 Chapter 93. London, December 5, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy. Those who suppose that men in general act rationally, because they are called rational creatures, know very little of the world, and if they act themselves upon that supposition, till nine times in ten find themselves grossly mistaken. That man is, Animal Bipes Implume Recibly, I entirely agree, but for the rationale I can only allow it him in Actu Primo, to talk logic, and seldom in Actu Secundo. Thus the speculative cloistered pedant in his solitary cell forms systems of things as they should be, not as they are, and rise as decisively and absurdly upon war, politics, manners and characters, as that pedant talked, who was so kind as to instruct Hannibal in the art of war. Such closet politicians never fail to assign the deepest motives for the most trifling actions, instead of often ascribing the greatest actions to the most trifling causes, in which they would be much seldomer mistaken. They read in Rite of Kings, Heroes and Statesmen, as never doing anything but upon the deepest principles of sound policy. But those who see and observe kings, heroes and statesmen, discover that they have headaches, indigestions, humours and passions just like other people, every one of which, in their turn, determines their wills, in defiance of their reason. Had we only read in the life of Alexander that he burned Persepolis, it would doubtless have been accounted for from deep policy. We should have been told that his new conquest could not have been secured without the destruction of that capital, which would have been the constant seat of cabals, conspiracies and revolts. But luckily we are informed at the same time that this hero, this demigod, this son and heir of Jupiter Ammon, happened to get extremely drunk with his whore, and by way of frolic, destroyed one of the finest cities in the world. Read men, therefore, yourself, not in books, but in nature. Adopt no systems but study them yourself. Observe their weaknesses, their passions, their humours, all of which their understandings are, nine times in ten, the dupes. You will then know that they are to be gained, influenced or led, much oftener by little things than by great ones, and consequently you will no longer think those things little which tend to such great purposes. Let us apply this now to the particular object of this letter. I mean speaking in and influencing public assemblies. The nature of our constitution makes eloquence more useful and more necessary in this country than in any other in Europe. A certain degree of good sense and knowledge is requisite for that, as well as for everything else. But beyond that, the purity of diction, the elegance of style, the harmony of periods, a pleasing elocution and a graceful action, are the things which a public speaker should attend to the most, because his audience certainly does, and understands them the best, or rather indeed understands little else. The late Lord Chancellor Cowper's strength as an orator lay by no means in his reasoning, for he often hazarded very weak ones. But such was the purity and elegance of his style, such the propriety and charms of his elocution, and such the gracefulness of his action, but he never spoke without universal applause. The ears and the eyes gave him up the hearts and the understandings of the audience. On the contrary, the late Lord Townsend always spoke materially, with argument and knowledge, but never pleased. Why? His diction was not only inelegant, but frequently ungrammatical, always vulgar, his cadences false, his voice unharmonious, and his action ungraceful. Nobody heard him with patience, and the young fellows used to joke upon him, and repeat his inaccuracies. The late Duke of Argyle, though the weakest reasoner, was the most pleasing speaker I ever knew in my life. He charmed, he warmed, he forcibly ravished the audience, not by his matter certainly, but by his manner of delivering it. A most genteel figure, a graceful noble air, and harmonious voice, and elegance of style, and a strength of emphasis, conspired to make him the most affecting, persuasive, and applauded speaker I ever saw. I was captivated like others, but when I came home, and coolly considered what he had said, stripped of all those ornaments in which he addressed it, I often found the matter flimsy, the arguments weak, and I was convinced of the power of those adventitious, concurring circumstances which ignorance of mankind only calls trifling ones. Cicero, in his book De Oratory, in order to raise the dignity of that profession which he well knew himself to be at the head of, asserts that a complete orator must be a complete everything, lawyer, philosopher, divine, etc. That would be extremely well, if it were possible, but man's life is not long enough, and I hold him to be the completest orator who speaks the best upon that subject which occurs, whose happy choice of words, whose lively imagination, whose elocution and action adorn and grace his matter, at the same time that they excite the attention and engage the passions of his audience. You will be of the House of Commons as soon as you are of age, and you must first make a figure there, if you would make a figure or a fortune in your country. This you can never do without that correctness and elegance in your own language, which you now seem to neglect, and which you have entirely to learn. Fortunately for you it is to be learned. Care and observation will do it, but do not flatter yourself that all the knowledge, sense, and reasoning in the world will ever make you a popular and applauded speaker, without the ornaments and the graces of style, elocution, and action. Sense and argument, though coarsely delivered, will have their weight in a private conversation, with two or three people of sense, but in a public assembly they will have none, if naked and destitute of the advantages I have mentioned. Cardinal de Retz observes, very justly, that every numerous assembly is a mob, influenced by their passions, humours, and affections, which nothing but eloquence ever did or ever can engage. This is so important a consideration for everybody in this country, and more particularly for you, that I earnestly recommend it to your most serious care and attention. Mind your addiction, in whatever language you either write or speak. Contract a habit of correctness and elegance. Consider your style, even in the freest conversation on most familiar letters. After, at least, if not before, you have said a thing, reflect if you could not have said it better. Where you doubt the propriety or elegance of a word or phrase, consult some good, dead, or living authority in that language. Use yourself to translate from various languages into English, correct those translations till they satisfy your ear, as well as your understanding. And be convinced of this truth, that the best sense and reason in the world will be as unwelcome in a public assembly, without these ornaments, as they will in public companies, without the assistance of manners and politeness. If you will please people, you must please them in their own way, and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are. I repeat it again, they are only to be taken by aggrimant, and by what flatters their senses in their hearts. Rabelais first wrote a most excellent book which nobody liked. Then, determined to conform to the public taste, he wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, which everybody liked, extravagant as it was. End of Section sixty-two. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section sixty-three of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter ninety-four. London. December ninth, old style, seventeen forty-nine. Dear boy. It is now above forty years since I have never spoken nor written one single word, without giving myself at least one moment's time to consider whether it was a good or a bad one, and whether I could not find out a better in its place. An unharmonious and rugged period at this time shocks my ears, and I, like all the rest of the world, will willingly exchange and give up some degree of rough sense for a good degree of pleasing sound. I will freely and truly own to you, without either vanity or false modesty, that whatever reputation I have acquired as a speaker is more owing to my constant attention to my diction than to my matter, which was necessarily just the same as other peoples. When you come into Parliament, your reputation as a speaker will depend much more upon your words and your periods than upon the subject. This same matter occurs equally to everybody of common sense, upon the same question. The dressing it well is what excites the attention and admiration of the audience. It is in Parliament that I have set my heart upon your making a figure. It is there that I want to have you justly proud of yourself and to make me justly proud of you. This means that you must be a good speaker there. I use the word must, because you know you may if you will. The vulgar, who are always mistaken, look upon a speaker and a comet with the same astonishment and admiration, taking them both for preternatural phenomenon. This error discourages many young men from attempting that character, and good speakers are willing to have their talent considered as something very extraordinary, if not a peculiar gift of God to his elect. But let you and me analyze and simplify this good speaker. Let a strip him of those adventurous plumes with which his own pride and the ignorance of others have decked him, and we shall find the true definition of him to be no more than this. A man of good common sense who reasons justly and expresses himself elegantly on that subject upon which he speaks. There is surely no witchcraft in this. A man of sense, without a superior and astonishing degree of parts, will not talk nonsense upon any subject, nor will he, if he has the least taste or application, talk inelegantly. What, then, does all this mighty art and mystery of speaking in Parliament amount to? Why, no more than this, that the man who speaks in the House of Commons speaks in that House, and to four hundred people. That opinion upon a given subject which he would make no difficulty of speaking in any House in England, round the fire, or at a table, to any fourteen people whatsoever. Better judges, perhaps, and severer critics of what he says than any fourteen gentlemen of the House of Commons. I have spoken frequently in Parliament, and not always without some applause, and therefore I can assure you from my experience, that there is very little in it. The elegance of the style, and the turn of the periods, make the chief impressions upon the hearers. Give them but one or two round and harmonious periods in a speech, which they will retain and repeat, and they will go home as well satisfied as people do from an opera, humming all the way one or two favourite tunes that have struck their ears, and were easily caught. Most people have ears, but few have judgment. Tickle those ears, and depend upon it, you will catch their judgments such as they are. Cicero, conscious that he was at the top of his profession, for in his time eloquence was a profession. In order to set himself off, defines in his treatise de oratory, an orator to be such a man as never was, nor never will be. And by his fallacious argument says that he must know every art and science whatsoever, or how shall he speak upon them. But with submission to go to so great an authority, my definition of an orator is extremely different from, and I believe much truer than his. I call that man an orator, who reasons justly and expresses himself elegantly upon whatever subject he treats. Problems in geometry, equations in algebra, processes in chemistry, and experiments in anatomy, are never that I have heard of the object of eloquence, and therefore I humbly conceive that a man may be a very fine speaker, and yet know nothing of geometry, algebra, chemistry, or anatomy. The subjects of all parliamentary debates are subject of common sense singly. Thus I write whatever occurs to me, that I think may contribute either to form or inform you. May my labour not be in vain, and it will not, if you will but have half the concern for yourself that I have for you. Adieu. End of Section 63. Read by Professor Heather and Bye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 64 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 95. London, December 12, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy. Lord Clarendon, in his history, says of Mr. John Hampton that he had a head to contrive, a tongue to persuade, and a hand to execute any mischief. I shall not now enter into the justice of this character of Mr. Hampton, to whose braves stand against the illegal demand of ship-money we owe our present liberties. But I mention it to you as the character, which with the alteration of one single word, good, instead of mischief, I would have you aspire to, and use your utmost endeavours to deserve. The head to contrive, God must to a certain degree have given you, but it is in your own power greatly to improve it, by study, observation, and reflection. As for the tongue to persuade, it wholly depends upon yourself, and without it the best head will contrive to very little purpose. The hand to execute depends likewise, in my opinion, in a great measure upon yourself. Serious reflection will always give courage in a good cause, and the courage arising from reflection is of much a superior nature to the animal and constitutional courage of a foot-soldier. The former is steady and unshaken, where the notice is dignus vindus. The latter is oftener improperly than improperly exerted, but always brutally. The second member of my text, to speak ecclesiastically, shall be the subject of my following discourse, the tongue to persuade, as judicious preachers recommend those virtues, which they think their several audiences want the most, such as truth in continents at court, disinterest in this in the city, and sobriety in the country. You must certainly, in the course of your little experience, have felt the different effects of elegant and inelegant speaking. Do you not suffer, when people accost you in a stammering or hesitating manner, in an untuneful voice, with false accents and cadences, puzzling and blundering through solicisms, barbarisms, and vulgarisms, misplacing even their bad words and inverting all method? Does not this prejudice you against their matter, be it what it will, nay, even against their persons? I am sure it does me. On the other hand, do you not feel yourself inclined, prepossessed, nay, even engaged in favour of those who address you in the direct, contrary manner? The effects of a correct and adorned style of method and perspicuity are incredible toward persuasion. They often supply the want of reason and argument. But when used in the support of reason and argument, they are irresistible. The French attend very much to the purity and elegance of their style, even in common conversation, in so much that it is a character to say of a man, qu'il n'a bien. Their conversations frequently turn upon the delicacies of their language, and an academy is employed in fixing it. The Crisca in Italy has the same object, and I have met with very few Italians who did not speak their own language correctly and elegantly. How much more necessary is it for an Englishman to do so, who is to speak it in a public assembly, where the laws and liberties of his country are the subject of his deliberation? The tongue that would persuade there must not content itself with mere articulation. You know what Paine's Demosthenes took to correct his naturally bad elocution. You know that he declined by the seaside in storms to prepare himself for the noise of the tumultuous assemblies he was to speak to. And you can now judge of the correctness and elegance of his style. He thought all these things of consequence, and he thought right. Pray, do you think so, too? It is of the utmost consequence to you to be of that opinion. If you have the least defect in your elocution, take the utmost care and pains to correct it. Do not neglect your style, whatever language you speak in, or whoever you speak to, were at your footmen. Seek always for the best words and the happiest expressions you can find. Do not content yourself with being barely understood, but adorn your thoughts and dress them as you would your person, which however well proportioned it might be, it would be very improper and indecent to exhibit naked, or even worse dressed than people of your sort are. I have sent you in a packet which your life-sig acquaintance, Duvall, sends to his correspondent at Rome, Lord Bollingbroke's book, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, on the idea of a Patriot King which he published about a year ago. I desire that you will read it over and over again, with particular attention to the style, and to all those beauties of oratory with which it is adorned. Till I read that book, I confess I did not know all the extent and powers of the English language. Lord Bollingbroke has both a tongue and a pen to persuade. His manner of speaking in private conversation is full as elegant as his writings. Whatever subject he either speaks or writes upon, he adorns with the most splendid eloquence, not a studied or a labored eloquence, but such a flowing happiness of diction, which from care perhaps at first is become so habitual to him that even his most familiar conversations, if taken down in writing, would bear the press without the least correction either as to method or style. If his conduct in the former part of his life had been equal to all his natural and acquired talents, he would most justly have merited the epithet of all accomplished. He is himself sensible of his past errors. Those violent passions which seduced him and his youth have now subsided by age, and take him as he is now, the character of an all accomplished is more his due than any man's I ever knew in my life. But he has been a most mortifying instance of the violence of human passions and of the weakness of the most exalted human reason. His virtues and his vices, his reason and his passions did not blend themselves by a graduation of tints, but formed a shining and sudden contrast. Here the darkest, the most splendid colors, and both rendered more shining from their proximity. Impetuosity, excess, and almost extravagance characterize not only his passions but even his senses. His youth was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of pleasures, in which he most licentiously triumphed, disdaining all decorum. His fine imagination has often been heated and exhausted, with his body, in celebrating and deifying the prostitute of the night, and his convivial joys were pushed to all the extravagance of frantic buck-and-alls. Those passions were interrupted but by a stronger ambition. The former impaired both his constitution and his character, but the latter destroyed both his fortune and his reputation. He has noble and generous sentiments rather than fixed, reflected principles of good nature and friendship, but they are more violent than lasting, and suddenly and often varied to their opposite extremes with regard to the same persons. He receives the common attentions of civility as obligations, which he returns with interests, and resents with passion the little inadvertencies of human nature, which he repays with interests, too. Even a difference of opinion upon a philosophical subject would provoke, and prove him no practical philosopher, at least. Notwithstanding the dissipation of his youth and the tumultuous agitation of his middle age, he has an infinite fund of various and almost universal knowledge, which from the clearest and quickest conception and happiest memory that ever man was blessed with he always carries about him. It is his pocket money, and he never has occasion to draw upon a book for any sum. He excels more particularly in history, as his historical works plainly prove. The relative political and commercial interests of every country in Europe, particularly of his own, are better known to him than perhaps to any man in it. But how steadily he has pursued the latter in his public conduct, his enemies of all parties and denominations tell with joy. He engaged young and distinguished himself in business, and his penetration was almost intuition. I am old enough to have heard him speak in Parliament. And I remember that, though prejudiced against him by party, I felt all the force and charms of his eloquence. Like Belial in Milton, he made the worse appear the better cause. All the internal and external advantages and talents of an orator are undoubtedly his. Figure, voice, elocution, knowledge, and above all, the purest and most flawed diction, with the justice, metaphors and happiest images, had raised him to the post of Secretary at War at twenty-four years old, an age at which others are hardly thought fit for the smallest employments. During his long exile in France he applied himself to study with his characteristical ardor, and there he formed and chiefly executed the plan of a great philosophical work. The common bonds of human knowledge are too narrow for his warm and aspiring imagination. He must go extra flamantia menia mundi, and explore the unknown and unknowable regions of metaphysics, which open an unbounded field for the excursion of an ardent imagination, where endless conjectures supply the defect of unattainable knowledge, and too often usurp both its name and its influence. He has had a very handsome person, with a most engaging address in his air and manners. He has all the dignity and good breeding which a man of quality should or can have, and which so few in this country at least really have. He professes himself a deist, believing in a general providence, but doubting of, though by no means rejecting, as is commonly supposed, the immortality of the soul and a future state. Upon the whole of this extraordinary man, what can we say but alas poor human nature? In your destination you will have frequent occasion to speak in public, to princes and states abroad, to the house of commons at home, judge then whether eloquence is necessary for you or not, not only common eloquence, which is rather free from faults than adorned by beauties, but the highest, the most shining degree of eloquence. For God's sake, have this object always in your view and in your thoughts. Tune your tongue early to persuasion, and let no jarring, dissonant accents ever fall from it. Contract a habit of speaking well upon every occasion, and neglect yourself in no one. Tune some good-breeding alone will carry an exceeding small degree of parts and knowledge. Will carry a man a great way. With your parts and knowledge, then, how far will they not carry you? Adieu. CHESTORFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON Red for LibriVox.org into the public domain. LETTER 96 LONDON December 16, old style, 1749. DEAR BOY This letter will, I hope, find you safely arrived and well settled at Rome, after the usual distresses and accidents of a winter journey, which are very proper to teach you patience. Your stay there I look upon as a very important period of your life, and I do believe that you will fill it up well. I hope you will employ the mornings diligently with Mr. Hart in acquiring weight, and in the evenings in the best companies at Rome in acquiring luster. A formal dull father would recommend to you to plod out the evenings, too, at home, over a book by a dim taper, but I recommend to you the evenings for your pleasures, which are as much a part of your education, and almost as necessary a one, as your morning studies. Go to whatever assemblies or spectacles people of fashion go to, and when you are there do as they do. Endeavour to outshine those who shine there the most. Get the garbo, the gentilesa, the leggeradria of the Italians. Make love to the most impertinent beauty of condition that you meet with, and be gallant with all the rest. Speak Italian, right or wrong, to everybody, and if you do but laugh at yourself first for your bad Italian, nobody else will laugh at you for it. That is the only way to speak it perfectly, which I expect you will do, because I am sure you may before you leave Rome. View the most curious remains of antiquity with the classical spirit, and they will clear up to you many passages of the classical authors, particularly the Trajan and Antonine columns, where you will find the warlike instruments, the dresses, and the triumphal ornaments of the Romans. Buy also the prints and explanations of all those respectable remains of Roman grandeur, and compare them with the originals. Most young travelers are contented with the general view of those things. Say they are very fine, and then go about their business. I hope you will examine them in a very different way. Approfondise everything you see or hear, and learn, if you can, the why and the wherefore. Inquire into the meaning and the objects of the innumerable processions, which you will see at Rome at this time. Assist at all the ceremonies, and know the reason, or at least the pretenses of them, and however absurd they may be, see and speak of them with great decency. Of all things I beg you not to herd with your own countrymen, but to be always either with the Romans or with the foreign ministers residing at Rome. You are sent abroad to see the manners and characters, and learn the languages of foreign countries, and not to converse with English in English, which would defeat all those ends. Among your graver company, I recommend, as I have done before, the Jesuits to you. Whose learning and address will both please and improve you. Inform yourself as much as you can of the history, policy, and practice of that society, from the time of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, who was himself a magman. If you would know their morality, you will find it fully and admirably stated in Le L'Artre d'un Provincial, by the famous Monsieur Pascal, and it is a book very well worth your reading. Few people see what they see, or hear what they hear. That is, they see and hear so inattentively and superficially, that they are very little better for what they do see and hear. This I dare say neither is nor will be your case. You will understand, reflect upon, and consequently retain, what you see and hear. You have still two years good, but no more, to form your character in the world decisively. For within two months after your arrival in England, it will be finally and irrevocably determined, one way or another, in the opinion of the public. Devote therefore these two years to the pursuit of perfection, which ought to be everybody's object, though in some particulars unattainable. Those who strive and labor the most will come the nearest to it. But above all things, aim at it in the two important arts of speaking and pleasing. Without them are all your other talents maimed and crippled. They are the wings upon which you must soar above other people. Without them you will only crawl with the dull mass of mankind. Pre-possessed by your air, address in your manners, persuade by your tongue, and you will easily execute what your head is contrived. I desire that you will send me very minute accounts from Rome, not of what you see, but of who you see, of your pleasures and entertainments. Tell me what companies you frequent most and how you are received. December 19, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy. The knowledge of mankind is a very useful knowledge for everybody, a most necessary one for you, who are destined to an active, public life. You will have to do with all sorts of characters. You should therefore know them thoroughly in order to manage them ably. This knowledge is not to be gotten systematically. You must acquire it yourself by your own observation and sagacity. I will give you such hints as I think may be useful landmarks in your intended progress. I have often told you, and it is most true, that with regard to mankind we must not draw general conclusions from certain particular principles, though in the main true ones. We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will therefore always act rationally. Or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in the pursuit of it. No, we are complicated machines, and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which in their turns retard, precipitate, and sometimes stop that motion. Let us exemplify. I will suppose ambition to be, as it commonly is, the predominant passion of a minister of state, and I will suppose that minister to be an able one. Will he therefore invariably pursue the object of that predominant passion? May I be sure that he will do so and so because he ought? Nothing less. Sickness or low spirits may damp this predominant passion. Humor and peevishness may triumph over it. Inferior passions may at time surprise it and prevail. Is this ambitious statesman amorous? Indiscreet and unguarded confidence, made in tender moments to his wife or his mistress, may defeat all his schemes. Is he avaricious? Some great lucrative object, suddenly presenting itself, may unravel all the work of his ambition. Is he passionate? Contradiction and provocation, sometimes it may be too, artfully intended, may extort rash and inconsiderate expressions or actions destructive of his main object. Is he vain and open to flattery? An artful, flattering favorite may mislead him, and even laziness may, at certain moments, make him neglect or omit the necessary steps to that height at which he wants to arrive. Seek first, then, for the predominant passion of the character which you mean to engage in influence, and address yourself to it, but without defying or despising the inferior passions. Get them in your interest, too, for now and then they will have their terms. In many cases you may not have it in your power to contribute to the gratification of the prevailing passion. Then take the next best to your aid. There are many avenues to every man, and when you cannot get at him through the great one, try the serpentine ones, and you will arrive at last. There are two inconsistent passions, which, however frequently accompany each other, like man and wife, and which, like man and wife, too, are commonly clogs upon each other. I mean ambition and avarice. The latter is often the true cause of the former, and then is the predominant passion. It seems to have been so in Cardinal Mazaran, who did anything, submitted to anything, and forgave anything for the sake of plunder. He loved and courted power, like a usurer, because it carried profit along with it. Whoever should have formed his opinion or taken his measures singly from the ambitious part of Cardinal Mazaran's character would have found himself often mistaken. Some who had found this out made their fortunes by letting him cheat them at play. On the contrary, Cardinal Richelieu's prevailing passion seems to have been ambition, and his immense riches only the natural consequence of that ambition gratified. And yet I make no doubt but that ambition had now and then its turn with the former and avarice with the latter. Richelieu, by the way, is so strong a proof of the inconsistency of human nature that I cannot help observing to you that while he absolutely governed both his king and his country, and was in a great degree the arbiter of the fate of all Europe, he was more jealous of the great reputation of Cornel than of the power of Spain, and more flattered with being thought what he was not, the best poet, than with being thought what he certainly was, the greatest statesman in Europe, and affairs stood still while he was concerning the criticism upon the sid. Could one think this possible, if one did not know it to be true? Though men are all of one composition, the literal ingredients are so differently proportioned in each individual that no two are exactly alike, and no one at all times like himself. The ablest man will sometimes do weak things, the proudest man mean things, the honestest man ill things, and the wickedest man good ones. Study individuals, then, and if you take as you ought to do their outlines from their prevailing passion, suspend your last finishing strokes till you have attended to, and discovered the operations of their inferior passions, appetites, and humours. A man's general character may be that of the honestest man in the world. Do not dispute it. You might be thought envious or ill-natured. But at the same time, do not take this probity upon trust to such a degree as to put your life, fortune, or reputation in his power. This honest man may happen to be your rival in power, in interest, or in love. Three passions that often put honesty to most severe trials, in which it is too often cast, but first analyze this honest man yourself, and then only will you be able to judge how far you may or may not, with safety, trust him. Women are much more like each other than men. They have in truth but two passions, vanity and love. These are their universal characteristics. An agrippina may sacrifice them to ambition or a mesoline as a lust. But those instances are rare. And in general, all they say and all they do tends to the gratification of their vanity or their love. He who flatters them most pleases them best. And they are the most in love with him, who they think is the most in love with them. No adulation is too strong for them. No assiduity too great. No simulation of passion too gross. As, on the other hand, the least word or action that can possibly be construed into a slight or contempt is unpardonable and never forgotten. Men are in this respect tender too, and will sooner forgive an injury than an insult. Some men are more capcious than others. Some are always wrong-headed. But every man living has such a share of vanity as to be hurt by marks of slight and contempt. Every man does not pretend to be a poet, a mathematician or a statesman, and considered as such. But every man pretends to common sense, and to fill his place in the world with common decency. And consequently, does not easily forgive those negligences, in attentions and slights, which seem to call in question or utterly deny him both these pretensions. Suspect in general those who remarkably affect any one virtue, who raise it above all others, and who in a manner intimate that they possess it exclusively. I say suspect them, for they are commonly impostors, but do not be sure that they are always so, for I have sometimes known saints really religious, blusterers really brave, reformers of manners really honest, and prudes really chaste. Pry into the recesses of their hearts yourself as far as you are able, and never implicitly adopt a character upon common fame, which, though generally right as to the great outlines of characters, is always wrong in some particulars. Be upon your guard against those who, upon very slight acquaintance, obtrude their unasked and unmerited friendship and confidence upon you, for they probably cram you with them only for their own eating. But at the same time do not roughly reject them upon that general supposition. Examine further and see whether those unexpected offers flow from a warm heart and a silly head, or from a designing head and a cold heart, for navery and folly have often the same symptoms. In the first case there is no danger in accepting them. Valiant, quantum, valiere possent. In the latter case it may be useful to seem to accept them, and artfully to turn the battery upon him who raised it. There is an incontinency of friendship among young fellows, who are associated by their mutual pleasures only, which has very frequently bad consequences. A parcel of warm hearts and inexperienced heads, heeded by convivial mirth, and possibly a little too much wine, vow and really mean at the time eternal friendships to each other, and indiscreetly pour out their whole souls in common and without the least reserve. These confidences are as indiscreetly repealed as they were made, for new pleasures and new places soon dissolve this ill-cemented connection, and then very ill uses are made of these rash confidences. Bear your part, however, in young companies. Nay, excel if you can in all the social and convivial joy and festivity that become youth. Trust them with your love-tales, if you please, but keep your serious views secret. Trust those only to some tried friend, more experienced than yourself, and who, being in a different walk of life from you, is not likely to become your rival. For I would not advise you to depend so much upon the heroic virtue of mankind, as to hope or believe that your competitor will ever be your friend, as to the object of that competition. These are reserves and cautions very necessary to have, but very imprudent to show. The Volto Schialto should accompany them. Great talents and great virtues, if you should have them, will procure you the respect and admiration of mankind. But it is the lesser talents, the lineores vertutes, which must procure you their love and affection. The former, unassisted and unadorned by the latter, will extort praise, but will at the same time excite both fear and envy, two sentiments absolutely incompatible with love and affection. Caesar had all the great vices and Cato all the great virtues that men could have. But Caesar had the lineores vertutes which Cato wanted, and which made him beloved even by his enemies, and gained him the hearts of mankind, in spite of their reason. While Cato was not even beloved by his friends, notwithstanding the esteem and respect which they could not refuse to his virtues. And I am apt to think that if Caesar had wanted and Cato possessed those lineores vertutes, the former would not have attempted, at least with success, and the latter could not have protected, the liberties of Rome. Mr. Addison, in his Cato, says of Caesar, and I believe with truth, curse on his virtues, they've undone his country, by which he means those lesser but engaging virtues of gentleness, affability, complacence, and good humor. The knowledge of a scholar, the courage of a hero, and the virtue of a stoic, will be admired. But if the knowledge be accompanied with arrogance, the courage with ferocity, and the virtue with inflexible severity, the man will never be loved. The heroism of Charles XII of Sweden, if his brutal courage deserves that name, was universally admired, but the man nowhere beloved. Whereas Henry IV of France, who had full as much courage, and was much longer engaged in wars, was generally beloved upon account of his lesser and social virtues. We are also formed, that our understandings are generally the dupes of our hearts, that is, of our passions, and the surest way to the former is through the latter, which must be engaged by the lineores vertutes alone, and the manner of exerting them. The insolence-ability of a proud man is, for example, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be, because he shows you by his manner that he thinks at mere condescension in him, and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim. He intimates his protection instead of his friendship, by a gracious nod instead of a usual bow, and rather signifies his consent that you may, than his invitation that you should sit, walk, eat, or drink with him. The cost of liberty of a purse-proud man insults the distresses it sometimes relieves. He takes care to make you feel your own misfortunes, and the difference between your situation and his, both which he insinuates to be justly merited, yours by your folly, his by his wisdom. The arrogant pedant does not communicate, but promulgates his knowledge. He does not give it you, but he inflicts it upon you, and is, if possible, more desirous to show you your own ignorance than his own learning. Such manners is these, not only in the particular instances which I have mentioned, but likewise in all others, shock and revolt that little pride and vanity which every man has in his heart, and obliterate in us the obligation for the favor conferred, by reminding us of the motive which produced, and the manner which accompanied it. These faults point out their opposite perfections, and your own good-sense will naturally suggest them to you. But besides these lesser virtues there are what may be called the lesser talents or accomplishments, which are of great use to adorn and recommend all the greater, and the more so, as all people are judges of the one, but few are of the other. Everybody feels the impression which an engaging address and agreeable manner of speaking and an easy politeness makes upon them, and they prepare the way for the favorable reception of their betters. CHESTERFIELD'S LETTER NINETY-NINE London, December 26, old-style 1749. My dear friend, the new year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form, and concern which they seldom feel. This is not the case between you and me, where truth leaves no room for compliments. DETB DENT ANOS DETO NAM SATERA SUMES was said formerly to one by a man who certainly did not think it. With the variation of one word only I will, with great truth, say it to you. I will make the first part conditional by changing in the second the NAM to see. May you live as long as you are fit to live but no longer, or may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live than after. My true tenderness for you makes me think more of the manner than of the length of your life, and forbids me to wish it prolonged by a single day, that should bring guilt, reproach, and shame upon you. I have not malice enough in my nature to wish that to my greatest enemy. You are the principal object of all my cares, the only object of all my hopes. I have now reason to believe that you will reward the former and answer the latter. In that case may you live long, for you must live happy. DETE NAM SATERA SUMES Conscious virtue is the only solid foundation of all happiness, for riches, power, rank, or whatever, in the common acceptance of the word, is supposed to constitute happiness, will never quiet, much less cure, the inward pangs of guilt. To that main wish I will add those of the good old nurse of Horus in his epistle to Tybalus. Sappare, you have it in a good degree already. Et fare ut pusit case sentiet. Have you that? More much more is meant by it than common speech or mere articulation. I fear that still remains to be wished for, and I earnestly wish it to you. Gratia and fama will inevitably accompany the above mentioned qualifications. The valetudo is the only one that is not in your own power. Heaven alone can grant it you, and may it do so abundantly. As for the Mundus Victus, non deficiente quimena, do you deserve, and I will provide them. It is with the greatest pleasure that I consider the fair prospect which you have before you. You have seen, read, and learned more at your age than most young fellows have done at two or three and twenty. Your destination is a shining one, and leads to rank, fortune, and distinction. Your education has been calculated for it, and to do you justice, that education has not been thrown away upon you. You want but two things, which do not want conjuration, but only care to acquire, eloquence and manners, that is, the graces of speech and the graces of behavior. You may have them. They are as much in your power as powdering your hair is, and will you let the want of them obscure, as it certainly will do, that shining prospect which presents itself to you. I am sure you will not. They are the sharp end, the point of the nail that you are driving, which must make way first for the larger and more solid parts to enter. Supposing your moral character is pure, and your knowledge is sound, as I really believe them both to be, you want nothing for that perfection which I have so constantly wished you, and taken so much pains to give you, but eloquence and politeness. A man who is not born with poetical genius can never be a poet, or at best an extremely bad one, but every man who can speak it all can speak elegantly and correctly if he pleases, by attending to the best authors and orators, and indeed I would advise those who do not speak elegantly not to speak at all, for I am sure they will get more by their silence than by their speech. As for politeness, whoever keeps good company, and is not polite, must deform to resolution, and take some pains not to be so. Otherwise he would naturally and insensibly take the air, the address, and the turn of those he converses with. You will probably in the course of this year see as great a variety of good company in the several capitals you will be at, as in any one year of your life, and consequently must, I should hope, catch some of their manners, almost whether you will or not. But as I dare say you will endeavor to do it, I am convinced you will succeed, and that I shall have the pleasure of finding you at your return here, one of the best bread men in Europe. I imagine that when you receive my letters, and come to those parts of them which relate to eloquence and politeness, you say, or at least think, what, will he never have done upon those two subjects? Has he not said all he can say upon them? Why, the same thing, over and over again? If you do think or say so, it must proceed from your not yet knowing the infinite importance of these two accomplishments, which I cannot recommend to you too often, nor inculcate too strongly. But if, on the contrary, you are convinced of the utility, or rather the necessity of those two accomplishments, and are determined to acquire them, my repeated admonitions are only unnecessary, and I grudge no trouble which can possibly be of the least use to you. I flatter myself that your stay at Rome will go a great way toward answering all my views. I am sure it will if you employ your time and your whole time as you should. Your first morning hours I would have you devote to your graver studies with Mr. Hart. In the middle part of the day I would have you employed in seeing things, and the evenings in seeing people. You are not, I hope, of a lazy, inactive turn, in either body or mind, and in that case the day is full long enough for everything, especially at Rome, where it is not the fashion, as it is here and at Paris, to embezzle at least half of it a table. But if by accident two or three hours are sometimes wanting for some useful purpose, borrow them from your sleep. Six or at most seven hours sleep is, for a constancy, as much as you or anybody can want. More is only laziness in dozing, and is I am persuaded both unwholesome and stupefying. If by chance your business or your pleasures should keep you up till four or five o'clock in the morning, I would advise you, however, to rise exactly at your usual time, that you may not lose the precious morning hours, and that the want of sleep may force you to go to bed earlier the next night. This is what I was advised to do when very young, by a very wise man, and what I assure you I always did in the most dissipated part of my life. I have very often gone to bed at six in the morning and rose not withstanding at eight, by which means I got many hours in the morning that my companions lost, and the want of sleep obliged me to keep good hours the next, or at least the third night. To this method I owe the greatest part of my reading, for from twenty to forty I should certainly have read very little, if I had not been up while my acquaintances were in bed. Know the true value of time, snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination, never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. That was the rule of the famous and unfortunate pensionary DeWitt, who, by strictly following it, found time, not only to do the whole business of the Republic, but to pass his evenings at assemblies and suppers, as if he had had nothing else to do or think of. Adieu, my dear friend, for such I shall call you, and as such I shall, for the future live with you, for I disclaim all titles which imply an authority, that I am persuaded you will never give me occasion to exercise. Moltos and Feliciers, most sincerely, to Mr. Hart. CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON Red for LibriVox.org into the public domain. LETTER 100 London, January 8, Old Style, 1750 Dear Boy, I have seldom or never written to you upon the subject of religion and morality. Your own reason I am persuaded has given you true notions of both. They speak best for themselves, but if they wanted assistance, you have Mr. Hart at hand, both for precept and example. To your own reason, therefore, and to Mr. Hart, shall I refer you for the reality of both, and confine myself in this letter to the decency, the utility, and the necessity of scrupulously preserving the appearances of both. When I say the appearances of religion, I do not mean that you should talk or act like a missionary or an enthusiast, nor that you should take up a controversial cudgel against who ever attacks the sect you are of. This would be both useless and unbecoming your age. But I mean that you should by no means seem to approve, encourage, or applaud those libertine notions which strike at religions equally, and which are the poor threadbare topics of half wits and minute philosophers. Even those who are silly enough to laugh at their jokes are still wise enough to distrust and attest their characters. For putting moral virtues at the highest and religion at the lowest, religion must still be allowed to be a collateral security, at least, to virtue, and every prudent man will sooner trust to two securities than to one. Whenever, therefore, you happen to be in company with those pretended esprit-faux, or with thoughtless libertines, who laugh at all religion to show their wit, or disclaim it to complete their riot. Let no word or look of yours intimate the least approbation. On the contrary, let a silent gravity express your dislike, but enter not into the subject and decline such unprofitable and indecent controversies. Depend upon this truth, that every man is the worst looked upon, and the less trusted for being thought to have no religion. In spite of all the pompous and specious epithets he may assume, of esprit-faux, freethinker, or moral philosopher, and a wise atheist, if such a thing there is, would for his own interest in character in this world pretend to some religion. Your moral character must be not only pure, but like Caesar's wife, unsuspected. The least speck or blemish upon it is fatal. Nothing degrades and vilifies more, for it excites and unites detestation and contempt. There are, however, wretches in the world profligate enough to explode all notions of moral good and evil. To maintain that they are merely local, and depend entirely upon the customs and fashions of different countries. Nay, there are still, if possible, more unaccountable wretches. I mean those who affect to preach and propagate such absurd and infamous notions without believing them themselves. These are the devil's hypocrites. Avoid as much as possible the company of such people, who reflect a degree of discredit and infamy upon all who converse with them. But as you may sometimes by accident fall into such company, take great care that no complacence, no good humor, no warmth of infestal mirth ever make you seem, even to acquiesce, much less to approve or applaud such infamous doctrines. On the other hand, do not debate nor enter into serious argument upon a subject so much below it, but content yourself with telling these apostles that you know they are not serious, that you have a much better opinion of them than they would have you have, and that you are very sure they would not practice the doctrine they preach, but put your private mark upon them, and shun them forever afterward. There is nothing so delicate as your moral character, and nothing which it is your interest so much to preserve pure. Should you be suspected of injustice, malignity, perfidity, lying, etc., all the parts and knowledge in the world will never procure you esteem, friendship, or respect. A strange concurrence of circumstances has sometimes raised very bad men to high stations. But they have been raised like criminals to a pillory, where their persons and their crimes, by being more conspicuous, are only the more known, the more detested, and the more pelted and insulted. If in any case whatsoever affectation and ostentation are pardonable, it is in the case of morality, though even there I would not advise you to a Pharisee called pomp of virtue. But I will recommend you to a most scrupulous tenderness for your moral character, and the utmost care not to say or do the least thing that may ever so slightly taint it. Show yourself upon all occasions the advocate, the friend, but not the bully of virtue. Colonel Schart, whom you have certainly heard of, who was, I believe, the most notorious blasted rascal in the world, and who had by all sorts of crimes amassed immense wealth, was so sensible of the disadvantage of a bad character that I heard him once say, in his impudent, profligate manner, that though he would not give one farthing for virtue, he would give ten thousand pounds for a character, because he should get a hundred thousand pounds by it, whereas he was so blasted that he had no longer an opportunity of cheating people. Is it possible, then, that an honest man can neglect what a wise rogue would purchase so dear? There is one of the vices above mentioned, into which people of good education, and in the mane of good principles sometimes fall, from mistaken notions of skill, dexterity, and self-defense. I mean lying, though it is inseparably attended with more infamy and loss than any other. The prudence and necessity of often concealing the truth insensibly seduces people to violate it. It is the only art of mean capacities, and the only refuge of mean spirits. Whereas concealing the truth upon proper occasions is as prudent and as innocent as telling a lie upon any occasion is infamous and foolish. I will state you a case in your own department. Suppose you are employed at a foreign court, and that the minister of that court is absurd or impertinent enough to ask you what your instructions are. Will you tell him a lie, which as soon as found out, and found out it certainly will be, must destroy your credit, blast your character, and render you useless there? No. Will you tell him the truth, then, and betray your trust? As certainly no. But you will answer with firmness that you are surprised at such a question, that you are persuaded he does not expect an answer to it. But that at all events he certainly will not have one. Such an answer will give him confidence in you. He will conceive an opinion of your veracity, of which opinion you may afterward make very honest and fair advantages. But if in negotiations you are looked upon as a liar and trickster, no confidence will be placed in you, nothing will be communicated to you, and you will be in the situation of a man who has been burned in the peak, and who from that mark cannot afterward get an honest livelihood if he would, but must continue a thief. Lord Bacon very justly makes a distinction between simulation and dissimulation, and allows the latter rather than the former, but still observes that they are the weaker sort of politicians who have recourse to either. A man who has strength of mind and strength of parts wants neither of them. Certainly, says he, the ablest men that ever were have all had an openness and frankness of dealing, and a name of certainty and veracity. But then they were like horses well managed, for they could tell passing well, when to stop or turn, and at such times, when they thought the case indeed required some dissimulation, if they then used it, it came to pass that the former opinions spread abroad of their good faith and clearness of dealing, made them almost invisible. There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of line which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so, for it hurts nobody but themselves. This sort of line is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly. These people deal in the marvellous. They have seen some things that never existed. They have seen other things which they never really saw, though they did exist, only because they were thought worth seeing. As anything remarkable been said or done in any place or in any company, they immediately present and declare themselves eye or ear witnesses of it. They have done feats themselves unattempted, or at least unperformed by others. They are always the heroes of their own fables, and think that they gain consideration, or at least present attention by it. Whereas in truth, all that they get is ridicule and contempt, not without a good degree of distrust, for one must naturally conclude that he who will tell any lie from idle vanity will not scruple telling a greater for interest. Had I really seen anything so very extraordinary as to be almost incredible, I would keep it to myself, rather than by telling it give anybody room to doubt for one minute of my veracity. It is most certain that the reputation of chastity is not so necessary for a woman as that of veracity is for a man, and with reason, for it is possible for a woman to be virtuous, though not strictly chaste, but it is not possible for a man to be virtuous without strict veracity. The slips of the poor women are sometimes mere bodily frailties, but a lie in a man is a vice of the mind and of the heart. For God's sake be scrupulously jealous of the purity of your moral character. Keep it immaculate, unblemished, unsullied, and it will be unsuspected. Defamation and collumny never attack, where there is no weak place. They magnify, but they do not create. There is a very great difference between the purity of character, which I so earnestly recommend to you, and the stoical gravity and austerity of character, which I do by no means recommend to you. At your age I would no more wish you to be a Cato than a Claudius. Be and be reckoned a man of pleasure as well as a man of business. Enjoy this happy and giddy time of your life. Shine in the pleasures and in the company of people of your own age. This is all to be done, and indeed only can be done, without the least taint to the purity of your moral character. For those mistaken young fellows who think to shine by an impious or immoralized consciousness shine only from their stinking, like corrupted flesh in the dark. Without this purity you can have no dignity of character, and without dignity of character it is impossible to rise in the world. You must be respectable, if you will be respected. I have known people slattern away their character without really polluting it. The consequence of which has been that they have become innocently contemptible, their merit has been dimmed, their pretensions unreguarded, and all their views defeated. Character must be kept bright, as well as clean. Content yourself with mediocrity in nothing, in purity of character, and in politeness of manners labored to excel all, if you wish to equal many. Adjou. This last is a very good symptom. For a man of sense is never desirous to frequent those companies where he is not desirous to please, or where he finds that he displeases, it will not be expected in those companies that at your age you should have the garbo, the disemboltura, and the legyadria of a man of five and twenty, who has been long used to keep the best companies, and therefore do not be discouraged and think yourself either slighted or laughed at, because you see others older and more used to the world, easier, more familiar, and consequently, rather better received in those companies than yourself. In time your turn will come, and if you do but show an inclination, a desire to please, though you should be embarrassed or even air in the means, which must necessarily happen to you at first, yet the will, to use a vulgar expression, will be taken for the deed, and people, instead of laughing at you, will be glad to instruct you. Good sense can only give you the great outlines of good breeding, but observation and usage can alone give you the delicate touches and the fine coloring. You will naturally endeavor to show the utmost respect to people of certain ranks and characters, and consequently you will show it, but the proper, the delicate manner of showing that respect, nothing but observation and time can give. I remember that when, with all the awkwardness and rust of Cambridge about me, I was first introduced in good company, I was frightened out of my wits. I was determined to be what I thought, civil, I made fine low bowels and placed myself below everybody, but when I was spoken to or attempted to speak myself, I was stupid, If I saw people whisper, I was sure it was at me, and I thought myself the sole object of either ridicule or the censure of the whole company, who God knows did not trouble their heads about me. In this way I suffered for some time like a criminal at the bar, and should certainly have renounced all polite company forever if I had not been so convinced of the absolute necessity of forming my manners upon those of the best companies, that I determined to persevere and suffer anything or everything, rather than not compass that point. Insensibly it grew easier to me, and I began not to bow so ridiculously low, and to answer questions without great hesitation or stammering. If now and then some charitable people seeing my embarrassment, and being desolved themselves, came and spoke to me, I considered them as angels sent to comfort me, and that gave me a little courage. I got more soon afterward, and was intrepid enough to go up to a fine woman and tell her that I thought it a warm day. She answered me very civilly that she thought so too, upon which the conversation ceased on my part for some time, till she, good-naturedly resuming it, spoke to me thus. I see your embarrassment, and I am sure that the few words you said to me cost you a great deal, but do not be discouraged for that reason, and avoid good company. We see that you desire to please, and that is the main point. You want only the manner, and you think that you want it still more than you do. You must go through your novitiate before you can profess good breeding, and if you will be my novice, I will present you my acquaintance as such. You will easily imagine how much this speech pleased me, and how awkwardly I answered it. I hemmed once or twice, for it gave me a bur in my throat, before I could tell her that I was very much obliged to her, that it was true, that I had a great deal of reason to distrust my own behaviour, not being used to find company, and that I should be proud of being her novice and receiving her instructions. As soon as I fumbled out this answer she called up three or four people to her and said, Savez-vous, for she was a foreigner, and I was abroad, que j'ai entreprise ce jeune homme, and qui le faut rassurer? Pour moi je crois en avoir fait. Do you know that I have undertaken this young man, and he must be encouraged? As for me, I think I have made a conquest of him, for he just now ventured to tell me, although tremblingly, that it is warm. You will assist me in polishing him. He must necessarily have a passion for somebody. If he does not think me worthy of being the object, he will seek out some other. However, my novice, do not disgrace yourself by frequenting opera girls and actresses, who will require of you sentiments and politeness, but will be your ruin in every respect. I repeat it to you, my friend, if you should get into low mean company you will be undone. Those creatures will destroy your fortune and your health, corrupt your morals, and you will never acquire the style of good company. The company laughed at this lecture, and I was stunned with it. I did not know whether she was serious or ingest. By turns I was pleased, ashamed, encouraged, and dejected. But when I found afterward that both she and those to whom she had presented me, countenanced and protected me in company, I gradually got more assurance, and began not to be ashamed of endeavouring to be civil. I copied the best masters, at first surveily, afterward more freely, and at last I joined habit and tradition. All this will happen to you if you persevere in the desire of pleasing and shining as a man of the world. That part of your character is the only one about which I have at present the least doubt. I cannot entertain the least suspicion of your moral character. Your learned character is out of question. Your polite character is now the only remaining object that gives me the least anxiety, and you are now in the right way of finishing it. Your constant collision with good company will, of course, smooth and polish you. I could wish that you would say, to the five or six men or women with whom you are the most acquainted, that you are sensible that, from youth and in experience, you must make many mistakes in good breeding, that you beg of them to correct you without reserve wherever they see you fail, and that you shall take such admonition as the strongest proofs of their friendship. Such a confession and application will be very engaging to those to whom you make them. They will tell others of them who will be pleased with that disposition, and, in a friendly manner, tell you of any little slip or error. The Duke de Nivernoy, Ambassador from the Court of France to Rome, would, I am sure, be charmed if you dropped such a thing to him, adding that you love to address yourself always to the best masters. Observe also the different modes of good breeding of several nations and conform yourself to them respectively. Use an easy civility with the French, more ceremony with the Italians, and still more with the Germans, but let it be without embarrassment and with ease. Bring it by use to be habitual to you, for, if it seems unwilling and forced, it will never please. Omnist arrestippum decuit color et reis. Acquire an easiness and versatility of manners as well as of mine, and, like the chameleon, take the hue of the company you are with. There is a sort of veteran woman of condition, who, having lived always in the Grand Monde, and having possibly had some gallantries, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him. These women, being past their bloom, are extremely flattered by the least attention from a young fellow, and they will point out to him those manners and attentions that pleased and engaged them when they were in the pride of their youth and beauty. Wherever you go, make some of those women your friends, which a very little matter will do. Ask their advice. Tell them your doubts or difficulties as to your behavior. But take great care not to drop one word of their experience. For experience implies age, and the suspicion of age no woman let her be ever so old ever forgives. I long for your picture, which Mr. Hart tells me is now drawing. I want to see your countenance, your air, and even your dress. The better they all three are, the better I am not wise enough to despise any one of them. Your dress, at least, is in your own power, and I hope that you mind it to a proper degree. Yours, adieu. London, January 18, Old Style, 1750. My dear friend, I consider the solid part of your little edifice as so near being finished and completed that my only remaining care is about the embellishments, and that must now be your principal care, too. Adorn yourself with all those graces and accomplishments, which, without solidity, are frivolous, but without which solidity is, to a great degree, useless. Take one man with a very moderate degree of knowledge, but with a pleasing figure, a prepossessing address, graceful in all that he says and does, polite, liant, and, in short, adorned with all the lesser talents, and take another man with sound sense and profound knowledge, but without the above-mentioned advantages, the former will not only get the better of the latter in every pursuit of every kind, but in truth there will be no sort of competition between them. But can every man acquire these advantages? I say, yes, if he please, suppose he is in a situation and in circumstances to frequent good company. Attention, observation, and imitation will most infallibly do it. When you see a man whose first aborde strikes you, prepossesses you in his favor, and makes you entertain a good opinion of him, you do not know why, analyze that aborde and examine, within yourself, the several parts that compose it. And you will generally find it to be the result, the happy assemblage of modesty unembarrassed, the happy assemblage of modesty unembarrassed, respect without timidity, a genteel but unaffected attitude of body and limbs, an open, cheerful but unsmurking countenance, an address by no means negligent, and yet not fervish. Copy him, then, not surveily, but as some of the greatest masters of painting have copied others, in so much that their copies have been equal to the originals, both as to beauty and freedom. When you see a man who is universally allowed to shine as an agreeable, well-bred man, and a fine gentleman, as, for example, the Duke de Nivernoy, attend to him, watch him carefully, observe in what manner he addresses himself to his superiors, how he lives with his equals, and how he treats his inferiors. Mind his turn of conversation in the several situations of morning visits, the table, and the evening amusements. Imitate without mimicking him, and be his duplicate, but not his ape. You will find that he takes care never to say or do anything that can be construed into a slight or negligence, or that can, in any degree, mortify people's vanity and self-love. On the contrary, you will perceive that he makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves. He shows respect, regard, esteem, and attention, where they are severally proper. He sows them with care, and he reaps them in plenty. These amiable accomplishments are all to be acquired by use and imitation, for we are in truth more than half what we are by imitation. The great point is to choose good models and study them with care. People insensibly contract not only the air, the manners, and the vices of those with whom they commonly converse, but their virtues, too, and even their way of thinking. This is so true that I have known very plain understandings catch a certain degree of wit by constantly conversing with those who had a great deal. Persist, therefore, in keeping the best company, and you will insensibly become like them. But if you add attention and observation, you will very soon become one of them. The inevitable contagion of company shows you the necessity of keeping the best and avoiding all other, for in every one something will stick. You have hitherto, I confess, had very few opportunities of keeping polite company. Westminster School is, undoubtedly, the seat of illiberal manners and brutal behavior. Leipzig, I suppose, is not the seat of refined and elegant manners. Venice, I believe, has done something. Rome, I hope, will do a great more, and Paris will, I dare say, do all that you want. I suppose that you frequent the best companies, and in the intention of improving and forming yourself, for without that intention nothing will do. I here subjoin a list of all those necessary, ornamental accomplishments, without which no man living can either please or rise in the world, which hitherto I fear you want, and which only require your care and attention to possess. To speak elegantly, whatever language you speak in, without which nobody will hear you with pleasure, and consequently you will speak to very little purpose. An agreeable and distinct elocution, without which nobody will hear you with patience. This everybody may acquire who is not born with some imperfection in the organs of speech. You are not, and therefore it is wholly in your power. You need take much less pains for it than Demosthenes did. A distinguished politeness of manners and address, which common sense, observation, good company, and imitation will infallibly give you if you will accept it. A genteel carriage and graceful motions, with the air of a man of fashion, a good dancing master, with some care on your part, and some imitation of those who excel, will soon bring this about. To be extremely clean in your person, and perfectly well dressed, according to the fashion, be that what it will. Your negligence of your dress while you were a schoolboy was pardonable, but would not be so now. Upon the whole take it for granted, that without these accomplishments, all you know and all you can do will avail you very little. Adieu. My dear friend, it is so long since I have heard from you that I suppose Rome engrosses every moment of your time, and if it engrosses it in the manner I could wish, I willingly give up my share of it. I would rather prodesse quam conspicchi, put out your time but to good interest, and I do not desire to borrow much of it. Your studies, the respectable remains of antiquity, and your evening amusements cannot, and indeed ought not, to leave you much time to write. You will probably never see Rome again, and therefore you ought to see it well now. By seeing it well I do not mean only the buildings, statues, and paintings, though they undoubtedly deserve your attention. But I mean seeing into the constitution and government of it. But these things certainly occur to your own common sense. How go your pleasures at Rome! Are you in fashion there? That is, do you live with the people who are? The only way of being so yourself, in time. Are you domestic enough in any considerable house, to be called Loupetisteinope? Has any woman of fashion and good breeding taken the trouble of abusing and laughing at you amicably to your face? Have you found a good d'écouteuse? For those are the steps by which you must rise to politeness. I do not presume to ask if you have any attachment, because I believe you will not make me your confidante. But this I will say eventually, that if you have one, il faut bien pailler d'attention et de petit soin, if you would have your sacrifice propitiously received. Women are not so much taken by beauty as men are, but prefer those men who show them the most attention. Would you engage the lovely fair with gentlest manners treat her, with tender looks and graceful air in softest accents greet her. Verse were but vain, the muses fail, without the grace's aid, the God of verse could not prevail to stop the flying maid. Attention by attention's gain and merit care by cares. So shall the nymph reward your pain, and Venus crown your prayers. Probatim est. A man's address and manner weigh much more with them than his beauty, and without them the Abboty and Montserrini will get the better of you. This address and manner should be exceedingly respectful, but at the same time easy and unembarrassed. Your chit chat, or entregon with them, neither can nor ought to be very solid. But you should take care to dress up your trifles prettily, and make them every now and then convey indirectly some little piece of flattery. A fan, a ribbon, or a headdress are great materials for gallant dissertations, to one who has got, le temps legue est amiable de la bonne compagnie. At all events a man had better talk too much to women than too little. They take silence for dullness, unless where they think that the passion they have inspired occasions it. And in that case they adopt the notion that, silence in love betrays more woe than words, though ne'er so witty. The beggar that is dumb we know deserves a double pity. Apropos of this subject, what progress do you make in that language in which Charles V said that he would choose to speak to his mistress? Have you got all the tender diminutives, in Etta, Ina, and Etina, which I presume he alluded to? You already possess, and I hope, take care not to forget, that language which he reserved for his horse. You are absolutely master, too, of that language in which he said he would converse with men, French. But in every language pray attend carefully to the choice of your words, and to the turn of your expression. Indeed it is a point of very great consequence. To be heard with success you must be heard with pleasure. Words are the dress of thoughts which should no more be presented in rags, tatters, and dirt than your person should. By the way, do you mind your person and your dress sufficiently? Do you take great care of your teeth? Pray have them put in order by the best operator at Rome. Are you belaced, bepowdered, and befeathered as other young fellows are, and should be? At your age, you faux du brilliant, et même un peu de fracas, mais point de mediocre, il faux une air vive, aise et noble. Avec les hommes, un maintien respecteur, et une même thème respectable. Avec les femmes, un cacaillé gay, en jus, et bada, mais toujours faux polis. To give you an opportunity of exerting your talents, I send you here in closed a letter of recommendation from Monsieur Villette to Madame de Simonette at Milan, a woman of the first fashion and consideration there, and I shall in my next send you another from the same person to Madame Clarissie at the same place. As these two ladies' houses are the resort of all the people of fashion of Milan, those two recommendations will introduce you to them all. Let me know in due time if you have received these two letters, and that I may have them renewed in case of accidents. Adieu, my dear friend, study hard, divert yourself heartily, distinguished carefully between the pleasures of a man of fashion and the vices of a scoundrel. Pursue the former and abhor the latter like a man of sense. My dear friend, very few people are good economists of their fortune, and still fewer of their time, and yet of the two the latter is the most precious. I heartily wish you to be a good economist of both, and you are now of an age to begin to think seriously of those two important articles. Young people are apt to think that they have so much time before them that they may squander what they please of it, and yet have enough left, as very great fortunes have frequently seduced people to ruinous profusion. Fatal mistakes always repented of, but always too late. Old Mr. Lownes, the famous Secretary of the Treasury in the reign of King William, Queen Anne, and King George I, used to say, take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves. To this maxim, which he not only preached but practiced, his two grandsons at this time owe the very considerable fortunes that he left them. This holds equally true as to time, and I must earnestly recommend to you the care of those minutes and quarters of hours in the course of the day which people think too short to deserve their attention, and yet have summed up at the end of the year would amount to a very considerable portion of time. For example, you are to be at such a place by twelve, by appointment, you go out at eleven to make two or three visits first. Those persons are not at home. Instead of sauntering away that intermediate time at a coffee-house and possibly alone, return home, write a letter beforehand for the ensuing post, or take up a good book. I do not mean Descartes, Malbranche, Locke, or Newton by way of dipping, but some book of rational amusement and detached pieces, as Horace, Boyleau, Waller, La Bruyère, etc. This will be so much time saved, and by no means ill-employed. Many people lose a great deal of time by reading, for they read frivolous and idle books, such as the absurd romances of the last two centuries, where characters that never existed are insipidly displayed, and sentiments that were never felt pompously described, the oriental ravings and extravagances of the Arabian knights and mogul tales, or the New Flimsy brochures that now swarm in France of fairy tales, réflections sur la côte et l'esprit, métaphysiques de l'amour, analyses des beaux sentiments, and such sort of idle frivolous stuff that nourishes and improves the mind just as much as whipped cream would the body. Stick to the best established books in every language, the celebrated poets, historians, orators, or philosophers. By these means, to use a city metaphor, you will make fifty percent of that time, which others do not make above three or four, or probably nothing at all. Many people lose a great deal of their time by laziness. They lull and yawn in a great chair, tell themselves that they have not time to begin anything then, and that it will do as well another time. This is a most unfortunate disposition, and the greatest obstruction to both knowledge and business. At your age you have no right nor claim to laziness. I have, if I please, being emeritus. You are but just listed in the world, and must be active, diligent, indefatagable. If ever you propose commanding with dignity, you must serve up to it with diligence. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method. Lay down a method for everything, and stick to it involubly, as far as unexpected incidents may allow. Fix one certain hour and day in the week for your accounts, and keep them together in their proper order, by which means they will require very little time, and you can never be much cheated. Whatever letters and papers you keep, dock it and tie them up in their respective classes, so that you may instantly have recourse to any one. Lay down a method also for your reading, for which you allot a certain share of your mornings. Let it be in a consistent and consecutive course, and not in that dulcetory and unmythotical manner in which many people read scraps of different authors upon different subjects. Keep a useful and short commonplace book of what you read, to help your memory only, and not for pedantic quotations. Never read history without having maps in a chronological book or tables lying by you, and constantly recurring to, without which history is only a confused heap of facts. One method more I recommend to you, by which I found great benefit, even in the most dissipated part of my life, that is to rise early and at the same hour every morning, how late soever you may have sat up the night before. This secures you an hour or two at least of reading or reflection before the common interruptions of the morning begin, and it will save your constitution by forcing you to go to bed early, at least one night in three. You will say, it may be, as many young people would, that all this order and method is very troublesome, only fit for dull people and a disagreeable restraint upon the noble spirit and fire of youth. I deny it, and assert on the contrary that it will procure you both more time and more taste for your pleasures, and so far from being troublesome to you that after you have pursued it a month it would be troublesome to you to lay it aside. Business wets the appetite and gives a taste to pleasure, as exercise does to food, and business can never be done without method. It raises the spirits for pleasures, and a spectacle, a ball, an assembly will much more sensibly affect a man who has employed than a man who has lost the preceding part of the day. Nay, I will venture to say that a fine lady will seem to have more charms to a man of study or business than to a saunterer. The same listlessness runs through his whole conduct, and he is as insipid in his pleasures as inefficient in everything else. I hope you earn your pleasures, and consequently taste them, for by the way I know a great many men who call themselves men of pleasure, but who in truth have none. They adopt other peoples indiscriminately, but without any taste of their own. I have known them often inflict excesses upon themselves because they thought them gentile, though they sat as awkwardly upon them as other peoples' clothes would have done. Have no pleasures but your own, and then you will shine in them. What are yours? Give me a short history of them. Tenez-vous votre coin à table et dans les bons compagnies? Y briliez-vous du code de la politice, de enjeuement, du bandage, êtes-vous gallant? Fillez-vous les parfaits d'amour? Est-ce-tu question de fléchir, par vos soins et par vos attentions, les rigueuses de quelque frière-princesse? You may safely trust me, for though I am a severe censor of vice and folly, I am a friend and advocate for pleasures, and will contribute all in my power to yours. There is a certain dignity to be kept up in pleasures, as well as in business. In love a man may lose his heart with dignity, but if he loses his nose he loses his character into the bargain. At table a man may with decency have a distinguishing palette, but indiscriminate voraciousness degrades him to a glutton. A man may play with decency, but if he games he is disgraced. Vavacity and wit make a man shine in company, but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon. Every virtue, they say, has its kindred vice. Every pleasure, I am sure, has its neighboring disgrace. Mark carefully, therefore, the line that separates them, and rather stop a yard short than step an inch beyond it. I wish to God that you had as much pleasure in following my advice as I have in giving it to you. And you may the more easily have it, as I give you none that is inconsistent with your pleasure. In all that I say to you, it is your interest alone that I consider. As to my experience, you know you may to my affection. Adieu. I have received no letter yet from you or Mr. Hart. End of Section 73. Read by Professor Heather and By. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 74 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 105. London, February 8, Old Style, 1750. My dear friend, you have, by this time, I hope and believe, made such a progress in the Italian language that you can read it with ease. I mean the easy books in it. And indeed in that, as well as in every other language, the easiest books are generally the best. For whatever author is obscure and difficult in his own language, certainly does not think clearly. This is, in my opinion, the case of a celebrated Italian author, to whom the Italians, from the admiration they have of him, have given the epithet of Ildivino. I mean Dante. Though I formerly knew Italian extremely well, I could never understand him, for which reason I had done with him, fully convinced that he was not worth the pains necessary to understand him. The good Italian authors are, in my mind, but few. I mean authors of invention, for there are undoubtedly very good historians and excellent translators. The two poets worth your reading, and I was going to say the only two, are Tasso and Ariosto. Tasso's D'Arusselemme Liberata is altogether unquestionably a fine poem, though it has some low and many false thoughts in it, and Boyleau very justly makes it the mark of a bad taste to compare the image, with which he adorns the introduction of his epic poem, is low and disgusting. It is that of a forward, sick, puking child, who is deceived into a dose of necessary physics by du bonbon. These verses are these. However, the poem, with all its faults about it, may justly be called a fine one. If fancy imagination, invention, description, etc., constitute a poet, Ariosto is unquestionably a great one. His Orlando, it is true, is a medley of lies and truths, sacred and profane, wars, loves, enchantments, giants, mad heroes, and adventurous damsels. But then he gives it you very fairly for what it is, and does not pretend to put it upon you for the true epope, or epic poem. He says, The connections of his stories are admirable, his reflections jest, his sneers and ironies incomparable, and his painting excellent. When Angelica, after having wandered over half the world alone with Orlando, pretends notwithstanding, C'è il fiore vergino cosi avia salvo, come se lo porto dal maternalvo. The author adds very gravely, For si er ver ma non per o credibile, ha ci del senso sui fossi signore. Astolfo is being carried to the moon by St. John in order to look for Orlando's lost wits at the end of the thirty-fourth book, and the many lost things that he finds there is a most happy extravagancy, and contains at the same time a great deal of sense. I would advise you to read this poem with attention. It is also the source of half the tales, novels, and plays that have been written since. The Pastor Fido of Guarini is so celebrated that you should read it, but in reading it you will judge of the great propriety of the characters. A parcel of shepherds and shepherdesses, with the true pastoral simplicity, talk metaphysics, epigrams, conchetti, and quibbles, by the hour to each other. The Aminto del Tasso is much more what it is intended to be, a pastoral. The shepherds indeed have their conchetti and their antithesis, but are not quite so sublime and abstracted as those in Pastor Fido. I think that you will like it much the best of the two. Petrarcha is, in my mind, a sing-song, love-sick poet, much admired, however, by the Italians. But an Italian who should think no better of him than I do would certainly say that he deserved his Laura better than his Laro, and that wretched quibble would be reckoned an excellent piece of Italian wit. The Italian prose writers of invention, I mean, which I would recommend to your acquaintance, are Machiavello and Boccaccio, the former for the established reputation which he has acquired of a consummate politician, whatever my own private sentiments may be, of either his politics or his morality, the latter for his great invention, and for his natural and agreeable manner of telling his stories. Quiciardini, Ventivoglio, Davila, etc., are excellent historians, and deserved being read with attention. The nature of history checks, a little, the flights of Italian imaginations, which in works of invention are very high indeed. Translations curb them still more, and their translations of the classics are incomparable, particularly the first ten, translated in the time of Leo the Tenth, and inscribed to him under the title of Colana. That original Colana has been lengthened since, and if I mistake not, consists now of one hundred and ten volumes. From what I have said, you will easily guess that I meant to put you on your guard, and not let your fancy be dazzled and your taste corrupted by the conchetti, the quaintnesses, and false thoughts, which are too much the characteristics of the Italian and Spanish authors. I think you are in no great danger, as your taste has been formed upon the best ancient models, the Greek and Latin authors of the best ages, who indulge themselves in none of the purilities I have hinted at. I think I may say with truth that true wit, sound taste, and good sense are now, as it were, engrossed by France and England. Your old acquaintances, the Germans, I fear, are a little below them, and your new acquaintances, the Italians, are a great deal too much above them. The former, I doubt, crawl a little, the latter, I am sure, very often fly out of sight. I recommended to you a good many years ago, and I believe you then read, La maniae du bien pensée dans l'horreur de l'esprit par le père Bonheur, and I think it is very well worth your reading again, now that you can judge of it better. I do not know any book that contributes more to form a true taste, and you will find there, into the bargain, the most celebrated passages, both of the ancients and the moderns, which refresh your memory with what you have formerly read in them separately. It is followed by a book much of the same size, by the same author, entitled, Suite des Pensees Enginiers. To do justice to the best English and French authors, they have not given into that false taste. They allow no thoughts to be good that are not just and founded upon truth. The age of Louis XIV was very like the Augustine. Boilot, Molière, La Fontaine, Racine, etc. established the truth, and exposed the false taste. The reign of King Charles II, meritorious in no other respect, banished false taste out of England, and prescribed puns, quibbles, acrostics, etc. Since that, false wit has renewed its attacks, and endeavored to recover its lost empire, both in England and France, but without success, though I must say with more success in France than in England. Addison, Pope, and Swift have vigorously defended the rites of good sense, which is more than can be said of their contemporary French authors, who have, of late, had a great tendency to la faux brillant, la rafinement, et l'entortinement. And Lord Ruscommon would be more in the right now than he was then in saying that the English bullion of one sterling line, drawn to French wire, would through whole pages shine. Lose no time, my dear child, I conjure you, informing your taste, your manners, your mind, your everything. You have but two years' time to do it in. For whatever you are to a certain degree at twenty, you will be more or less all the rest of your life. May it be a long and happy one. I am very well satisfied with the progress which you have made in that language in so short a time. According to that gradation, you will, in a very little time more, be master of it. Except of the French ambassadors, I believe you hear only Italian spoke, for the Italians speak very little French, and that generally very ill. The French are even with them, and generally speak Italian as ill, for I never knew a Frenchman in my life who could pronounce the Italians C-E, C-I, or G-E, G-I. Your desire of pleasing the Roman ladies will, of course, give you not only the desire but the means of speaking to them elegantly in their own language. The Princess Borghese, I am told, speaks French both ill and unwillingly, and therefore you should make a merit to her of your application to her language. She is, by a kind of prescription, longer than she would probably wish, at the head of the Beaumond at Rome, and can consequently establish or destroy a young fellow's fashionable character. If she declares him amiabile e legiardro, others will think him so, or at least those who do not will not dare to say so. There are in every great town some such women, whose rank, beauty, and fortune have conspired to place them at the head of fashion. They have generally been gallant, but within certain decent bounds. Their gallantries have taught both them and their admirers good-breeding, without which they could keep up no dignity, but would be vilified by those very gallantries which put them in vogue. It is with these women, as with ministers and favorites at court, they decide upon fashion and characters, as these do of fortunes and performance. Pay particular court, therefore, wherever you are, to these female sovereigns of the Beaumond. Their recommendation is a passport through all the realms of politeness. But then remember that they require minute, officious attentions. You should, if possible, guess at and anticipate all their little fancies and inclinations. Make yourself familiarly and domestically useful to them, by offering yourself for all their little commissions, and assisting in doing the honors of their houses, and entering with seeming unction into all their little grievances, bustles, and views, for they are always busy. If you are once Benficato at the Palazzo Borghese, you will soon be in fashion at Rome, and being in fashion will soon fashion you, for that is what you must now think of very seriously. I am sorry there is no good dancing master at Rome to form your exterior air and carriage, which I doubt are not yet the gentilist in the world. But you may, and I hope you will, in the meantime, observe the air and carriage of those who are reckoned to have the best, and form your own upon them. Ease, gracefulness, and dignity compose the air and address of a man of fashion, which is unlike the affected attitudes and motions of a petite matra, as it is to the awkward, negligent, clumsy, and slouching manner of a booby. I am extremely pleased with the account Mr. Hart has given me of the allotment of your time at Rome. Those five hours every morning which you employ in serious studies with Mr. Hart are laid out with great interest, and will make you rich all the rest of your life. I do not look upon the subsequent morning hours which you pass with your Cicceroni to be ill disposed of. There is a kind of connection between them, and your evening diversions in good company are, in their way, as useful and necessary. This is the way for you to have both weight and lustre in the world, and this is the object which I always had in view in your education. Adieu, my friend, go on and prosper. Mr. Grevenkopf has just received Mr. Hart's letter of the 19th new style. End of Section 75. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 76 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 107. London, March 8, Old Style, 1750. Young as you are, I hope you are in haste to live. By living I mean living with lustre and honour to yourself, with utility to society, doing what may deserve to be written, or writing what may deserve to be read. I should wish both. Those who consider life in that light will not idly lavish one moment. The present moments are the only ones we are sure of, and as such the most valuable. But yours are doubly so at your age. For the credit, the dignity, the comfort, and the pleasure of all your future moments depend upon the use you make of your present ones. I am extremely satisfied with your present manner of employing your time. But will you always employ it as well? I am far from meaning always in the same way. But I mean as well in proportion in the variation of age and circumstances. You now study five hours every morning. I neither suppose that you will nor desire that you should do so for the rest of your life. Both business and pleasure will justly and equally break in upon those hours. But then will you always employ the leisure they leave you in useful studies? If you have but an hour, will you improve that hour instead of idling it away? While you have such a friend and monitor with you as Mr. Hart, I am sure you will. But suppose that business and situations should in six or seven months call Mr. Hart away from you. Tell me truly, what may I expect and depend upon from you when left to yourself? May I be sure that you will employ some part of every day in adding something to that stock of knowledge which he will have left you? May I hope that you will allot one hour in the week to the care of your own affairs, to keep them in that order and method which every prudent man does? But above all, may I be convinced that your pleasures, whatever they may be, will be confined within the circle of good company and people of fashion? Those pleasures I recommend to you. I will promote them, I will pay for them, but I will neither pay for nor suffer the unbecoming, disgraceful, and degrading pleasures they should not be called pleasures of low and profligate company. I confess the pleasures of high life are not always strictly philosophical, and I believe a stoic would blame my indulgence, but I am yet no stoic, but I am yet no stoic, though turned of five and fifty, and I am apt to think that you are rather less so at eighteen. The pleasures of the table, among people of the first fashion, may indeed sometimes by accident run into excesses, but they will never sink into a continued course of gluttony and drunkenness. The gallantry of high life, though not strictly justifiable, carries at least no external marks of infamy about it. Neither the heart nor the constitution is corrupted by it. Neither nose nor character lost by it. Manor's possibly improved. Play in good company is only play, and not gaming, not deep, and consequently not dangerous nor dishonorable. It is only the interacts of other amusements. This, I am sure, is not talking to you like an old man, though it is talking to you like an old friend. These are not hard conditions to ask of you. I am certain you have sense enough to know how reasonable they are on my part. How advantageous they are on yours. But have you resolution enough to perform them? Can you withstand the examples and the invitations of the profligate and their infamous missionaries? For I have known many a young fellow seduced by a mauve aunt that made him ashamed to refuse. These are resolutions which you must form and steadily execute for yourself, whenever you lose the friendly care and assistance of your mentor. In the meantime, make a greedy use of him, exhaust him if you can of all his knowledge, and get the Prophet's mantle from him before he has taken away himself. You seem to like Rome. How do you go on there? Are you got into the inside of that extraordinary government? Has your Abate Fogini discovered many of those mysteries to you? Have you made an acquaintance with some eminent Jesuits? I know no people in the world more instructive. You would do very well to take one or two such sort of people home with you to dinner every day. It would be only a little ministra and macaroni the more, and a three or four hours' conversation de suite produces a thousand useful informations, which short meetings and snatches at third places do not admit of. And many of those gentlemen are by no means unwilling to dine gratee. Whenever you meet with a man eminent in any way, feed him, and feed upon him at the same time. It will not only improve you, but give you a reputation of knowledge and of loving it in others. I have been lately informed of an Italian book, which I believe may be of use to you, and which I dare say you may get at Rome, written by one Alberti, about four score or a hundred years ago, a thick quarto. It is a classical description of Italy. From whence I am assured that Mr. Addison, to save himself trouble, has taken most of his remarks and classical references. I am told that it is an excellent book for a traveller in Italy. What Italian books have you read, or are you reading? Ariosto, I hope, is one of them. Pray apply yourself diligently to Italian. It is so easy a language that speaking it constantly, and reading it often must, in six months more, make you perfect master of it. In which case you will never forget it, for we only forget those things of which we know but little. But above all things, to all that you learn, to all that you say, and to all that you do, remember to join the great graces. All is imperfect without them, and with them everything is at least tolerable. Nothing could hurt me more than to find you unattended by them. How cruelly should I be shocked if, at our first meeting, you should present yourself to me without them? Invote them, and sacrifice to them every moment. They are always kind where they are assiduously courted. For God's sake, aim at perfection in everything. Neal Actum Reputansi Quid Supresset Agendum. Adju, yours most tenderly. End of Section 76. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 77 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 108. London, March 19, old style, 1750. My dear friend, I acknowledge your last letter of the 24th February new style. In return for your earthquake, I can tell you that we have had here more than our share of earthquakes, for we had two very strong ones in eight and twenty days. They really do too much honor to our cold climate. In your warm one, they are compensated by favors from the sun, which we do not enjoy. I did not think that the present pope was a sort of man to build seven modern little chapels at the expense of so respectable a piece of antiquity as the Coliseum. However, let his holiness's taste of virtue be ever so bad. Pray get somebody to present you to him before you leave Rome, and without hesitation kiss his slipper, or whatever else the etiquette of that court requires. I would have you see all those ceremonies, and I presume that you are by this time ready enough at Italian to understand and answer Il Santo Padre in that language. I hope too that you have acquired address and usage enough of the world to be presented to anybody without embarrassment or disapprobation. If that is not yet quite perfect, as I cannot suppose it is entirely, custom will improve it daily, and habit at last complete it. I have for some time told you that the great difficulties are pretty well conquered. You have acquired knowledge which is the Principum et Phon, but you have now a variety of lesser things to attend to, which collectively make one great and important object. You easily guess that I mean the graces, the air, address, politeness, and in short the whole tournure and agrément of a man of fashion. So many little things conspire to form that tournure, that though separately they seem too insignificant to mention, yet aggregately they are too material for me, who think for you down to the very lowest things to omit. For instance, do you use yourself to carve, eat, and drink gentilely and with ease? Do you take care to walk, sit, stand, and present yourself gracefully? Are you sufficiently upon your guard against awkward attitudes and illiberal, ill-bred, and disgusting habits, such as scratching yourself, putting your fingers in your mouth, nose, and ears? Tricks always acquired at schools, often too much neglected afterward, but, however, extremely ill-bred and nauseous. For I do not conceive that any man has a right to exhibit in company any one excrement more than another. Do you dress well and think a little of the brilliant in your person? That too is necessary, because it is prevenant. Do you aim it easy, engaging, but at the same time civil or respectful manners, according to the company you are in? These and a thousand other things, which you will observe in people of fashion better than I can describe them, are absolutely necessary for every man, but still more for you than for almost any man living. The showish, the shining, the engaging parts of the character of a fine gentleman should, considering your destination, be the principal objects of your present attention. When you return here I am apt to think that you will find something better to do than to run to Mr. Osborn's at Grey's Inn to pick up scarce books. Buy good books and read them. The best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads, for they may profit of the former. But take care not to understand editions and title-pages too well. It always smells of pedantry and not always of learning. What curious books I have, they are indeed but few, shall be at your service. I have some of the old Colana and the Machiavelle of 1550. Beware of the Bibliomenee. In the midst of either your studies or your pleasures, pray never lose view of the object of your destination. I mean the political affairs of Europe. Follow them politically, chronologically, and geographically, through the newspapers, and trace up the facts which you meet with there to their sources. As, for example, consult the treaty's Nusdott and Abo with regard to the disputes, which you read of every day in the public papers, between Russia and Sweden. For the affairs of Italy, which are reported to be the objects of present negotiations, recur to the quadruple alliance of the year 1718, and follow them down through their several variations to the Treaty of Ex-La Chapelle, 1748, in which, by the by, you will find the very different tenures by which the infant Don Philippe, your namesake, holds Parma and Placentia. Consult also the Emperor Charles VI Act of Session of the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, being a point which, upon the death of the present King of Spain, is likely to occasion some disputes. Do not lose the thread of these matters, which is carried on with great ease, but if once broken is resumed with difficulty. Pray tell Mr. Hart that I have sent his packet to Berenfermian by Count Ein-Siedlen, who has gone from hence this day for Germany, and passes through Vienna in his way to Italy, where he is in hopes of crossing upon you somewhere or other. Adieu, my friend.