice. But the important point, and the important place, is Turin, for there I propose you're staying a considerable time, to pursue your studies, learn your exercises, and form your manners. I own, I am not without my anxiety for the consequence of your stay there, which must be either very good or very bad. To you it will be entirely a new scene. Wherever you have hitherto been, you have conversed chiefly with people wiser and discreter than yourself, and have been equally out of the way of bad advice or good advice. But in the academy at Turin you will probably meet with both, considering the variety of young fellows about your own age, among whom it is to be expected that some will be dissipated in idle, others vicious and profligate. I will believe, till the contrary appears, that you have sagacity enough to distinguish the good from the bad characters, both sense and virtue enough to shun the latter, and connect yourself with the former. But however, for greater security and for your sake alone, I must acquaint you that I have sent positive orders to Mr. Hart to carry you off instantly to a place which I have named to him upon the very first symptom which he shall discover in you of drinking, gaming, idleness, or disobedience to his orders, so that whether Mr. Hart informs me or not of the particulars I shall be able to judge of your conduct in general by the time of your stay in Turin. If it is short I shall know why, and I promise you that you shall soon find that I do, but if Mr. Hart lets you continue there, as long as I propose that you should, I shall then be convinced that you make the proper use of your time, which is the only thing I have to ask of you. One year is the most that I propose you should stay at Turin, and that year, if you employ it well, perfects you. One year more of your late application with Mr. Hart will complete your classical studies. You will be likewise master of your exercises in that time, and will have formed yourself so well at that court as to be fit to appear advantageously at any other. These will be the happy effects of your year's stay at Turin, if you behave and apply yourself there as you have done at Leipzig. But if either ill-advise or ill-example affect and seduce you, you are ruined forever. I look upon that year as your decisive year of probation. Go through it well, and you will be all accomplished, and fixed in my tenderest affection forever, but should the contagion of vice-of-idleness lay hold of you there. Your character, your fortune, my hopes, and consequently my favor are all blasted, and you are undone. The more I love you now, from the good opinion I have of you, the greater will be my indignation if I should have reason to change it. Hitherto you have had every possible proof of my affection, because you have deserved it. But when you cease to deserve it, you may expect every possible mark of my resentment. To leave nothing doubtful upon this important point I will tell you fairly, beforehand, by what rule I shall judge of your conduct, by Mr. Hart's accounts. He will not, I am sure, nay, I will say more, he cannot be in the wrong with regard to you. He can have no other view but your good, and you will, I am sure, allow that he must be a better judge of it than you can possibly be at your age. While he is satisfied I shall be so too, but whenever he is dissatisfied with you, I shall be much more so. If he complains, you must be guilty. I shall not have the least regard for anything that you may allege in your own defense. I will now tell you what I expect and insist upon from you at Turin. First, that you pursue your classical and other studies every morning with Mr. Hart, as long and in whatever manner Mr. Hart shall be pleased to require. Secondly, that you learn uninterruptedly your exercises of riding, dancing, and fencing. Thirdly, that you make yourself master of the Italian language, and lastly, that you pass your evenings in the best company. I also require a strict conformity to the hours and rules of the academy. If you will but finish your year in this manner at Turin, I have nothing further to ask of you, and I will give you everything that you can ask of me. You shall, after that, be entirely your own master. I shall think you safe. I lay aside all authority over you, and friendship shall be our mutual and only tie. Weigh this, I beg of you, deliberately in your own mind, and consider whether the application and the degree of restraint which I require, but for one year more, will not be amply repaid by all the advantages and the perfect liberty which you will receive at the end of it. Your own good sense will, I am sure, not allow you to hesitate one moment in your choice. God bless you. Adieu. PS. Sir James Gray's letters not being yet sent to me, as I thought they would, I shall enclose them in my next, which I believe will get to Venice as soon as you. End of Section 39. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 40 of Chesterfield Sutter's To His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter 67 London, April 12, Old Style, 1749 Dear Boy. I received by the last mail a letter from Mr. Hart, dated Prague, April the First, New Style, for which I desire you will return him my thanks, and assure him that I extremely approve of what he has done, and proposes eventually to do, in your way to Turin. Who would have thought you were old enough to have been so well acquainted with the heroes of the Bellum Tresenal, as to be looking out for their great-grandsons in Bohemia, with that affection which, I am informed, you seek for the Wallsteens, the Kinskis, etc. As I cannot ascribe it to your age, I must to your consummate knowledge of history. That makes every country, and every century, as it were, your own. Seriously, I am told, that you are both very strong and very correct in history, of which I am extremely glad. This is useful knowledge. Count Duperron and Compte Lascaris are arrived here. The former gave me a letter from Sir Charles Williams. The latter brought me your orders. They are very pretty men, and have both knowledge and manners, which though they always ought, seldom go together. I examined them, particularly Compte Lascaris, concerning you. Their report is a very favourable one, especially on the side of knowledge. The quickness of conception which they allow you, I can easily credit. But the attention which they add to it pleases me the more, as I own I expected it less. Go on in the pursuit and the increase of knowledge. Nay, I am sure you will, for you now know too much to stop. And if Mr. Hart would let you be idle, I am convinced you would not. But now that you have left Leipzig, and are entered into the great world, remember there is another object that must keep pace with and accompany knowledge. I mean manners, politeness, and the graces, in which Sir Charles Williams, though very much your friend, owns that you are very deficient. The manners of Leipzig must be shook off, and in that respect you must put on the new man. No scrambling at your meals, as at a German ordinary. No awkward overturns of glasses, plates, and salt cellars. No horseplay. On the contrary, a gentleness of manners, a graceful carriage, and an insinuating address must take their place. I repeat, and shall never cease repeating to you, the graces, the graces. I desire that as soon as you ever get to Turin you will apply yourself diligently to the Italian language. That before you leave that place you may know it well enough to be able to speak tolerably when you get to Rome, where you will soon make yourself perfect master of Italian, from the daily necessity you will be under of speaking it. In the meantime I insist upon your not neglecting, much less forgetting, the German you already know, which you may not only continue but improve by speaking it constantly to your Saxon boy, and as often as you can to the several Germans you will meet in your travels. You remember, no doubt, that you must never write to me from Turin, but in the German language and character. I send you the enclosed letter of recommendation to Mr. Smith, the king's consul at Venice. Who can, and I dare say will, be more useful to you there than anybody. Pray make your court and behave your best to Monsieur and Madame Capello, who will be of great use to you at Rome. Adieu. Yours, tenderly. Letter sixty-eight. London. April nineteenth. Old style. Seventeen forty-nine. Dear boy. This letter will, I believe, still find you at Venice in all the dissipation of masquerades, ridotos, operas, etc. With all my heart they are decent evening's amusements, and very properly succeed that serious application to which I am sure you devote your mornings. There are liberal and illiberal pleasures as well as liberal and illiberal arts. There are some pleasures that degrade as much as some trades could do. Saudish drinking, indiscriminate gluttony, driving coaches, rustic sports such as fox chases, horse races, etc., are in my opinion infinitely below the honest and industrious profession of a tailor and a shoemaker, which are said to derogay. As you are now in a musical country, where singing, fiddling, and piping are not only the common topics of conversation, but almost the principal objects of attention, I cannot help cautioning you against giving in to those, I will call them illiberal pleasures, though music is commonly reckoned one of the liberal arts, to the degree that most of your countrymen do, when they travel in Italy. If you love music, hear it. Go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you. But I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. What puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light brings him into a great deal of bad company and takes up a great deal of time, which might be better employed. Few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing apart in a concert with a fiddle under your chin or a pipe in your mouth. I've had a great deal of conversation with Compte de Perron and Compte Lescars upon your subject, and I will tell you very truly what Compte de Perron, who is in my opinion a very pretty man, said of you. I was very glad to hear, from one whom I think so good a judge, that you wanted nothing but des maniers, which I am convinced you will now soon acquire, in the company which henceforward you are likely to keep. But I must add, too, that if you should not acquire them, all the rest will be of little use to you. By manier I do not mean bare civility. Everybody must have that who would not be kicked out of company. But I mean engaging, insinuating, shining manners, distinguished politeness, an almost irresistible address, a superior gracefulness in all you say and do. It is this alone that can give all your other talents their full lustre and value, and consequently it is this which should now be thy principal object of your attention. Observe minutely wherever you go, the allowed and established models of good-breeding, and form yourself upon them. Whatever pleases you most in others will infallibly please others in you. I have often repeated this to you. Now is your time of putting it in practice. I make my compliments to Mr. Hart, and tell him I have received his letter from Vienna of the sixteenth new-style, but that I shall not trouble him with an answer to it till I have received the other letter which he promises me, upon the subject of one of my last. I long to hear from him after your settlement at Turin. The months that you are to pass there will be very decisive ones for you. The exercises of the academy and the manners of courts must be attended to and acquired, and at the same time your other studies continued. I am sure you will not pass nor desire one single idle hour there, for I do not foresee that you can, in any part of your life, put out six months to greater interest than those next six at Turin. We will talk hereafter about your stay at Rome and in other parts of Italy. This only I will now recommend to you, which is to extract the spirit of every place you go to. In those places which are only distinguished by classical fame, and valuable remains of antiquity, have your classics in your hand and in your head. Compare the ancient geography and descriptions with the modern, and never fail to take notes. Rome will furnish you with business enough of that sort, but then it furnishes you with many other objects as well deserving your attention, such as deep ecclesiastical craft and policy. Adieu. I have received your letter from Vienna of the nineteenth new style, which gives me great uneasiness upon Mr. Hart's account. You and I have reason to interest ourselves very particularly in everything that relates to him. I am glad, however, that no bone is broken or dislocated, which being the case, I hope he will have been able to pursue his journey to Venice. In that supposition I direct this letter to you at Turin, where it will either find, or at least not wait very long for you, as I calculate that you will be there by the end of next month, new style. I hope you reflect how much you have to do there, and that you are determined to employ every moment of your time accordingly. You have your classical and several studies to continue with Mr. Hart. You have your exercises to learn, the Turin and manners of a court to acquire, reserving always some time for the decent amusements and pleasures of a gentleman. You see I am never against pleasures. I loved them myself when I was of your age, and it is as reasonable that you should love them now. But I insist upon it that pleasures are very combinable with business and studies, and have a much better relish from the mixture. The man who cannot join business and pleasure is either a formal coxcomb in the one, or a sensual beast in the other. Your evening is therefore a lot for company, assemblies, balls, and such sort of amusements, as I look upon those to be the best schools for the manners of a gentleman, which nothing can give but use, observation, and experience. You have besides Italian to learn, to which I desire you will diligently apply. For though French is, I believe, the language of the court at Turin, yet Italian will be very necessary for you at Rome, and in other parts of Italy. And if you are well grounded in it while you are at Turin, as you easily may, for it is a very easy language, your subsequent stay at Rome will make you perfect in it. I would also have you acquire a general notion of fortification. I mean so far as not to be ignorant of the terms which you will often hear mentioned in company, such as ravelin, bastion, glacis, contrascarp, etc. In order to do this I do not propose that you should make a study of fortification as if you were to be an engineer, but a very easy way of knowing as much as you need know of them will be to visit often the fortifications of Turin, in company with some old officer or engineer, who will show and explain to you the several works themselves, by which means you will get a clearer notion of them than if you were to see them only upon paper for seven years together. Go to the originals whenever you can, and trust to copies and descriptions as little as possible. At your idle hours, while you are at Turin, pray read the history of the House of Savoy, which has produced a great many very great men. The late king, Victor Amity, was undoubtedly one, and the present king is, in my opinion, another. In general I believe that little princes are more likely to be great men than those whose more extensive dominions and superior strength flatter them with a security which commonly produces negligence and indolence. A little prince, in the neighborhood of great ones, must be alert and look out sharp if he would secure his own dominions, much more still if he would enlarge them. He must watch for conjectures or endeavor to make them. No princes have ever possessed this art better than those of the House of Savoy, who have enlarged their dominions prodigiously within a century by profiting of conjectures. I sent you enclosed a letter from Comte Lascaris, who is a warm friend of yours. I desire that you will answer it very soon and cordially, and remember to make your compliments in it to Comte du Péran. A young man should never be wanting in those attentions. They cost little and bring in a great deal, by getting you people's good word and affection. They gain the heart to which I have always advised you to apply yourself particularly. It guides ten thousand for one that reason influences. I cannot end this letter, or, I believe, any other, without repeating my recommendation of the graces. They are to be met with at Turin, for God's sake, sacrifice to them, and they will be propitious. People mistake grossly to imagine that the least awkwardness, either in matter or manner, mind or body, is an indifferent thing and not worthy of attention. It may possibly be a weakness in me, but in short we are also made. I confess to you fairly, that when you shall come home and that I first see you, if I find you ungraceful in your address and awkward in your person and dress, it will be impossible for me to love you half so well as I should otherwise do. Let your intrinsic merit and knowledge be ever so great. If that would be your case with me, as it really would, judge how much worse it might be with others, who have not the same affection and partiality for you, and to whose hearts you must make your own way. Remember to write to me constantly while you are in Italy, in the German language and character, till you can write to me in Italian, which will not be till you have been some time at Rome. Adieu, my good boy. May you turn out what Mr. Hardin I wish you. I must add that if you do not, it will be both your own fault and your own misfortune. End of Section 41. Read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit www.redforlibrivox.org. Section 42 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for Librivox.org into the public domain. Letters 70. London, May 15, Old Style, 1749. Dear boy, this letter will, I hope, find you settled into your serious studies and your necessary exercises at Turin, after the hurry and the dissipation of the Carnaval at Venice. I mean that you stay at Turin should, and I flatter myself that it will, be in useful and ornamental period of your education. But at the same time I must tell you that all my affection for you has never yet given me so much anxiety as that which I now feel. While you are in danger I shall be in fear, and you are in danger at Turin. Mr. Hardin will, by his care, arm you as well as he can against it, but your own good sense and resolution can alone make you invulnerable. I am informed there are now many English at the academy at Turin, and I fear those are just so many dangers for you to encounter. Who they are I do not know, but I well know the general ill conduct, the indecent behavior, and the illiberal views of my young countrymen abroad, especially wherever they are in numbers together. Ill example is of itself dangerous enough, but those who give it seldom stop there. They add their infamous exhortations and invitations, and if they fail they have recourse to ridicule, which is harder for one of your age and inexperience to withstand than either of the former. Be on your guard, therefore, against these batteries, which will all be played upon you. You are not sent abroad to converse with your own countrymen. Among them in general you will get no knowledge, no languages, and I am sure no manners. I desire that you will form no connections, nor what they impudently call friendships with these people, which are in truth only combinations and conspiracies against good morals and good manners. There is commonly, in young people, a facility that makes them unwilling to refuse anything that is asked of them, a mauvais zon that makes them ashamed to refuse, and at the same time an ambition of pleasing and shining in the company they keep. These several causes produce the best effect in good company, but the very worst in bad. If people had no vices but their own, few would have so many as they have. For my own part I would sooner wear other people's clothes in their vices, and they would sit upon me just as well. I hope you will have none, but if you ever have, I beg at least they may be all your own. Vices of adoption are, of all others, the most disgraceful and unpardonable. There are degrees in vices as well as in virtues, and I must do my countrymen the justice to say that they generally take their vices in a lower degree. Their gallantry is the infamous mean debauchery of stews, justly attended and rewarded by the loss of their health as well as their character. Their pleasures of the table end in beastly drunkenness, low riot, broken windows, and very often, as they well deserve, broken bones. They game for the sake of the vice, not of the amusement, and therefore carry it to excess, undo, or are undone by their companions. By such conduct and in such company abroad they come home, the unimproved, ill-liberal and un-gentlemen-like creatures that one daily sees them, that is, in the park and in the streets, for one never meets them in good company, where they have neither manners to present themselves nor merit to be received. But with the manners of footmen and grooms they assume their dress too, for you must have observed them in the streets here, in dirty blue frocks, with oaken sticks in their ends, and their hair greasy and unpowdered, tucked up under their hats of an enormous size. As furnished and adorned by their travels they become the disturbers of playhouses, they break the windows and commonly the landlords of the taverns where they drink, and are at once the support, the terror, and the victims of the body-houses they frequent. These poor people think they shine, and so they do indeed, but it is as putrefaction shines in the dark. I am not now preaching to you, like an old fellow, upon their religious or moral texts. I am persuaded that you do not want the best instructions of that kind. But I am advising you as a friend, as a man of the world, as one who would not have you old while you are young, but would have you to take all the pleasures that reason points out, and that decency warrants. I will therefore suppose, for argument's sake, for upon no other account can it be supposed, that all the vices above mentioned were perfectly innocent in themselves. They would still degrade, vilify, and sink those who practice them, would obstruct their rising in the world by debasing their characters, and give them low turn of mind and manners absolutely inconsistent with their making any figure in upper life and great business. What I have now said, together with your own good sense, is, I hope, sufficient to arm you against the seduction, the invitations, or the profligate exhortations, for I cannot call them temptations of those unfortunate young people. On the other hand, when they would engage you in these schemes, content yourself with a decent but steady refusal, avoid controversy upon such plain points. You are too young to convert them, and I trust, too wise to be converted by them. Shun them not only in reality, but even in appearance, if you would be well received in good company, for people will always be shy of receiving a man who comes from a place where the plague rages, let him look ever so healthy. There are some exceptions, both in French and English, and some characters, both in these two and in other countries, which have, I dare say, misled many young men to their ruin. An honnette de Beauche, un joli de Beauche, an agreeable man, a man of pleasure. Do not think that this means debauchery and profligacy, nothing like it. It means, at most, the accidental and unfrequented irregularities of youth and vivacity, in opposition to dullness, formality, and want of spirit. A commerce galant, insensibly formed with a woman of fashion, a glass of wine or two too much, unwairly taken in the warmth and joy of a good company, or some innocent frolic by which nobody is injured, are the utmost bounds of that life of pleasure which a man of sense and decency, who has a regard for his character, will allow himself, or be allowed by others. Those who transgress them in the hopes of shining miss their aim, and become infamous, or at least contemptible. The length or shortness of your stay at Turin will sufficiently inform me, even though Mr. Hart should not, of your conduct there. For, as I have told you before, Mr. Hart has the strictest orders to carry you away immediately from thence, upon the first and least symptom of infection that he discovers about you. And I know him to be too conscientiously scrupulous, and too much your friend and mine not to execute them exactly. Moreover, I will inform you that I shall have constant accounts of your behaviour from Comte Salmore, the Governor of the Academy, whose son is now here and my particular friend. I have also other good channels of intelligence, of which I do not apprise you. But supposing that all turns out well at Turin, yet as I propose your being at Rome for the jubilee at Christmas, I desire that you will apply yourself diligently to your exercises of dancing, fencing, and riding in the Academy, as well as for the sake of your health and growth, as to fashion and supple you. You must not neglect your dress neither, but take care to be bien me. Pray send for the best operator for the teeth at Turin, where I suppose there is some famous one, and let him put yours in perfect order, and then take care to keep them so afterward yourself. You had very good teeth, and I hope they are still so. But even those who have had bad ones should keep them clean, for a dirty mouth is, in my mind, ill manners. In short, neglect nothing that can possibly please. A thousand nameless little things which nobody can describe, but which everybody feels, conspire to form that whole of pleasing, as the separate pieces of a mosaic work, though separately of little beauty or value, when properly joined, form those beautiful figures which please everybody. A look, a gesture, an attitude, a tone of voice, all bear their parts in the great work of pleasing. The art of pleasing is more particularly necessary in your intended profession than perhaps in any other. It is, in truth, the first half of your business, for if you do not please the court you are sent to, you will be of very little use to the court that you are sent from. Please the eyes and the ears. They will introduce you to the heart, and nine times in ten the heart governs the understanding. Make your court particularly, and show distinguished attentions to such men and women as our best at court, highest in the fashion and in the opinion of the public. Make advantageously of them behind their backs, in companies whom you have reason to believe will tell them again. Express your admiration of the many great men that the House of Savoy has produced. Observe that nature, instead of being exhausted by those efforts, seems to have redoubled them in the person of the present king and the Duke of Savoy. Wonder at this rate where it will end, and conclude that it must end in the government of all Europe. Say this likewise where it will probably be repeated, but say it unaffectively, and the last especially with the kind of un jourment. These little arts are very allowable, and must be made use of in the course of the world. They are pleasing to one party, useful to the other, and injurious to nobody. What I have said with regard to my countrymen in general does not extend to them all without exception. There are some who have both merit and manners. Your friend Mr. Stevens is among the latter, and I approve of your connection with him. You may happen to meet with some others, whose friendship may be of great use to you hereafter, either from their superior talents or their rank in fortune. Cultivate them, but then I desire that Mr. Hart may be the judge of those persons. Adieu, my dear child. Consider seriously the importance of the next two years to your character, your figure, and your fortune. I recommend it to you in my last and innocent piece of art, that a flattering people behind their backs in presence of those who, to make their own court, much more than for your sake, will not fail to repeat and even amplify the praise to the party concerned. This is, of all flattery, the most pleasing, and consequently the most effectual. There are other, and many other, inoffensive arts of this kind, which are necessary in the course of the world, in which he who practices the earliest will please the most, and rise the soonest. The spirits and vivacity of youth are apt to neglect them as useless, or reject them as troublesome. But subsequent knowledge and experience of the world reminds us of their importance, commonly when it is too late. The principle of these things is the mastery of one's temper, and that coolness of mine, and serenity of countenance, which hinders us from discovering by words, actions, or even looks. Those passions or sentiments by which we are inwardly moved or agitated, and the discovery of which gives cooler and abler people such infinite advantages over us, not only in great business, but in all the most common occurrences of life. A man who does not possess himself enough to hear disagreeable things without visible marks of anger and change of countenance, or agreeable ones without sudden bursts of joy and expansion of countenance, is at the mercy of every artful nave or pert coxcomb. The former will provoke, or please you by design, to catch unguarded words or looks by which he will easily decipher the secrets of your heart, of which you should keep the key yourself, and trust it with no man living. The latter will, by his absurdity, and without intending it, produce the same discoveries of which other people will avail themselves. You will say possibly that this coolness must be constitutional, and consequently does not depend upon the will, and I will allow that constitution has some power over us, but I will maintain, too, that people very often, to excuse themselves, very unjustly accuse their constitutions. Care and reflection, if properly used, will get the better, and a man may as surely get a habit of letting his reason prevail over his constitution, as of letting, as most people do, the latter prevail over the former. If you find yourself subject to sudden starts of passion or madness, for I see no difference between them but in their duration, resolve within yourself, at least, never to speak one word while you feel that emotion within you. Even, too, to keep your countenance as unmoved and unembarrassed as possible, which steadiness you may get a habit of by constant attention. I should desire nothing better, in any negotiation, than to have to do with one of those men of warm, quick passions, which I would take care to set in motion. By artful provocations I would exhort rash, unguarded expressions, and by hinting at the several things that I could suspect, infallibly discover the true one, by the alteration occasioned in the countenance of the person. Culto schiolto compensieri stretti is a most useful maximum business. It is so necessary at some games, such as Berlin Cans, etc., that a man who had not the command of his temper and countenance would infallibly be outdone by those who had, even though they played fair. Whereas in business you always play with sharpers, to whom, at least, you should give no fair advantages. It may be objected that I am now recommending dissimulation to you. I both own and justify it. It has been long said, chineset dissimilari neset regnari. I go still further and say that without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all. It is simulation that is false, mean, and criminal. That is the cunning which Lord Bacon calls crooked or left-handed wisdom, and which is never made use of but by those who have not true wisdom. And the same great man says that dissimulation is only to hide our own cards, whereas simulation is put on in order to look into other peoples. Lord Bolingbroke, in his idea of a Patriot King, which he has lately published, and which I will send you by the first opportunity, says very justly that simulation is a stiletto, not only an unjust but an unlawful weapon, and the use of it very rarely to be excused, never justified. Whereas dissimulation is a shield, as secrecy is armor, and it is no more possible to preserve secrecy in business without some degree of dissimulation than it is to succeed in business without secrecy. He goes on and says that those two arts of dissimulation and secrecy are like the alloy mingled with pure ore. A little is necessary, and will not debase the coin below its proper standard. But if more than a little be employed, that is, simulation and cunning, the coin loses its currency, and the coiner has credit. Make yourself absolute master, therefore, of your temper and your countenance, so far at least as that no visible change do appear in either, whatever you may feel inwardly. This may be difficult, but it is by no means impossible, and as a man of sense never attempts impossibilities on one hand, on the other, he is never discouraged by difficulties. On the contrary, he redoubles his industry and his diligence. He perseveres, and infallibly prevails at last. In any point which prudence bids you pursue, and which a manifest utility attends, let difficulties only animate your industry, not deter you from the pursuit. If one way has failed, try another. Be active, persevere, and you will conquer. Some people are to be reasoned, some flattered, some intimidated, and some teased into a thing. But in general, all are to be brought into it at last, if skillfully applied to, properly managed and indefatagably attacked in their several weak places. The time should likewise be judiciously chosen. Every man has his molia tempora, but that is far from being all day long, and you would choose your time very ill if you applied to a man about one business when his head was full of another, or when his heart was full of grief, anger, or any other disagreeable sentiment. In order to take judge of the insides of others, study your own, for men in general are very much alike, and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same. And whatever engages or disgusts, pleases or offends you, in others' will, mutatas, mutandas, engage, disgust, please, or offend others in you. Observe with the utmost attention all the operations of your own mind, the nature of your passions, and the various motives that determine your will. And you may, in a great degree, know all mankind. For instance, do you find yourself hurt and mortified when another makes you feel his superiority, and your own inferiority, in knowledge, parts, rank, or fortune? You will certainly take great care not to make a person whose good will, good word, interest, esteem, or friendship you would gain feel that superiority in you, in case you have it. If disagreeable insinuations, sly sneers, or repeated contradictions tease and irritate you, would you use them where you wish to engage and please, surely not, and I hope you wish to engage and please almost universally. The temptation of saying a smart and witty thing, or bon-mote, and the malicious applause with which it is commonly received, has made people who can say them, and still often are people who think they can, but cannot, and yet try, more enemies and implacable ones too, than any one thing that I know of. When such things, then, shall happen to be said at your expense, as sometimes they certainly will, reflect seriously upon the sentiments of uneasiness, anger, and resentment, which they excite in you, and consider whether it can be prudent, by the same means, to excite the same sentiments in others against you. It is a decided folly to lose a friend for a jest, but in my mind it is not much less degree of folly to make an enemy of an indifferent and neutral person for the sake of a bon-mote. When things of this kind happen to be said of you, the most prudent way is to seem not to suppose that they are meant at you, but to dissemble and conceal whatever degree of anger you may feel inwardly, but should they be so plain that you cannot be supposed ignorant of their meaning, to join in the lap of the company against yourself, acknowledge the hit to be a fair one, and the just a good one, and play off the whole thing in seeming good humor, but by no means reply in the same way, which only shows that you are hurt, and publishes the victory which you might have concealed. Should the things said, indeed, injure your honor or moral character, there is but one proper reply, which I hope you will never have occasion to make. As the female part of the world has some influence, and often too much, over the male, your conduct with regard to women, I mean women of fashion, for I cannot suppose you capable of conversing with any others, deserves some share in your reflections. They are a numerous and loquacious body. Their hatred would be more prejudicial than their friendship can be advantageous to you. A general complacence and attention to that sex is therefore established by custom, and certainly necessary. But where you would particularly please anyone, whose situation, interest, or connections can be of use to you, you must show particular preference. The least attentions please, the greatest charm them. The innocent but pleasing flattery of their persons, however gross, is greedily swallowed and kindly digested. But a seeming regard for their understandings, a seeming desire of, and deference for, their advice, together with a seeming confidence in their moral virtues, turns their heads entirely in your favor. Nothing shocks them so much as the least appearance of that contempt, which they are apt to suspect men of entertaining of their capacities, and you may be very sure of gaining their friendship if you seem to think it worth gaining. Here dissimilation is very often necessary, and even simulation sometimes allowable, which as it pleases them, may be useful to you, and is injurious to nobody. This torn sheet, which I did not observe when I began upon it, as it alters the figure, shortens to the length of my letter. It may very well afford it. My anxiety for you carries me insensibly to these lengths. I am apt to flatter myself, that my experience, at the latter end of my life, may be of use to you at the beginning of yours, and I do not grudge the greatest trouble, if it can procure you the least advantage. I even repeat frequently the same things, the better to imprint them on your young and, I suppose, yet giddy mind, and I shall think that part of my time the best employed, that contributes to make you employ yours well. God bless you, child. I do not guess where this letter will find you, but I hope it will find you well. I direct it eventually to Lubach, from whence I suppose you have taken care to have your letters sent after you. I receive no account for Mr. Hart by last post, and the mail due this day has not yet come in, so that my information has come down to no lower than the second June, new style, the date of Mr. Hart's last letter. As I am now easy about your health, I am only curious about your motions, which I hope have either been to Innsbruck or Verona, for I disapprove extremely of your proposed long and troublesome journey to Switzerland. Wherever you may be, I recommend you to get as much Italian as you can, before you go either to Rome or Naples. A little will be of great use to you upon the road, and the knowledge of the grammatical part, which you can easily acquire in two or three months, will not only facilitate your progress, but accelerate your perfection in that language, when you go to those places where it is generally spoken, as Naples, Rome, Florence, etc. To the state of your health not yet admit of your usual application to books. You may, in a great degree, and I hope you will, repair that loss by useful and instructive conversations with Mr. Hart. You may, for example, desire him to give you in conversation the outlines at least of Mr. Locke's logic, a general notion of ethics, and a verbal epitome of rhetoric, of all which Mr. Hart will give you clearer ideas in half an hour by word of mouth, than the books of most of the Del Fellows who have written upon those subjects would do in a week. I have waited so long for the post, which I hoped would come, that the post which is just going out obliges me to cut this letter short. God bless you, my dear child, and restore you soon to perfect health. My compliments to Mr. Hart, to whose care your life is the least thing that you owe. Letter Seventy-three, London, June 22nd, Old Style, 1749. The outside of your letter of the Seventh New Style, directed by your own hand, gave me more pleasure than the inside of any other letter ever did. I received it yesterday at the same time with one for Mr. Hart of the Sixth. They arrived at a very proper time, for they found a consultation of physicians in my room, upon account of a fever which I had for four or five days, but which has now entirely left me. As Mr. Hart says that your lungs now and then give you a little pain, and that your swellings come and go variably, but as he mentions nothing of your coughing, spitting, or sweating, the doctors take it for granted that you are entirely free from those three bad symptoms, and from thence conclude that the pain which you sometimes feel upon your lungs is only symptomatical of your rheumatic disorder, from the pressure of the muscles which hinders the free play of the lungs. But however, as the lungs are a point of the yet most importance and delicacy, they insist upon your drinking, in all events, asses milk twice a day, and goats way as often as you please, the oftener the better. In your common diet they recommend an attention to pectorals, such as sego, barley, turnips, etc. These rules are equally good and rheumatic as in consumptive cases. You will therefore, I hope, strictly observe them, for I take it for granted that you are above the silly likings or dislikings in which silly people indulge their tastes at the expense of their health. I approve of your going to Venice as much as I disapproved of your going to Switzerland. I suppose that you are by this time arrived, and in that supposition direct this letter there. But if you should find the heat too great, or the water offensive at this time of year, I would have you go immediately to Verona and stay there till the great heats are over, before you return to Venice. The time which you will probably pass at Venice will allow you to make yourself master of that intricate and singular form of government, of which few of our fellow travelers know anything. Read, ask, and see everything that is relative to it. There are likewise many valuable remains of the remotest antiquity, and many fine pieces of the Antico Moderna, all which deserve a different sort of attention from that which your countrymen commonly give them. They go to see them as they go to see the lions and kings on horseback, at the tower here, only to say that they have seen them. You will, I am sure, view them in another light, and you will consider them as you would a poem, to which indeed they are akin. You will observe whether the sculptor has animated his stone or the painter his canvas into just the expression of those sentiments and passions which should characterize and mark their several figures. You will examine likewise whether in their groups there be a unity of action or proper relation, a truth of dress and manners. Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts, a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, being absolutely necessary to excel in either, which in my opinion is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two, a proof of the decline of that country. The Venetian school produced many great painters, such as Paul Veronez, Titian, Palma, etc., of whom you will see, as well in private houses as in churches, very fine pieces. The last supper of Paul Veronez in the Church of St. George is reckoned his capital performance, and deserves your attention, as does also the famous picture of the Coronaro family by Titian. A taste for sculpture and painting is, in my mind, as becoming as a taste for fiddling and piping is unbecoming a man of fashion. The former is connected with history and poetry, the latter, with nothing that I know of but bad company. Learn Italian as fast as ever you can, that you may be able to understand it tolerably, and speak it a little before you go to Roman Naples. There are many good historians in that language, and excellent translations of the ancient Greek and Latin authors, which are called the Colana. But the only two Italian poets that deserve your acquaintance are Arostio and Tasso, and they undoubtedly have great merit. Make my compliments to Mr. Hart, and tell him that I have consulted about his leg, and that if it was only a sprain, he ought to keep a tight bandage about that part, for a considerable time, and do nothing else to it. Adjou, Giubbeo te bene valere. Chapter Seventy-Four London, July Sixth, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy, as I am now no longer in pain about your health, which I trust is perfectly restored, and as by the various accounts I have had of you, I need not be in pain about your learning, our correspondence may, for the future, turn upon less important points comparatively, though still very important ones. I mean the knowledge of the world, decorum, manners, dress, and all those commonly called little accomplishments, which are absolutely necessary to give greater accomplishments their full value and luster. Had I the admirable ring of Gidges, which rendered the wear invisible, and had I at the same time those magic powers, which were very common formerly, but are now very scarce, of transporting myself by a wish to any given place, my first expedition would be to Venice, there to reconnoiter you, and seen myself. I would first take you in the morning at breakfast with Mr. Hart, and attend to your natural and unguarded conversation with him. From whence, I think, I could pretty well judge of your natural turn of mind. How I should rejoice if I overheard you asking him pertinent questions upon useful subjects, or making judicious reflections upon the studies of that morning, or the occurrences of the former day. Then I would follow you into the different companies of the day, and carefully observe in what manner you presented yourself to, and behave yourself with men of sense and dignity, whether your address was respectful and yet easy, your air modest and yet unembarrassed, and I would at the same time penetrate into their thoughts, in order to know whether your first abhorred made that advantageous impression upon their fancies, which a certain address, air and manners never failed doing. I would afterward follow you to the mixed companies of the evening, such as assemblies, suppers, et cetera, and their watch if you trifled gracefully and gentilely, if your good breeding and politeness made way for your parts and knowledge. With what pleasure should I hear people cry out, Che gabbato cavier, comei polito, disinvolto, spiritoso? If all these things turned out to my mind, I would immediately assume my own shape, become visible, and embrace you. But if the contrary happened, I would preserve my invisibility, make the best of my way home again, and sink my disappointment upon you in the world. As unfortunately these supernatural powers of genie, berries, silphs, and gnomes have had the fate of the oracles they succeeded, and have ceased for some time, I must content myself till we meet naturally and in the common way, with Mr. Hart's written accounts of you, and the verbal ones which I now and then receive from people who have seen you. However, I believe it would do you no harm if you would always imagine that I were present, and saw and heard everything you did and said. There is a certain concurrence of various little circumstances which compose what the French call l'amiable, and which, now that you are entering into the world, you ought to make it your particular study to acquire. Without them your learning will be pedantry, your conversation often improper, always unpleasant, and your figure, however good in itself, awkward and unengaging. A diamond, while rough, has indeed its intrinsic value, but till polished is of no use, and would neither be sought for nor worn. Its great luster, it is true, proceeds from its solidity and strong cohesion of parts, but without the last polish it would remain forever a dirty, rough mineral in the cabinets of some few curious collectors. You have, I hope, that solidity and cohesion of parts. It now is much pains to get the luster. Good company, if you make the right use of it, will cut you into shape, and give you the true brilliant polish. Apropos of diamonds, I have sent you by Sir James Gray, the King's Minister, who will be at Venice about the middle of September, my own diamond buckles, which are fitter for your young feet than for my old ones. They will properly adorn you, they would only expose me. If Sir James finds anybody whom he can trust, and who will be at Venice before him, he will send them by that person. But if he should not, and that you should be gone from Venice before he gets there, he will in that case give them to your banker, Mr. Cornette, to forward to you, wherever you may then be. You are now of an age at which the adorning of your person is not only not ridiculous, but proper in becoming. Negligence would imply either an indifference about pleasing, or else an insolent security of pleasing, without using those means to which others are obliged to have recourse. A thorough cleanliness in your person is as necessary for your own health as it is not to be offensive to other people. Washing yourself and rubbing your body and limbs frequently with a flesh brush will conduce as much to health as to cleanliness. A particular attention to the cleanliness of your mouth, teeth, hands, and nails is but common decency, in order not to offend people's eyes and noses. I send you here enclosed a letter of recommendation to the Duke of Nivernoy, the French ambassador at Rome, who is in my opinion one of the prettiest men I ever knew in my life. I do not know a better model for you to form yourself upon. Pray observe and frequent him as much as you can. He will show you what manners and graces are. I shall, by successive posts, send you more letters, both for Roman Naples, where it will be your own fault entirely if you do not keep the very best company. As you will meet swarms of Germans wherever you go, I desire that you will constantly converse with them in their own language, which will improve you in that language, and be at the same time an agreeable piece of civility to them. Your stay in Italy will, I do not doubt, make you critically master of Italian. I know it may, if you please, for it is a very regular and consequently a very easy language. Adieu. God bless you. End of Section forty-four, read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section forty-five of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter seventy-five, London, July twentieth-old style, seventeen-forty-nine. Dear boy, I wrote to Mr. Hart last Monday, the seventeenth-old style, in answer to his letter of the twentieth June new style, which I had received but the day before, after an interval of eight posts, during which I did not know whether you or he existed, and indeed I began to think that you did not. By that letter you ought at this time to be at Venice, where I hope you are arrived in perfect health. After the baths of Teffler, in case you have made use of them. I hope they are not hot baths, if your lungs are still tender. Your friend, the Compte to Ayn Sideland, is arrived here. He has been at my door, and I have been at his, but we have not yet met. He will dine with me some day this week. Compte Lascaris inquires after you very frequently and with great affection. Pray answer the letter which I have forwarded you a great while ago from him. You may enclose your answer to me, and I will take care to give it to him. These attentions ought never to be omitted. They cost little, and please a great deal. But the neglect of them offends more than you can yet imagine. Great merit or great failings will make you respected or despised, but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked in the general run of the world. Examine yourself why you like such and such people, and dislike such and such others, and you will find that those different sentiments proceed from very slight causes. All virtues are the foundation of society in general, and of friendship in particular, but attentions, manners, and graces both adorn and strengthen them. My heart is so set upon your pleasing, and consequently succeeding in the world, that possibly I have already, and probably shall again, repeat the same things over and over to you. However, to err, if I do err, on the sure side, I shall continue to communicate to you those observations upon the world, which long experience has enabled me to make, and which I have generally found to hold true. Your youth and talents, armed with my experience, may go a great way, and that armor is very much at your service, if you please, to wear it. I promise that it is not my imagination but my memory that gives you these rules. I am not writing pretty but useful reflections. A man of sense soon discovers, because he carefully observes, where and how long he is welcome, and takes care to leave the company, at least as soon as he is wished out of it. Fools never perceive where they are either ill-timed or ill-placed. I am this moment agreeably stopped, in the course of my reflections, by the arrival of Mr. Hart's letter of the thirteenth July new style, to Mr. Grevenkopp, with one enclosed for your mamma. I find by it that many of his and your letters to me must have miscarried, for he says that I have had regular accounts of you, whereas all those accounts have been only his letter of the sixth and yours of the seventh June new style, his of the twentieth June new style to me, and now his of the thirteenth July new style to Mr. Grevenkopp. However, since you are so well, as Mr. Hart says you are, all as well. I am extremely glad you have no complaint upon your lungs, but I desire that you will think you have, for three or four months to come. Keep in a course of asses or goats milk, for one is as good as the other, and possibly the latter is the best, and let your common food be as pectoral as you can conveniently make it. Pray tell Mr. Hart that, according to his desire, I have wrote a letter of thanks to Mr. Fermion. I hope you write to him, too, from time to time. The letters of recommendation of a man of his merit and learning will, to be sure, be of great use to you among the learned world of Italy, that is, provided you take care to keep up to the character he gives you in them, otherwise they will only add to your disgrace. Consider that you have lost a good deal of time by your illness. Fetch it up now that you are well. At present you should be a good economist of your moments, of which company and sites will claim a considerable share, so that those which remain for study must be not only attentively, but greedily employed. But indeed I do not suspect you of one single moment's idleness in the whole day. Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds and the holiday of fools. I do not call good company and liberal pleasures idleness, far from it. I recommend to you a good share of both. I send you here enclosed a letter for Cardinal Alexander Albany, which you will give him as soon as you get to Rome, and before you deliver any others. The purple expects that preference. Go next to the Duke de Nivernoy, to whom you are recommended by several people at Paris, as well as by myself. Then you may carry your other letters occasionally. Remember to pry narrowly into every part of the government of Venice. Inform yourself of the history of that republic, especially of its most remarkable eras, such as the Ligue d'Ambres in 1509, by which it had liked to have been destroyed, and the conspiracy formed by the Marquis de Bedmar, the Spanish ambassador, to subject it to the crown of Spain. The famous disputes between that republic and the pope are worth your knowledge, and the writings of the celebrated and learned fra Paolo di Sarpi upon that occasion worth your reading. It was once the greatest commercial power in Europe, and in the 14th and 15th centuries made a considerable figure, but at present its commerce is decayed and its riches consequently decreased, and far from meddling now with the affairs of the continent, it owes its security to its neutrality and inefficiency, and that security will last no longer than till one of the great powers in Europe engrosses the rest of Italy, an event which this century possibly may, but which the next probably will see. Your friend Comte de Ayn Sainlund and his governor have been with me this moment, and delivered me your letter from Berlin, of February the 28th, new style. I like them both so well that I am glad you did, and still gladder to hear what they say of you. Go on and continue to deserve the praises of those who deserve praises themselves. Adieu. I break open this letter to acknowledge yours of the 30th new style, which I have but this instant received, though thirteen days antecedent in date to Mr. Hart's last. I never in my life heard of bathing four hours a day, and I am impatient to hear of your safe arrival at Venice, after so extraordinary an operation. End of Section 45. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 46 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 76. London, July 30th, old style, 1749. Dear Boy. Mr. Hart's letters and yours drop in upon me almost irregularly, for I received by the last post one from Mr. Hart of the ninth new style, and that which Mr. Grevenkopp had received from him the post before was of the thirteenth. At last I suppose I shall receive them all. I am very glad that my letter, with Dr. Shaw's opinion, has lessened your bathing, for since I was born I never heard of bathing four hours a day, which would surely be too much, even in Madea's kettle, if you wanted, as you do not yet, new boiling. Though in that letter of mine I proposed you're going to Innsbruck, it was only in opposition to Lausanne, which I thought much too long and painful a journey for you, but you will have found, by my subsequent letters, that I entirely approved of Venice, where I hope you have now been some time, and which is a much better place for you to reside at, till you go to Naples, than either Tafler or Laughbuck. I love capitals extremely. It is in capitals that the best company is always to be found, and consequently the best manners to be learned. The very best provincial places have some awkwardness that distinguished their manners from those of the Metropolis. Apropos of capitals I send you here two letters of recommendation to Naples, from Mr. Finocchetti, the Neapolitan minister at the Hague, and in my next I shall send you two more, from the same person to the same place. I have examined Comptonine Seinland so narrowly concerning you, that I have extorted from him a confession that you do not care to speak German, unless to such as understand no other language. At this rate you will never speak it well, which I am very desirous that you should do, and of which you would, in time, find the advantage. Whoever has not the command of a language, and does not speak it with facility, will always appear below himself when he converses in that language. The want of words and phrases will cramp and lame his thoughts. As you now know German enough to express yourself tolerably, speaking it very often will soon make you speak it very well, and then you will appear in it wherever you are. What with your own Saxon servant and the swarms of Germans you will meet with wherever you go, you may have opportunities of conversing in that language half the day, and I do very seriously desire that you will, or else all the pains you have already taken about it are lost. You will remember likewise that, till you can write in Italian, you are always to write to me in German. Mr. Hart's conjecture concerning your distemper seems to be a very unreasonable one. It agrees entirely with mine, which is the universal rule by which every man judges of another man's opinion. But whatever may have been the cause of your rheumatic disorder, the effects are still to be attended to, and as there must be a remaining acrimony in your blood, you ought to have regard to that in your common diet as well as in your medicines, both which should be of a sweetening alkaline nature and promotive of perspiration. Rheumatic complaints are very apt to return, and those returns would be very vexatious and detrimental to you, at your age and in your course of travels. Your time is, now particularly, inestimable, and every hour of it at present, worth more than a year will be to you twenty years hence. You are now laying the foundation of your future character and fortune, and one single stone wanting in that foundation is of more consequence than fifty in the superstructure, which can always be mended and embellished if the foundation is solid. To carry the metaphor of building, I would wish you to be a Corinthian edifice upon a Tuscan foundation, the latter having the utmost strength and solidity to support, and the former, all possible ornaments to decorate. The Tuscan column is coarse, clumsy, and unpleasant. Nobody looks at it twice. The Corinthian fluted column is beautiful and attractive, but without a solid foundation. Can hardly be seen twice, because it must soon tumble down. Yours affectionately. Letter Seventy-Seven. London, August Seventh Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy. By Mr. Hart's letter to me of the eighteenth July new style, which I received by the last post, I am at length informed of the particulars both of your past distemper and of your future motions. As to the former, I am now convinced, and so is Dr. Shaw, that your lungs were only symptomatically affected, and that the rheumatic tendency is what you are chiefly now to guard against, but for greater security, with due attention still to your lungs, as if they had been and still were a little affected. In either case, a general cooling pectoral regimen is equally good. By cooling I mean cooling in its consequences, not cold to the palate, for nothing is more dangerous than very cold liquors at the very time that one longs for them the most, which is when one is very hot. Fruit when full ripe is very wholesome, but then it must be within certain bounds as to quantity, for I have known many of my countrymen die of blood fluxes by indulging in too great a quantity of fruit. In those countries where, from the goodness and ripeness of it, they thought it could do them no harm. Niquid nimus is a most excellent rule in everything, but commonly the least observed by people of your age in anything. As to your future motions, I am very well pleased with them, and greatly prefer your extended say at Verona to Venice, whose almost stagnating waters must at this time of the year corrupt the air. Verona has a pure and clean air, and as I am informed a great deal of good company. Marquis Maffay alone would be worth your going therefor. You may, I think, very well leave Verona about the middle of September, when the great heats will be quite over, and then make the best of your way to Naples, where I own I want to have you by way of precaution. I hope it is rather overcaution, in case of the last remains of a pulmonic disorder. The amphitheater at Verona is worth your attention, as our are also many buildings there and at Vincenza, of the famous Andrea Palladio, whose taste and style of buildings were truly antique. If you employed three or four days in learning the five orders of architecture, with their general proportions, and you may know all that you need know of them in that time. Palladio's own book of architecture is the best you can make use of for that purpose, skipping over the mechanical part of it, such as the materials, the cement, etc. Mr. Hart tells me that your acquaintance with the classics is renewed, the suspension of which has been so short, that I dare say it has produced no coldness. I hope and believe that you are now so much master of them, that two hours every day, uninterruptedly, for a year or two more, will make you perfectly so, and I think you cannot now allot them a greater share than that of your time, considering the many other things that you have to learn and to do. You must know how to speak and write Italian perfectly. You must learn some logic, some geometry, and some astronomy, not to mention your exercises, where they are to be learned, and above all, you must learn the world, which is not soon learned, and only to be learned by frequency good in various companies. Consider therefore how precious every moment of time is to you now. The more you apply to your business, the more you will taste your pleasures. The exercise of the mind in the morning wets the appetite for the pleasures of the evening, as much as the exercise of the body wets the appetite for dinner. Business and pleasure, rightly understood, mutually assist each other, instead of being enemies, as silly or dull people often think them. No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them by previous business, and few people do business well, who do nothing else. Remember that when I speak of pleasures I always mean the elegant pleasures of a rational being, and not the brutal ones of a swine. I mean la bonchère, short of gluttony, wine infinitely short of drunkenness, play without the least gaming, and gallantry without debauchery. There is a line in all these things which men of sense, for greater security, take care to keep a good deal on the right side of, for sickness, pain, contempt, and infamy lie immediately on the other side of it. Men of sense and merit, in all other respects, may have some of these failings, but then those few examples, instead of inviting us to imitation, should only put us the more upon our guard against such weakness. And whoever thinks them fashionable will not be so himself. I have often known a fashionable man to have some one vice, but I never in my life knew a vicious man a fashionable man. Vice is as degrading as it is criminal. God bless you, my dear child. End of Section 46. Read by Professor Heathern Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 47 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 78. London, August 20th, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy, let us resume our reflections upon men, their characters, their manners, in word our reflections upon the world. They may help you to form yourself, and to know others. A knowledge very useful at all times, very rare at yours. It seems as if it were nobody's business to communicate it to young men. Their masters teach them, singly, the languages or the sciences of their several departments, and are indeed generally incapable of teaching them the world. Their parents are often so too, or at least neglect doing it, either from avocations, indifference, or from an opinion that throwing them into the world, as they call it, is the best way of teaching it them. This last notion is, in a great degree, true. That is, the world can doubtless never be well known by theory. Practice is absolutely necessary. But surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler. There is a certain dignity of manners absolutely necessary, to make even the most valuable character either respected or respectable, meaning worthy of respect. Horse play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, waggery, and indiscriminate familiarity will sink both merit and knowledge into degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow, and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubs you their dependent and lead captain. It gives your inferiors jest, but troublesome and improper claims of equality. A joker is nearer akin to a buffoon, and neither of them is the least related to wit. Whoever is admitted or sought for in company, upon any other account than that of his merit and manners, is never respected there, but only made use of. We will have such a one, for he sings prettily. We will invite such a one to a ball, for he dances well. We will have such a one at supper, for he is always joking and laughing. We will ask another because he plays deep at all games, or because he can drink a great deal. These are all vilifying distinctions, mortifying preferences, and exclude all ideas of esteem and regard. Whoever is had, as it is called, in company for the sake of any one thing singly, is singly that thing, and will never be considered in any other light. Consequently, never respected, let his merits be what they will. This dignity of manners, which I recommend so much to you, is not only as different from pride as true courage is from blustering, or true wit from joking, but is absolutely inconsistent with it, for nothing vilifies and degrades more than pride. The pretensions of the proud man are often or treated with sneer and contempt than with indignation, as we offer ridiculously too little to a tradesman, who asks ridiculously too much for his goods. Do not haggle with one who only asks a just and reasonable price. Abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation degrade as much as indiscriminate contradiction and noisy debate disgust, but a modest assertion of one's own opinion, and a complacent acquiescence to other people's preserved dignity. Vulgar, low expressions, awkward motions and address vilify as they imply either a very low turn of mind, or low education and low company. Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and a laborious attention to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence's thought, and not unjustly, incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz, very sagaciously, marked out Cardinal Chiggy for a little mind, from the moment that he told him he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. A certain degree of exterior seriousness in looks and motions gives dignity, without excluding wit and decent cheerfulness, which are always serious themselves. A constant smirk upon the face, and a whiffing activity of the body, are strong indications of futility. Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him. Haste and hurry are different things. I have only mentioned some of those things which may and do in the opinion of the world, lower and sink characters, in other respects valuable enough. But I have taken no notion of those that affect and sink the moral characters. They are sufficiently obvious. A man who has patiently been kicked may as well pretend to courage, as a man blasted by vices and crimes made to dignity of any kind. But an exterior decency and dignity of manners will keep such a man longer from sinking than otherwise he would be. Of such a consequence is the—even though affected and put on. You read frequently, and with the utmost attention, nay get by heart, if you can, that incomparable chapter in Cicero's offices, upon the—or the decorum. It contains whatever is necessary for the dignity of manners. In my next I will send you a general map of courts, a region yet unexplored by you, but which you are one day to inhabit. The ways are generally crooked and full of turnings, sometimes strewed with flowers, sometimes choked up with briars, rotten ground and deep pits frequently lichen-sealed under a smooth and pleasing surface. All the paths are slippery, and every slip is dangerous. Sense and discretion must accompany you at your first setting out. But notwithstanding those, till experience is your guide, you will every now and then step out of your way or stumble. Lady Chesterfield has just now received your German letter, for which she thanks you. She says the language is very correct, and I can plainly see that the character is well-formed, not to say better than your English character. Continue to write German frequently, that it may become quite familiar to you. Adieu. CHESTTERFIELD'S LETTERS to his son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. LETTER 48 London, August 21st, old style, 1749. DEAR BOY, by the last letter that I received from Mr. Hart of the 31st of July, new style, I suppose you are now either at Venice or Verona, and perfectly recovered of your late illness, which I am daily more and more convinced, had no consumptive tendency. However, for some time still, v'cum si y'en a vol, be regular, and live pectorily. You will soon be at court, where, though you will not be concerned, yet reflection and observation upon what you see and hear there may be of use to you. Even hereafter you may come to be concerned in courts yourself. Nothing in courts is exactly as it appears to be. Often very different, sometimes directly contrary. Interest, which is the real spring of everything there, equally creates and dissolves friendship, produces and reconciles enemies, or rather, allows of neither real friendship nor enmities, for as Dryden very justly observes, politicians neither love nor hate. This is so true that you may think you connect yourself with two friends today, and be obliged to-morrow to make your option between them as enemies. Observe therefore such a degree of reserve with your friends as not to put yourself in their power, if they should become your enemies, and such a degree of moderation with your enemies as not to make it impossible for them to become your friends. Courts are unquestionably the seeds of politeness and good breeding, where they not so they would be the seeds of slaughter and desolation. Those who now smile upon and embrace would affront and stab each other if manners did not interpose. But ambition and avarice, the two prevailing passions at courts, found dissimilation more effectual than violence, and dissimulation introduced that habit of politeness which distinguishes the courtier from the country gentlemen. In the former case the strongest body would prevail, in the latter the strongest mind. A man of parts and efficiency need not flatter everybody at court, but he must take great care to offend nobody personally, it being in the power of every man to hurt him, who cannot serve him. Homer supposes a chain let down from Jupiter to earth to connect him with mortals. There is at all courts a chain which connects the prince or the minister with the page of the back stairs or the chambermaid. The king's wife or mistress has an influence over him. A lover has an influence over her. The chambermaid or the valet de chambre has an influence over both, and so add infinitum. You must therefore not break a link of that chain by which you hope to climb up to the prince. You must renounce courts if you will not connive at knaves and tolerate fools. Their number makes them considerable. You should as little quarrel as connect yourself with either. Whatever you say or do at court you may depend upon it will be known, who crowd levies in anti-chambers being to repeat all that they see or hear, and a great deal that they neither see nor hear, according as they are inclined to the person's concerned, and according to the wishes of those to whom they hope to make their court. Great caution is therefore necessary, and if, to great caution, you can join seeming frankness and openness, you will unite what Machiavelli reckons very difficult but very necessary to be united. Volto schiolto e pensieri scetti. Men are very apt to be mingled in court intrigues, but they deserve attention better than confidence. To hold by them is a very precarious tenure. I am agreeably interrupted in these reflections by a letter which I have this moment received from Baron Firmian. It contains your panegyric, and with the strongest protestations imaginable that he does you only justice. I receive this favorable account of you with pleasure, and I communicate it to you with as much. While you deserve praise, it is reasonable you should know that you meet with it, and I make no doubt, but that it will encourage you in persevering to deserve it. There is one paragraph of the Baron's letter. Se mur dans une âge chitendre, réglez selon tous les lores d'une morale exacte et sensée, son application, that is what I like, à tout ce qui s'appelle étude sérieuse et belle-être. Notwithstanding his great youth, his banners are regulated by the most unexceptionable rules of sense and of morality. His application, that is what I like, to every kind of serious study, as well as to polite literature, without even the least appearance of ostentation's penitry, render him worthy of your most tender affection, and I have the honour of assuring you that everyone cannot but be pleased with the acquisition of his acquaintance or of his friendship. I have profited of it, both here and at Vienna, and shall esteem myself very happy to make use of the permission he has given me of continuing it by letter. Reputation, like health, is preserved and increased by the same means which it is acquired. Continue to desire and deserve praise, and you will certainly find it. Knowledge adorned by manners will infallibly procure it. Consider that you have but a little way further to get to your journey's end. Therefore, for God's sake, do not slacken your pace. One year and a half more of sound application, Mr. Hart assures me, will finish this work, and when this work is finished well, your own will be very easily done afterward. Les manières et les grâces are no immaterial parts of that work, and I beg that you will give as much of your attention to them as to your books. Everything depends upon them. Senza di noi annifatica ivana. The various companies you now go into will procure them you, if you will carefully observe and form yourself upon those who have them. Adju, God bless you, and may you ever deserve that affection with which I am now yours.