 Section 152 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 183. Bath, November 28th, 1752. My dear friend, since my last to you I have read Madame Montenot's letters. I am sure they are genuine, and they both entertained and informed me. They have brought me acquainted with the character of that able and artful lady, whom I am convinced that I now know much better than her directeur, the Abbey de Fanelon, afterwards Archbishop of Cambrai, did, when he wrote her the 185th letter, and I know him the better too for that letter. The Abbey, though brimful of the divine love, had a great mind to be First Minister and Cardinal in order, no doubt to have an opportunity of doing the more good. His being directeur at that time to Madame Montenot seemed to be a good step toward those views. She put herself upon him for a saint, and he was weak enough to believe it. He, on the other hand, would have put himself upon her for a saint too, which I dare say she did not believe, but both of them knew that it was necessary for them to appear saints to Louis XIV, who they were very sure was a bigot. It is to be presumed, nay, indeed, it is plain by that 185th letter that Madame Montenot had hinted to her directeur some scruples of conscience, with relation to her commerce with the king, and which I humbly apprehend to have been only some scruples of prudence, at once to flatter the bigot character, and increase the desires of the king. The pious Abbey, frightened out of his wits, lest the king should impute to the directeur any scruples or difficulties which he might meet with on the part of the lady, writes her the above-mentioned letter, in which he not only bids her not to tease the king by advice and exhortations, but to have the utmost submission to his will, and that she may not mistake the nature of that submission, he tells her it is the same that Sarah had for Abraham, to which submission Isaac perhaps was owing. No bod could have written a more seducing letter to an innocent country girl than the director did to his penitent, who I dare say had no occasion for his good advice. Those who would justify the good director, alias the pimp, in this affair, must not attempt to do it by saying that the king and Madame Mentenot were at that time privately married, that the director knew it, and that this was the meaning of his enigma. That is absolutely impossible, for that private marriage must have removed all scruples between the parties, nay, could not have been contracted upon any other principle since it was kept private, and consequently prevented no public scandal. It is therefore extremely evident that Madame Mentenot could not be married to the king at the time when she scrupled granting, and when the director advised her to grant, those favors which Sarah with so much submission granted to Abraham, and what the director is pleased to call, le mystère de Dieu, was most evidently a state of concubinage. The letters are very well worth your reading. They throw light upon many things of those times. I have just received a letter from Sir William Stanhope from Lyon, in which he tells me that he saw you at Paris, that he thinks you a little grown, but that you do not make the most of it, for that you stoop still. D'ailleurs his letter was a panageric of you. The young Comte de Schillemberg, the chamblant who you knew at Hanover, is come over with the king, et fait aussi vos éloge. Though as I told you in my last, I have done buying pictures by way of virtue, yet there are some portraits of remarkable people that would tempt me. For instance, if you could, by chance, pick up at Paris, at a reasonable price, and undoubted originals, whether heads, half-links, or whole-links, no matter, of Cardinals Richelieu, Mazurin, and Retz, Monsieur de Turin, le Grand Prince de Condo, Mesdames de Mont-Pesson, de Saivigny, de Mont-Anon, de Chevreuse, de Longbill, de Long, et cetera, I should be tempted to purchase them. I am sensible that they can only be met with by great accident at family sales and auctions, so I only mention the affair to you eventually. I do not understand, or else I do not remember, what affair you mean in your last letter, which you think will come to nothing, and for which you say you had once a mind that you should take the road again. Explain it to me. I shall go to town in four or five days, and carry back with me a little more hearing than I brought, but yet not half enough for common wants. One wants ready pocket money much oftener than one wants great sums, and to use a very odd expression I want to hear at sight. I love everyday senses, everyday wit and entertainment. A man who is only good on holy days is good for very little. Adjou. End of Section 152, read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audio books or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 153 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 184. Christmas Day, 1752. My dear friend, a tyrant with legions at his command may say, Odorant Modotimiant, though he is a fool if he says it, and a greater fool if he thinks it. But a private man who can hurt but few, though he can please many, must endeavor to be loved, for he cannot be feared in general. Popularity is his only rational and sure foundation. The good will, the affections, the love of the public, can alone raise him to any considerable height. Should you ask me how he is to acquire them, I will answer by desiring them. No man ever deserved who did not desire them, and no man both deserved and desired them who had them not, though many have enjoyed them merely by desiring and without deserving them. You do not imagine, I believe, that I mean by this public love the sentimental love of either lovers or intimate friends. No, that is of another nature, and confined to a very narrow circle. But I mean that general good will which a man may acquire in the world, by the arts of pleasing, respectively, exerted according to the rank, the situation, and the turn of mind of those whom he hath to do with. The pleasing impressions which he makes upon them will engage their affections and their good wishes, and even their good offices, as far, that is, as they are not inconsistent with their own interests. For further than that you are not to expect from three people in the course of your life, even were it extended to the patriarchal term. Could I revert to the age of twenty and carry back with me all the experience that forty years more have taught me, I can assure you that I would employ much the greatest part of my time in engaging the good will and in insinuating myself into the predilection of people in general, instead of directing my endeavours to please, as I was too apt to do, the man whom I immediately wanted, or the woman I wished for, exclusively of all others. For if one happens, and it will sometimes happen to the ablest man, to fail in his views with that man or that woman, one is at a loss to know whom to address oneself to next, having offended in general, by that exclusive and distinguished particular application. I would secure a general refuge in the good will of the multitude, which is a great strength to any man, for both ministers and mistresses choose popular and fashionable favourites. A man who solicits a minister, backed by the general good will and good wishes of mankind, solicits with great weight and great possibility of success, and a woman is strangely biased in favour of a man whom she sees in fashion, and hears everybody speak well of. This useful art of insinuation consists merely of various little things. A graceful motion, a significant look, a trifling attention, and a blidging word dropped apropos. Air, dress, and a thousand other undefinable things, all several little ones, joined together make that happy and inestimable composition, the art of pleasing. I have in my life seen many a very handsome woman who has not pleased me, and many very sensible men who have disgusted me. Why, only for want of those thousand little means to please, which those women, conscious of their beauty, and those men of their sense, have been grossly enough mistaken to neglect. I never was so much in love in my life as I was with a woman who was very far from being handsome, but then she was made up of graces, and had all the arts of pleasing. The following verses, which I have read in some congratulatory poem, prefixed to some work, I have forgot which, express what I mean in favour of what pleases preferably to what is generally called mere solid and instructive. I would an author like a mistress try, not by a nose, a lip, a cheek, or eye, but by some nameless power to give me joy. Lady Chesterfield bids me make you many compliments. She showed me your letter of recommendation of la Vestress, with which I was very well pleased. There is a pretty turn in it. I wish you would always speak as gentilely. I saw another letter from a lady at Paris in which there was a high panagirical paragraph concerning you. I wish it were every word of it literally true. But as it comes from a very little, pretty, white hand, which is suspected, and I hope justly, of great partiality to you, il aime faux rebâtre quelque chose, et même, en la façon, it ira toujours d'assez bien reste. Adieu. CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SONS I examined him about you, thinking him a competent judge. He told me I told him that I knew all this very well, but that I wanted to know whether you had the courage, the way, the attention, and the brilliantness of a man. His answer was Mais oui, une vérité, c'est faux bien. This you see is but cold in comparison of what I do wish and what you ought to wish. Your friend Cléran interposed and said Mais je vous suis sûr qu'il est faux poli, to which I answered Je le crois bien, vis-à-vis de l'appent vos amis. Je vous accuse pour juge jusque que vous avez attendre de l'appent, au moins disons, parmi des enneux gens. These testimonies in your favor are such as perhaps you are satisfied with and think sufficient, but I am not. They are only the cold dispositions of disinterested and unconcerned witnesses upon a strict examination. When upon a trial a man calls witnesses to his character, and that those witnesses only say that they never heard, nor do not know any ill of him, it intimates at best a neutral and insignificant though innocent character. Now I want and you ought to endeavor that les agréments, les grâces, les attentions, etc., should be a distinguishing part of your character and specified of you by people unasked. I wish to hear people say of you, Ah, qu'il est amiable, quel manier, quel gas, quel art de clair. Nature, thank God, has given you all the powers necessary, and if she is not yet, I hope in God she will give you all the will of inserting them. I have lately read with great pleasure Voltaire's two little histories of Les Croissants and Les Sprees Humains, which I recommend to your perusal if you have not already read them. They are bound up with a most poor performance called Macromagia, which is said to be Voltaire's two, but I cannot believe it. It is so very unworthy of him. It consists only of thought stolen from swift, but miserably mangled and disfigured. But his history of the Croissants shows, in a very short and strong light, the most immoral and wicked scheme that was ever contrived by naves, and executed by madmen and fools against humanity. There is a strange but never-failing relation between honest madmen and skillful naves, and whenever one meets with collected numbers of the former one may be very sure that they are secretly directed by the latter. The Popes, who have generally been both the ablest and the greatest naves in Europe, wanted all the power and money of the East, for they had all that was in Europe already. The times and the minds favoured their design, for they were dark and uninformed, and Peter the Hermit, at once a naïve and a madman, was a fine papal tool for so wild and wicked and undertaking. I wish we had good histories of every part of Europe, and indeed of the world, written upon the plan of Voltaire's de l'esprit humain, for I own I am provoked at the contempt which most historians show for humanity in general. One would think by them that the whole human species consisted but of about a hundred and fifty people, called and dignified, commonly very undeservedly too, by the titles of emperors, kings, popes, generals, and ministers. I have never seen in any of the newspapers any mention of the affairs of the Sevent, or Grenoble, which you gave me an account of some time ago, and the dupe de Marpoix pretends at least to know nothing of either. Were they false reports? Or does the French court choose to stifle them? I hope that they are both true, because I am very unwilling that the cares of the French government should be employed and confined to themselves. Your friend, the electress Palantine, has sent me six wild boards-heads, and other pièces de sachasse, in return for the fans which she approved of extremely. This present was signified to me by one Mr. Harold, who wrote me a letter in very indifferent English. I suppose he is a dain who has been in England. Mr. Hart came to town yesterday and dined with me today. We talked you over, and I can assure you that though a parson, and no member du bon monde, he thinks all the most shining accomplishments of it full as necessary for you as I do. His expression was, that is all that he wants. But if he wants that, considering his situation and destination, he might as well want everything else. This is the day when people reciprocally offer and receive the kindness and warmest wishes, though in general without meaning them on one side or believing them on the other. They are formed by the head in compliance with custom, though disavowed by the heart, in consequence of nature. His wishes upon this occasion are the best that are the best turned. You do not, I am sure, doubt the truth of mine, and therefore I will express them with a Quaker-like simplicity. May this new year be a very new one indeed to you. May you put off the old and put on the new man. But I mean the outward, not the inward man. With this alteration I might justly sum up all my wishes for you in these words. D-e-tib-e-dent anos. D-t-n-am s-t-t-e-r-s-s-s-s. This minute I receive your letter of the twenty-sixth past, which gives me a very disagreeable reason for your late silence. By the symptoms which you mention of your illness, I both hope and believe that it was wholly owing to your want of care. You are rather inclined to be fat. You have naturally a good stomach and you eat at the best tables, which must of course make you plethoric. And upon my word you will be very subject to these accidents. If you will not, from time to time, when you find yourself full, heated, or your head aching, take some little easy preventative purge that would not confine you, such as chewing a little rhubarb when you go to bed at night, or some senatee in the morning. You do very well to live extremely low for some time, and I could wish, though I do not expect it, that you would take one gentle vomit for those giddinesses and swimmings in the head always proceed from some foulness of the stomach. However, on the whole, I am very glad that your old complaint has not mixed itself with this, which I am fully convinced arises simply from your own negligence. Adieu. Section 155 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son Read for LibriVox.org into the Public Domain Letter 186 London, January 15, 1753 My dear friend, I never think my time so well employed as when I think it employed to your advantage. You have long had the greatest share of it. You now engross it. The moment is now decisive. The piece is going to be exhibited to the public. The mere outlines and the general coloring are not sufficient to attract the eyes and to secure applause, but the last finishing, artful and delicate strokes are necessary. Skillful judges will discern and acknowledge their merit, the ignorant will, without knowing why, feel their power. In that view I have thrown together for your perusals some maxims, or to speak more properly, observations on men and things, for I have no merit as to the invention. I am no system monger, and instead of giving way to my imagination, I have only consulted my memory, and my conclusions are all drawn from facts, not from fancy. Most maxim mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth, but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm. I wish you could consider them seriously and separately, and recur to them again pro renata in similar cases. Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience, which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken, for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and effective. Their union, which is very rare, is perfection. You may join them if you please, for all my experience is at your service, and I do not desire one grain of your spirit in return. Use them both, and let them reciprocally animate and check each other. I mean here by the spirit of youth only the vivacity and presumption of youth, which hinder them from seeing the difficulties or dangers of an undertaking, but I do not mean what the silly vulgar call spirit, by which they are captious, jealous of their rank, suspicious of being undervalued, and tart, as they call it in their repartees, upon the slightest occasions. This is an evil and a very silly spirit, which should be driven out and transferred to unheard of swine. This is not the spirit of a manifestation who has kept good company. People of an ordinary, low education, when they happen to fall into good company, imagine themselves the only object of its attention, if the company whispers it is to be sure concerning them. If they laugh it is at them, and if anything ambiguous, that by the most forced interpretation can be applied to them happens to be said, they are convinced that it was meant at them, upon which they grow out of countenance first and then angry. This mistake is very well ridiculed in the stratagem, where Scrub says, I am sure they talked of me for they laughed consumedly. A well-bred man seldom thinks, but never seems to think himself slided, undervalued, or laughed at in company, unless where it is so plainly marked out, that his honor obliges him to resent it in a proper manner. I will admit that it is very difficult to command one's self-enough to behave with ease, frankness and good-breeding toward those who one knows dislike, slide, and injure one, as far as they can, without personal consequences. But I assert that it is absolutely necessary to do it. You must embrace the man you hate, if you cannot be justified in knocking him down, for otherwise you avow the injury which you cannot revenge. A prudent cuckold, and there are many such at Paris, pockets his horns when he cannot gore with him, and will not add to the triumph of his maker by only budding with him ineffectually. A seeming ignorance is very often a most necessary part of worldly knowledge. It is, for instance, commonly advisable to seem ignorant of what people are to tell you, and when they say, Have you not heard of such a thing, to answer no, and to let them go on, though you know it already? Some have a pleasure in telling it, because they think they tell it well. Others have a pride in it, as being the sagacious discoverers, and many have a vanity in showing that they have been, though very undeservedly trusted. All these would seem disappointed and consequently displeased if you said yes. Seem always ignorant, unless to one's most intimate friend, of all matters of private scandal and defamation, though you should hear them a thousand times, for the parties affected always look upon the receiver to be almost as bad as the thief, and whenever they become the topic of conversation seem to be a skeptic, though you are really a serious believer, and always take the extenuating part. But all this seeming ignorance should be joined to thorough and extensive private information, and indeed it is the best method of procuring them, for most people have such a vanity in showing a superiority over others, though but for a moment, and in the merest trifles, that they will tell you what they should not, rather than not show that they can tell what you did not know. Besides that, such seeming ignorance will make you pass for incurious and consequently undesigning. However, fish for facts, and take pains to be well informed of everything that passes. But fish judiciously, and not always, or indeed often, in the shape of direct questions, which always put people upon their guard, and often repeated grow tiresome. But sometimes take the things that you would know for granted upon which somebody will, kindly and efficiently, set you right. Sometimes say that you have heard so and so, and at other times seem to know more than you do, in order to know all that you want, but avoid direct questioning as much as you can. All these necessary arts of the world require constant attention, presence of mind and coolness. Achilles, though invulnerable, never went to battle but completely armed. Courts are to be the theatres of your wars, where you should always be as completely armed, and even with the addition of a heel-piece. The least attention, the least distraction, may prove fatal. I would faint see you what pedants call omnis-homo, and what pope much better calls all accomplished. You have the means in your power, add the will, and you may bring it about. The vulgar have a course saying, of spoiling a ship for a half-penny-worth of tar. Prevent the application by providing the tar. It is very easily to be had in comparison with what you have already got. The fine Mrs. Pitt, who it seems saw you often at Paris, speaking of you the other day, said in French, for she speaks little English, whether it is that you did not pay the homage due her beauty, or that it did not strike you as it does determine. But I hope she had some of the reason than truth for saying it. I will suppose that you did not care a pen for her, but, however, she surely deserved a degree of propitiatory adoration from you, which I am afraid you neglected. Had I been in your case, I should have endeavored, at least, to have supplanted Mr. Mackay in his office of nocturnal reader to her. I played at cards two days ago with your friend Mrs. Fitzgerald, and her most sublime mother, Mrs. Mackay, inquired after you, and Mrs. Fitzgerald said, she hoped you went on with your dancing. I said yes, and that you assured me you had made such considerable improvements in it that you had now learned to stand still and even upright. Your virtuoso, la senorvestre, sung here the other day, with great applause. I presume you are intimately acquainted with her merit. Good night to you, whoever you pass it with. Your seal, though not directed by your hand, for Lady Herbie. No letter from you. Are you not well? No. Section 156 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, read for Librevox.org into the public domain. Letter 187 London, May 27th, old style, 1753. My dear friend, I have this day been tired, jaded, nay, tormented by the company of a worthy, sensible, and learned man, a near relation of mine who dined and passed the evening with me. This seems a paradox, but is a plain truth. He has no knowledge of the world, no manners, no address. Far from talking without book is commonly said of people who talk sillily. He only talks by book, which in general conversation is ten times worse. He has formed in his own closet from books certain systems of penitiously upon those principles, and is both surprised and angry at whatever deviates from them. His theories are good, but unfortunately all are impracticable. Why? Because he is only read and not conversed. He is acquainted with books, and an absolute stranger to men. Laboring with his matter, he is delivered of it with pangs. He hesitates, stops in his utterance, and always expresses himself inelegantly. His actions are pitiful, so that, with all his merit and knowledge, I would rather converse six hours with the most frivolous, tittle-tattle woman who knew something of the world than with him. The preprosterous notions of a systematical man who does not know the world tire the patience of a man who does. It would be endless to correct his mistakes, nor would he take it kindly, for he has considered everything deliberately and is very sure that he is in never failing one of these people. Regardless, because ignorant of customs and manners, they violate them every moment. They often shock, though they never mean to offend, never attending either to the general character or the particular distinguishing circumstances of the people to whom or before whom they talk, whereas the knowledge of the world teaches one that the very same things which are exceedingly right and proper in one company, are equally absurd in others. In short, a man who has great knowledge from experience and observation of the characters, customs, and manners of mankind is a being as different from, and as superior to, a man of mere book and systematical knowledge, as a well-managed horse is to an ass. Study, therefore, cultivate and frequent men and women, not only in their outward and consequently guarded, but in their interior, domestic, and mixed characters and manners. Take your notions of things as by observation and experience you find they really are, and not as you read that they are or should be, for they never are quite what they should be. For this purpose do not content yourself with general and common acquaintance, but wherever you can, establish yourself with a kind of domestic familiarity in good houses. For instance, go again to Orly for two or three days, and so you will receive your prizes. Go and stay two or three days at a time at Versailles, and improve and extend the acquaintance you have there. Be at home at St. Cloud, and whenever any private person of fashion invites you to, pass a few days at his country house, except of the invitation. This will necessarily give you a versatility of mind and a facility to adopt various manners and customs, for everybody desires to please those in whose mind is pleased in their own way. Nothing is more engaging than a cheerful and easy conformity to people's particular manners, habits and even weaknesses. Nothing, to use a vulgar expression, should come amiss to a young fellow. He should be, for good purposes, what alcibiades was commonly for bad ones, a proteus, assuming with ease and wearing with cheerfulness any shape. Heat, cold, luxury, abstinence, gravity, gaiety, ceremony, learning, trifling, business and pleasure, are modes which he should be able to take, lay aside or change occasionally, with as much ease as he would take or lay aside his hat. All this is only to be acquired by use and knowledge of the world, by keeping a great deal of company, analyzing every character, and insinuating yourself into the familiarity of various acquaintance. A right, a generous ambition to make a figure in the world, rarely gives the desire of pleasing. The desire of pleasing points out to a great degree the means of doing it, and the art of pleasing is, in truth, the art of rising, of distinguishing oneself, of making a figure and a fortune in the world. But without pleasing, without the graces, as I have told you a thousand times, on ye fatika-ivana. You are now but nineteen, an age at which most of your countrymen are illiberally getting to the university. You have greatly got the start of them in learning, and if you can equally get the start of them in the knowledge and manners of the world, you may be very sure of outrunning them in court and parliament, as you set out much earlier than they. They generally begin but to see the world at one in twenty. You will, by that age, have seen all Europe. They set out upon their travels unlicked cubs, and in their travels they only lick one another, for they seldom go into any other country. They know nothing but the English world, and the worst part of that too, and generally very little of any but the English language. And they come home, at three or four in twenty, refined and polished, as it is said in one of Congreve's plays, like Dutch skippers from a whale fishing. The care which has been taken of you, and to do you justice, the care that you have taken of yourself, has left you at the age of nineteen only, nothing to acquire but the knowledge of the manners, address, and those exterior accomplishments. But they are great and necessary acquisitions to those who have sense enough to know their true value, and you're getting them before you are one in twenty, and before you enter upon the active and shining scenes of life, will give you such an advantage over all your contemporaries that they cannot overtake you. They must be distanced. You may probably be placed about a young prince who will probably be a young king. There, all the various arts of pleasing, the engaging address, the versatility of manners, the brilliant, the graces will outweigh and yet outrun all solid knowledge and unpolished merit. Oil yourself, therefore, and be both supple and shining for that race, if you would be first or early at the goal. Ladies will most probably too have something to say there, and those who are best with them will probably be best somewhere else. Labor this great point, my dear child, and, vitagably, attend to the very smallest parts, the minutest graces, the most trifling circumstances that can possibly concur in forming the shining character of a complete gentleman. Un galantan, un homme de coeur, a man of business and pleasure, estime des hommes, recherche des femmes, âme de tout le monde. In this view, observe the shining part of every man of fashion, who is liked and esteemed. Attend to and in particular accomplishment for which you hear him chiefly celebrated and distinguished. Then collect those various parts, and make yourself a mosaic of the whole. No one body possesses everything, and almost everybody possesses some one thing worthy of imitation. Only choose your models well, and in order to do so, choose by your ear more than by your eye. The best model is always that which is most universally allowed to be the best, though in strictness will possibly not be so. We must take most things as they are. We cannot make them what we would, nor often what they should be. And where moral duties are not concerned, it is more prudent to follow than to attempt to lead. End of Section 156. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Section 157 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 188. Bath October 3, 1753. My dear friend, you have set out well at the Hague. You are in love with Madame Munter, which I am very glad of. You are in the fine company there, and I hope one of it, for it is not enough at your age to be merely in good company, but you should, by your address and attentions, make that good company think you one of them. There is a tribute due to beauty, even independently of further views, which tribute I hope you paid with alacrity to Madame Munter and Madame Degenfeld. Depend upon it they expected it, and were offended in proportion or scantily paid. I believe my friend Croningen admits nobody now to his table, for fear of their communicating the plague to him, or at least the bite of a mad dog. Pray, prophet, of the entrée libre that the French ambassador has given you. Frequent him, and speak to him. I think you will not do amiss to call upon Mr. Burish at Ex-la-Chapelle, since it is so little out of your way, and you will do still better, if you would, which I know you will not. I am sure it would do you a great deal of good. Mr. Burish can doubtless give you the best letters to Munich, and he will naturally give you some to Comte Pressing or Comte Seinsen, and such sort of grave people. But I could wish that you would ask him for some to young fellows of pleasure or fashionable coquettes, that you may be Don Lonnet de Boche de Munich. Apropos of your future motions, I leave you in a great measure the master of them, and I leave you in a great measure the master of them, so shall only suggest my thoughts to you upon that subject. You have three electoral courts in view, Bonn, Munich, and Mannheim. I would advise you to see two of them rather cursely, and fix your tabernacle at the third, whichever that may be, for a considerable time. For instance, should you choose, as I fancy you will, to make Mannheim the place of your residence, stay only ten or twelve days at Bonn, and as long at Munich, and then go and fix at Mannheim, and so vice versa, if you should like Bonn or Munich better than you think you would Mannheim, to make that the place of your residence, and only visit the other two. It is certain that no man can be much pleased himself or please others much, in any place where he is only a bird of passage for eight or ten days, neither party thinking it worthwhile to make an acquaintance, still less to form any connection for so short a time. A man may domesticate himself pretty well, and very soon not be looked upon as a stranger. This is the real utility of travelling, when by contracting a familiarity in any place, you get into the inside of it and see it in its undress. That is the only way of knowing the customs, the manners, and all the little characteristical peculiarities that distinguish one place from another. But then this familiarity is not to be brought about by cold, formal visits of half an hour. No, you must show a willingness, a desire, and impatience of forming connections. Il faut supprater du désir de plaire. Whatever you do approve, you must be lavish in your praises of, and you must learn to commend what you do not approve of, if it is approved of there. You are not much given to praise, I know, but it is because you do not yet know how extremely people are engaged by a seeming sanction to their own opinions, and weaknesses, even in the mirest tribals. Our self-love is mortified when we think our opinions and even our tastes, customs, and dresses, either arraigned or condemned, as on the contrary it is tickled and flattered by approbation. I will give you a remarkable instance of this kind. The famous Earl of Shaftesbury, in the flagitious reign of Charles II, while he was Chancellor, had a mind to be a favourite, in order therefore to please his Majesty, whose prevailing passion was women, my Lord kept a whore, whom he had no occasion for, and made no manner of use of. The King soon heard of it and asked him if it was true. He owned it was, but that though he kept that one woman he had several others besides, for he loved variety. A few days afterward the King, at his public levy, saw Lord Shaftesbury at some distance and said in the circle, a weak man is the greatest Tormaster in England, but I can assure you that he is. Upon Lord Shaftesbury's coming into the circle there was a general smile and the King said, this is concerning you, my Lord. Me, Sir, asked the Chancellor with some surprise. Yes, you, answered the King, for I had just said that you were the greatest Tormaster in England. Is it not true? Of a subject, Sir, replied Lord Shaftesbury, perhaps I am. A prince of opinion, of conduct, of manners, a tacit reproach, at least upon our own. We must therefore use ourselves to a ready conformity to whatever is neither criminal nor dishonorable. Whoever differs from any general custom is supposed to both think and proclaim himself wiser than the rest of the world, which the rest of the world cannot bear, especially in a young man. A young fellow is always forgiven and often applauded when he carries but never if he stops short of it. The first is ascribed to youth in fire, but the latter is imputed to an affectation of singularity or superiority. At your age one is allowed to Uchcré fashion, dress, vivacity, gallantry, etc., but by no means to be behind hand in any one of them. And one may apply to youth in this case. See non eriset, viserat, you menis. Adjou. Red by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audio books or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Section 158 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 189 Bath October 19th, 1753 My dear friend, of all the various ingredients that compose the useful and necessary art of pleasing, no one is so effectual and engaging is that gentleness, that duessure of countenance and manner, to which you are no stranger, though God knows why a sworn enemy. Other people take great pains to conceal or disguise their natural imperfections, some by the make of their clothes and other arts, endeavour to conceal the defects of their shape. Women who, unfortunately, have natural bad complexions lay on good ones, and both men and women upon whom unkind nature has inflicted a surliness and ferocity of countenance, do at least all they can, though often without success, to soften and mitigate it. They affect duessure and aim at smiles, though often in the attempt, like the devil in Milton, they grin horribly a ghastly smile. But you are the only person I ever knew in the whole course of my life, who not only disdain, but absolutely reject and disguise a great advantage that nature has kindly granted. You easily guess, I mean, countenance, for she has given you a very pleasing one, but you beg to be excused, you will not accept it, but on the contrary take singular pains to put on the most funest, forbidding an unpleasing one that can possibly be imagined. This one would think impossible, but you know it to be true. If you imagine that it gives you a manly, thoughtful, and decisive air, as some, though very few of your countrymen do, you are most exceedingly mistaken, for it is at best the air of a German corporal, part of whose exercise to look fierce, and to blaspheme Europe. You will say, perhaps, what, am I always to be studying my countenance in order to wear this duessure? I answer, no, but do it for a fortnight, and you will never have occasion to think of it more. Take but half the pains to recover the countenance that nature gave you, that you must have taken to disguise and deform it as you have, and the business will be done. Transform your eyes to a certain softness, of which they are very capable, and your face to smiles, which become it more than most faces I know. Give all your motions, too, an air of duessure, which is directly the reverse of their present celerity and rapidity. I wish you would adopt a little of l'air du couvent. You very well know what I mean, to a certain degree. It has something extremely engaging. There is a mixture of benevolence, affection, and unction in it. It is frequently really sincere, but is almost always thought so, and consequently pleasing. Will you call this trouble? It will not be half an hour's trouble to you in a week's time. But suppose it be, pray tell me, why did you give yourself the trouble of learning to dance so well as you do? It is neither a religious, moral, or civil duty. You must own that you did it then singly to please, and you were in the right on it. Why do you wear fine clothes and curl your hair? Both are troublesome. Lank locks and plain flimsy rags are much easier. This then you do in order to please, and you do very right. But then for God's sake reason enact consequently, and endeavour to please in other things, too, still more essential, and without which the trouble you have taken in those is wholly thrown away. You show your dancing perhaps six times a year at most, but you show your countenance and your common motions every day and all day. Which then, I appeal to yourself, ought you to think of the most, and care to render easy, graceful, and engaging. Dussure of countenance and gesture can alone make them so. You are by no means ill-natured, and would you then most unjustly be reckoned so? Yet your common countenance intimates, and would make anybody who did not know you believe it. Apropos of this I must tell you what was said the other day to a fine lady whom you know, who is very good-natured in truth, and whose common countenance implies ill-nature even to brutality. It was Miss H. Lady M's niece, whom you have seen both at Black Heath and at Lady Hervey's. Lady M was saying to me that you had a very engaging countenance when you had a mind to it, but that you had not always that mind, upon which Miss H said that she liked your countenance best when it was as glum as her own. Why, then, replied Lady M, you too should marry, for while you both wear your worst countenances, nobody else will venture upon either of you, and they call her now Mrs. Stanhope. To complete this du sur of countenance and motions, which I so earnestly recommend to you, you should carry it also to your expressions and manner of thinking. Mettez-y toujours de la facte de longchon. Take the gentle, the favorable, the indulgent side of most questions. I own that the manly and sublime John Trott, your countryman seldom does, but to show his spirit and decision takes the rough and harsh side, which he generally adorns with an oath to seem more formidable. This he only thinks fine, for to do John Justice he is commonly as good-natured as anybody. These are among the many little things which you have not, and I have, lived long enough in the world to know of what infinite consequence they are in the course of life. Reason, then, I repeated again within yourself, consequentially, and let not the pains you have taken, and still take, to please in some things, be apurepeut, by your negligence of and inattention to others of much less trouble, and much more consequence. I have been of late much engaged, or rather bewildered, in oriental history, particularly that of the Jews, since the destruction of their temple, and their dispersion by Titus. But the confusion and uncertainty of the whole, and the monstrous extravagances and falsehoods of the greatest part of it, twisted me extremely. Their Talmud, their Mishnah, their Targums, and other traditions and writings of their rabbins and doctors, who were most of them cabalists, are really more extravagant and absurd, if possible, than all that you have read in Comte de Gabelie, and, indeed, most of his stuff is taken from them. Take this sample of their nonsense which is transmitted in the writings of one of their most considerable rabbins. Even Abbas Sall, a man of ten feet high, was digging a grave, and happened to find the eye of Goliath, in which he thought proper to bury himself, and so he did, all but his head, which the giant's eye was, unfortunately, not quite deep enough to receive. This, I assure you, is the most modest lie of ten thousand. I have also read the Turkish history which, accepting the religious part, is not fabulous, though very possibly not true. For the Turks, having no notion of letters, and being even by their religion, forbid the use of them, except for reading and transcribing the Quran, they have no historians of their own, nor any authentic records, nor memorials for other historians to work upon, so that what histories we have of that country are written by foreigners, as Platina, Sir Paul Ricot, Prince Cantimer, etc., or else snatches only of particular and short periods, by some who happen to reside there at those times, such as Bess Quibbius, whom I have just finished. I like him as far as he goes, much the best of any of them, but then his account is, properly, only an account of his own embassy, from the Emperor Charles V to Suleiman the Magnificent. However, there he gives, episodically, the best account I know of the customs and manners of the Turks, and of the nature of that government, which is a most extraordinary one. For despotic as it always seems, and sometimes is, it is in truth a military republic, and the real power resides in the Janissaries, who sometimes order their sultan to strangle his vizier, and sometimes the vizier to depose or strangle his sultan, according as they happen to be angry at the one or the other. I own I am glad that the capital strangler should, in his turn, be strangleable, and now and then strangled, for I know of no brute so fierce, nor criminal so guilty, as the creature called a sovereign, whether king, sultan, or sophie, who thinks himself, either by divine or human right, vested with an absolute power of destroying his fellow creatures, or who, without inquiring into his right, lawlessly exerts that power. The most excusable of all those human monsters are the Turks, whose religion teaches them inevitable fatalism. Apropos of the Turks, my Loyola, I pretend, is superior to your sultan. Perhaps you think this impossible, perhaps you think this impossible, and wonder who this Loyola is. Know then, that I have had a barbeque brought me from France, so exactly like the sultan, that he has been mistaken for him several times, only his snout is shorter, and his ears larger than the sultans. He has also the acquired knowledge of the sultan, and I am apt to think that he studied under the same master at Paris. His habit and his white band show him to be an ecclesiastic, and his begging, which he does very earnestly, proves him to be of a mendicant order, which, added to his flattery and the insinuation, make him supposed to be a Jesuit, and have acquired him the name of Loyola. I must not omit, too, that when he breaks wind he smells exactly like the sultan. I do not yet hear one jot the better for all my bavings and pumpings, though I have been here already full half my time. I consequently go very little into company, being very little fit for any. I hope you keep company enough for us both. You will get more by that than I shall by all my reading. I read simply to amuse myself and fill up my time, of which I have too much, but you have too much better reasons for going into company, pleasure, and profit. May you find a great deal of both in a great deal of company. Adjou. End of Section 158, read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Section 159 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 190, London, November 20th, 1753. My dear friend, two mails are now due from Holland, so that I have no letter from you to acknowledge. But that, you know, by long experience, does not hinder my writing to you. I always receive your letters with pleasure, but I mean an endeavor that you should receive mine with some profit, preferring always your advantage to my own pleasure. If you find yourself well-settled and naturalized at Mannheim, stay there some time, and do not leave a certain for an uncertain good. But if you think you shall be as well or better established at Munich, go there as soon as you please, and if disappointed you can always return to Mannheim. I mentioned in a former letter you're passing the Carnival at Berlin, which I think may be both useful and pleasing to you. However, do as you will, but let me know what you resolve. That king and that country have and will have so great a share in the affairs of Europe that they are well worth being thoroughly known. Whether where you are now or ever may be hereafter, you speak French, German, or English most, I earnestly recommend to you a particular attention to the propriety and elegance of your style. Employ the best words you can find in the language, avoid cacophony, and make your periods as harmonious as you can. I need not, I am sure, tell you what you must often have felt, how much the elegance of diction adorns the best thoughts, and palliates the worst. In the House of Commons it is almost everything, and indeed in memory assembly, whether public or private. The words which are the dress of thoughts deserve surely more care than clothes, which are only the dress of the person, and which, however, ought to have their share of attention. If you attend to your style in any one language it will give you a habit of attending to it in every other, and if once you speak either French or German very elegantly you will afterwards speak much the better English for it. I repeat it to you again for at least the thousandth time. Start your whole attention now in acquiring the ornamental parts of character. People know very little of the world and talk nonsense, when they talk of plainness and solidity unadorned. They will do in nothing. Mankind has been long out of a state of nature, and the golden age of native simplicity will never return. Whether for the better or the worse, no matter, but we are refined, and plain manners, plain dress, and plain diction, would as little do in life as acorns, herbage, and the water of the neighboring spring would do it table. Some people are just come who interrupt me in the middle of my sermon, so good night. Letter 191 London, November 26th, 1753 My dear friend, find doings at Mannheim. If one may give credit to the weekly histories of Monsieur Rodrigue, the finest writer among the moderns. Not only des chasse-brillants et nombreuses des appareurs ou les acteurs si se passent les jeux, les sens de L, L, A, A, et, et, sérénisme, célèbre, and grand gala. But to crown the whole, Monsieur Juequementel is happily arrived, and Monsieur Watensblout hourly expected. I hope that you are par magna of all these delights, though as no bluff says, in the old bachelor, that rascally gazetteer takes no more notice of you than if you were not in the land of the living. I should think that he might at least have taken notice that, in these rejoicings you appeared with a rejoicing, and not a gloomy countenance, and you distinguished yourself in that numerous and shining company by your air, dress, address, and attentions. If this was the case, as I will both hope and suppose it was, I will, if you require it, have him written to, to do you justice in his next supplement. Seriously, I am very glad that you are whorled in that tourbillon of pleasure. They smooth, polish, and rub off rough corners. Perhaps too, you have some particular collision, which is still more effectual. Channat's history of the Palatinate was, I find, written originally in German, in which language I suppose it is that you have read it. But as I most humbly content myself with the French translation, Valiant has sent for it for me from Holland, so that I have not yet read it. While you are in the Palatinate, you do very well to read everything relative to it. You will do still better if you make that reading the foundation of your inquiries into the more minute circumstances and anecdotes of that country, wherever you are in company with informed and knowing people. The ministers here, intimidated on the absurd and groundless clamors of the mob, have very weakly in my mind, repealed, this session, the bill which they passed in the last for rendering Jews capable of being naturalized by subsequent acts of parliament. The clamors triumph, and will doubtless make further demands, which if not granted, this piece of complacence will soon be forgotten. Nothing is truer in politics than this reflection of the Cardinal de Retz, que le peuple qu'un toujours qu'on ne le qu'a pas. And consequently, they grow unreasonable and insolent, when they find that they are feared. These and honest governors will never, if they can help it, give the people just cause to complain. But then on the other they will firmly withstand groundless clamor. Besides that this noise against the Jew-bill proceeds from that narrow mob-spirit of intoleration in religious and in-hospitality in civil matters, both which all wise governments should oppose. The confusion in France increases daily, as no doubt you are informed where you are. There is an answer of the clergy to the remonstrances of the parliament, lately published, which was sent me by the last post from France, and which I would have sent you, enclosed in this, were it not too bulky. Very probably you may see it at Mannheim, from the French minister. It is very well worth your reading, being most artfully and plausibly written, though founded upon false principles, the juice divinum of the clergy, and consequently their supremacy in all matters of faith and doctrine are asserted, both which I absolutely deny. Where these two points allowed, the clergy of any country whatsoever, they must necessarily govern that country absolutely, everything being, directly or indirectly, relative to faith or doctrine, and whoever is supposed to have the power of saving and damning souls to all eternity, which power the clergy pretend to, will be much more considered and better obeyed than any civil power that forms no pretensions beyond this world, whereas in truth the clergy in every country are, like all other subjects, dependent upon the supreme legislative power, and are appointed by that power under whatever restrictions and limitations it pleases, to keep up decency and decorum in the church, just as constables are to keep peace in the parish. This frau paolo has clearly proved, even upon their own principles of the Old and New Testament, in his book De Nifesias, which I recommend to you to read with attention, it is short. Adjou. End of Section 159. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 160 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the Public Domain. Chapter 192 London, December 25, 1753 My dear friend, yesterday again I received two letters at once from you, the one of the seventh, the other of the fifteenth, from Mannheim. You never had in your life so good a reason for not writing, either to me or to anybody else, as your sore finger lately furnished you. I believe it was painful, and I am glad it is cured, but a sore finger, however painful, is a much less evil than laziness, of either body or mind, and attended by fewer ill consequences. I am very glad to hear that you were distinguished at the court of Mannheim from the rest of your countrymen and fellow travellers. It is a sign that you had better manners and address than they. For take it for granted, the best bred people will always be the best received wherever they go. Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie, is of commercial life. Returns are equally expected for both, and people will no more advance their civility to a bear than their money to a bankrupt. I really both hope and believe that the German courts will do you a great deal of good, their ceremony and restraint being the proper correctives and antidotes for your negligence and inattention. I believe they would not greatly relish your weltering in your own laziness, and an easy chair, nor take it very kindly if, when they spoke to you or to them, you looked another way, as much as to say, kiss my— As they give, so they require attention, and, by the way, take this maxim for an undoubted truth, that no young man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint. I dare not trust to Miss Sonier's report of his renish, his burgundy not having answered either his account or my expectations. I doubt, as a wine-merchant, he is the profiteus capo, whatever he may be, as a banker. I shall therefore venture upon none of his wine, but delay making my provision of old hawk, till I go abroad myself next spring, as I told you in the utmost secrecy in my last that I intend to do, and then probably I may taste some that I like, and go upon shore-ground. There is commonly very good, both at Ex-La-Chapelle and the Ege, where I formerly got some Ex- lent, which I carried with me to Spa, where I drank no other wine. As my letters to you frequently miscarry, I will repeat in this that part of my last which related to your future motions. Whenever you shall be tired of Berlin, go to Dresden, where Sir Charles Williams will be, who will receive you with open arms. He dined with me today, and sets out for Dresden in about six weeks. He spoke of you with great kindness and impatience to see you again. He will trust and employ you in business, and he is now in the whole secret of importance, till we fix our place to meet in, which probably will be Spa. Wherever you are, inform yourself minutely of, and attend particularly to the affairs of France. They grow serious, and in my opinion will grow more and more so every day. The king is despised, and I do not wonder at it, but he is brought it about to be hated at the same time, which seldom happens to the same man. His ministers are known to be as disunited as incapable. He hesitates between the church and the parliaments, like the ass and the fable, that starve between two hampers of hay. Too much in love with his mistress to part with her, and too much afraid of his soul to enjoy her. Jealous of the parliaments, who would support his authority, and a devoted bigot to the church that would destroy it. The people are poor, consequently discontented. Those who have religion are divided in their notions of it, which is saying that they hate one another. The clergy never do forgive, much less will they forgive the parliament. The parliament never will forgive them. The army must, without doubt, take in their own minds at last different parts in all these disputes, which upon occasion would break out. Armies, though always the supporters and tools of absolute power for the time being, are always the destroyers of it, too, by frequently changing the hands in which they think it proper to lodge it. This was the case of the Praetorian bands, who deposed and murdered the monsters they had raised to oppress mankind. The Janissaries in Turkey and the regiments of guards in Russia do the same now. The French nation reasons freely, which they never did before, upon matters of religion and government, and begin to be spread judicati. The officers do so, too. In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history previous to great changes in revolutions and government now exist and daily increase in France. I am glad of it. The rest of Europe will be the quieter and have time to recover. England, I am sure, wants rest, for it wants men and money. The Republic of the United Provinces wants both still more, and other powers cannot well dance, when neither France nor the Maritime powers can, as they used to do, pay the piper. The first squabble in Europe that I foresee will be about the crown of Poland, should the present king die, and therefore I wish his majesty a long life and a merry Christmas. So much for foreign politics, but I propose of them, pray take care, while you are in those parts of Germany, to inform yourself correctly of all the details, discussions and agreements, which the several wars, confiscations, bans, and treaties occasioned between the Bavarian and Palatine electorates. They are interesting and curious. I shall not, upon the occasion of the approaching New Year, repeat to you all the wishes which I continue to form for you. You know them already, and you know that it is absolutely in your power to satisfy most of them. Among other wishes this is my most earnest one, that you would open the New Year with a most solemn and devout sacrifice to the graces, who never reject those that supplicate them with fervor. Without them, let me tell you, that your friend Dame Fortune will stand you in little stead. May they all be your friends. Adieu. I have this moment received your letter of the twenty-sixth past from Munich. Since you are got so well out of the distress and dangers of your journey from Mannheim, I am glad that you were in them. Condice idilletti, memory idipene, nasace siabene, chimal non sofri. They were but little samples of the much greater distress and dangers which you must expect to meet within your great, and I hope, long journey through life. In some parts of it flowers are scattered with profusion, the road is smooth and the prospect pleasant. But in others, and I fear the greater number, the road is rugged, beset with thorns and briars, and cut by torrents. Gather the flowers in your way, but at the same time guard against the briars that are either mixed with them, or that most certainly succeed them. Thank you for your wild boar, who now he is dead, I assure him, si la sere bien mange mal qu'il en ape. Though I am not so sure that I should have had that personal valor which so successfully distinguished you in single combat with him, which made him bite the dust like Homer's heroes, and to conclude my period sublimely, put him into that pickle from which I propose eating him. At the same time that I applaud your valor, I must do just as to your modesty, which candidly admits that you were not over-matched, and that your adversary was about your own age and size. Your castan, being under a year old, would have been below your indignation. Bete de Campania, being under two years old, was still, in my opinion, below your glory. But I guess that your enemy was in Rago, that is, from two to three years old. An age and size which, between man and bore, answer pretty well to yours. If accidents of bad roads or waters do not detain you at Munich, I do not fancy that pleasures will, and I rather believe you will seek for and find them at the carnival at Berlin, in which supposition I eventually direct this letter to your banker there. While you are at Berlin, I earnestly recommend it to you again and again, pray care to see, hear, know, and mind everything there. The ablest prince in Europe is surely an object that deserves attention, and the least thing that he does, like the smallest sketches of the greatest painters, has its value, and a considerable one, too. Read with care the code Frederick, and inform yourself of the good effects of it in those parts of his dominions where it has taken place, and where it has banished the former chicances, quirks, and quibbles of the old law. Do not think any detail too minute or trifling for your inquiry and observation. I wish that you could find one hour's leisure every day to read some good Italian author, and to converse in that language with our worthy friend, Signor Angelo Corri. It would both refresh and improve your Italian, which of the many languages you know I take to be that in which you are the least perfect, but of which, too, you already know enough to make yourself master up, with very little trouble whenever you please. Live, dwell, and grow at the several courts there. Use them so much to your face that they may not look upon you as a stranger. Live and take their tombs, even to their affectations and follies, for such there are, and perhaps should be at all courts. Stay in all events at Berlin till I inform you of Sir Charles Williams' arrival at Dresden, where I suppose you would not care to be before him, and where you may go as soon after him as ever you please. Your time there will neither be unprofitably nor disagreeably spent. He will introduce you into all the best company, though he can introduce you to none so good as his own. He has, of late, applied himself very seriously to foreign affairs, especially those of Saxony and Poland. He knows them perfectly well, and will tell you what he knows. He always expresses, and I have good reason to believe very sincerely, great kindness and affection for you. The works of the late Lord Bolingbroke are just published, and have plunged me into philosophical studies, which hitherto I have not been much used to or delighted with, convinced of the futility of those researches. But I have read his philosophical essay upon the extent of human knowledge, which, by the way, makes two large quartos and a half. He there shows very clearly, and with most splendid eloquence, what the human mind can and cannot do, that our understandings are wisely calculated for our place in this planet, and for the link which we form in the universal chain of things, but that they are by no means capable of that degree of knowledge which our curiosity makes us search after, and which our vanity makes us often believe we arrive at. I shall not recommend to you the reading of that work, but when you return hither I shall recommend to your frequent and diligent perusal all his tracks that are relative to our history and constitution, upon which he throws lights and scatters graces which no other writer has ever done. Reading, which was always a pleasure to me in the time even of my greatest dissipation, is now become my only refuge, and I fear I indulge it too much at the expense of my eyes. But what can I do? I must do something. I cannot bear absolute idleness. My ears grow every day more useless to me. My eyes consequently more necessary. I will not hoard them like a miser, but will rather risk the loss than not enjoy the use of them. Pray let me know all the particulars not only of your reception at Munich, but also at Berlin. At the latter I believe it will be a good one, for his Prussian Majesty knows that I have been long an admirer and respecter of his great and various talents. Adju. End of Section 161, read by Professor Heatheran Baye, for more free audiobooks or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Section 162 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter 194 London, February 1, 1754 My dear friend, I received yesterday yours of the twelfth from Munich, in consequence of which I direct this to you there, though I directed my three last to Berlin, where I suppose you will find them at your arrival. Since you are not only domesticated but niche at Munich, you are much in the right to stay there. It is not by seeing places that one knows them, but by familiar and daily conversations with the people of fashion. I would not care to be in the place of that prodigy of beauty, whom you are to drive don la coste tra no, and I am apt to think you are much more likely to break her bones than she is, though ever so cruel to break your heart. Nay, I am not sure but that, according to all the rules of gallantry, you are obliged to overturn her on purpose, in the first place, for the chance of seeing her backside, in the next for the sake of the contrition and concern which it would give you an opportunity of showing, and lastly, upon account of all the gentiless and epic-gram which it would naturally suggest. Voltaire has made several stanzas upon an accident of that kind, which happened to a lady of his acquaintance. There is a great deal of wit in them, rather too much, for according to the taste of those times, they are full of what the Italians call concetti spiritosissimi, the Spaniards agudese, and we, affectation and quaintness. I hope you have endeavored to suit your tra no to the character of the fair one whom it is to contain. She is of an irascible, impetuous disposition, as fine women can sometimes be. You will doubtless place her in the body of a lion, a tiger, a dragon, or some tremendous beast of prey and fury. If she is a sublime and stately beauty, which I would think more probable, for unquestionably she is whole-girl-born. You will, I suppose, provide a magnificent swan or proud peacock for her reception. But if she is all tenderness and softness, you have to be sure taking care of amorous doves and wanton sparrows should seem to flutter around her. Proper mottoes I take it for granted that you have eventually prepared, but if not, you may find a great many ready-made ones in Les Entretiens, Derriste, et Dugigny sur les Divises, written by Père Bonheur, and worth your reading at any time. I will not say to you upon this occasion, like the father in Ovid, Parcé, Pure, Stimulus, Effortius, Oterre, Lores. On the contrary, drive on briskly. It is not the chariot of the sun that you drive, but you carry the sun in your chariot. Consequently, the faster it goes, the less it will be likely to scorch or consume. This is Spanish enough, I am sure. If this finds you still at Munich, pray make many compliments from me to Mr. Burrish, to whom I am very much obliged for all his kindness to you. It is true that while I had power I endeavored to serve him, but it is as true, too, that I served many others more, who have neither returned nor remembered those services. I have been very ill this last fortnight of your old Carnolian complaint, the Arthritis Vaga. Luckily it did not fall upon my breast but seized on my right arm. There it fixed its seat of empire. But as in all tyrannical governments the remotest parts felt their share of its severity. Last post I was not able to hold a pen long enough to write to you, and therefore desired Mr. Grevenkopf to do it for me. But that letter was directed to Berlin. My pain is now much abated, though I have still some fine remains of it in my shoulder, where I fear it will tease me a great while. I must be careful to take Horace's advice and consider well, quid valiant humeri quid ferre recusant. Lady Chesterfield bids me make you her compliments, and assure you that the music will be much more welcome to her with you than without you. In some of my last letters, which were directed and will, I suppose, wait for you at Berlin, I complimented you and with justice, upon your great improvement of late in the epistolary way, both with regard to the style and the turn of your letters. Your four or five last to me have been very good ones, and one that you wrote to Mr. Hart, upon the new year, was so a pretty one, and he was so much and so justly pleased with it, that he sent it me from Windsor the instant he had read it. This talent, and a most necessary one it is in the course of life, is to be acquired by resolving and taking pains to acquire it, and indeed so is every talent except poetry, which is undoubtedly a gift. Think therefore night and day of the turn, the purity, the correctness, the perspicuity, and the elegance of whatever you speak or write. Take my word for it, your labor will not be in vain, but greatly rewarded by the harvest of praise and success which it will bring you. Delicacy of turn and elegance of style are ornaments as necessary to common sense, as attentions, address, and fashionable manners are to common civility. Both may subsist without them, but then without being of the least use to the owner. The figure of a man is exactly the same in dirty rags or in the finest and best-chosen clothes, but in which of the two he is the most likely to please and to be received in good company I leave it to you to determine. Both my arm and my paper hint to me to bid you good night. End of Section 162, read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 163 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 195, London, February 12, 1754. My dear friend, I take my aim and let off this letter at you at Berlin. I should be sorry it missed you because I believe you will read it with as much pleasure as I write it. This is to inform you that after some difficulties and dangers your seat in the new Parliament is at last absolutely secured, and that without opposition, or the least necessity of your personal trouble or appearance. This success, I must further inform you, is in great degree owing to Mr. Eliot's friendship to us both, for he brings you in with himself at his surest borough. As it was impossible to act with more zeal and friendship than Mr. Eliot has acted in this whole affair, I desire that you will by the very next post write him a letter of thanks, warm and young thanks, not old and cold ones. You may enclose it in yours to me, and I will send it to him, for he is now in Cornwall. Thus, being sure of being a senator, I dare say you do not propose to be one of the Padere Senatores, a Pedebus Eire in Cententium, for as the House of Commons is the theatre where you must make your fortune and figure in the world, you must resolve to be an actor, and not a persona muta, which is just equivalent to a candle snuffer upon other theatres. Whoever does not shine there is obscure, insignificant, and contemptible, and you cannot conceive how easy it is for man of half your sense and knowledge to shine there if he pleases. The receipt to make him a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and necessary. Take of common sense, quantum suffcit. Add a little application to the rules and orders of the House. Throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness, and elegance of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind do neither analyze nor search to the bottom. They are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface. All have senses to be gratified. Very few have reason to be applied to. Peaceful utterance and action please their eyes, elegant diction tickles their ears, but strong reason would be thrown away upon them. I am not only persuaded by theory, but convinced by my experience, that, supposing a certain degree of common sense, what is called a good speaker is as much a mechanic as a good shoemaker, and that the two trades are equally to be learned by the same degree of application. Therefore for God's sake let this trade be the principal object of your thoughts. Never lose sight of it. Attend minutely to your style, whatever the language you speak or write in. Seek for the best words, and think of the best turns. Whenever you doubt of the propriety or elegance of any word, search the dictionary or some good author for it, or inquire of somebody who is master of that language, and in a little time propriety and elegance of diction will become so habitual to you that they will cost you no more trouble. As I have laid this down to be mechanical and attainable by whoever will take the necessary pains, there will be no great vanity in my saying, that I saw the importance of the object so early and attended to it so young, that it would now cost me more trouble to speak or write ungrammatically, vulgarly, and inelegantly, than ever it did to avoid doing so. The late Lord Bullingbroke, without the least trouble, talked all day long, full as elegantly as he wrote. Why? Not by a peculiar gift from heaven, but, as he has often told me himself, by an early and constant attention to his style. The present Solicitor-General, Murray, Editors' Note, created Lord Mansfield in the year 1756, and Editors' Note, has less law than many lawyers, but has more practice than any, merely upon account of his eloquence, of which he has a never-failing stream. I remember so long ago as when I was at Cambridge, whenever I read pieces of eloquence, and indeed they were my chief study. Whether ancient or modern, I used to write down the shining passages, and then translate them, as well and elegantly, as ever I could, if Latin or French, into English, if English into French. This which I practiced for some years not only improved and formed my style, but imprinted in my mind and memory the best thoughts of the best authors. The trouble was little, but the advantage I have experienced was great. While you are abroad, you can neither have time nor opportunity to read pieces of English or parliamentary eloquence, as I hope you will carefully do when you return. But in the meantime, whenever pieces of French eloquence come in your way, such as the speeches of persons received into the Academy, Oresion Funimbrés, representations of the several parliaments to the King, etc., read them in that view, in that spirit. Observe the harmony, the turn, and elegance of the style. Examine in what you think it might have been better, and consider in what, had you written it yourself, you might have done worse. Compare the different manners of expressing the same thoughts in different authors, and observe how differently the same things appear in different dresses. Bvlgar, Chorus, and ill-chosen words will deform and degrade the best thoughts as much as rags and dirt will the best figure. In short, you now know your object, pursue it steadily and have no digressions that are not relative to, and connected with the main action. Your success in Parliament will effectively remove all other objections, either a foreign or a domestic destination will no longer be refused you, if you make your way to it through Westminster. I think I may now say that I am quite recovered from my late illness, strength and spirits accepted, which are not yet restored. Ex-La-Chapelle and Spa-Will, I believe, answer all my purposes. I long to hear an account of your reception at Berlin, which I fancy will be a most gracious one. Adieu. End of Section 163, read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 164 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 196. London, February 15, 1754. My dear friend, I can now, with great truth, apply your own motto to you. Nullum numen a best, si sit prudentia. You are sure of being, as early as your age will permit, a member of that house, which is the only road to figure and fortune in this country. Those indeed who are bred up to and distinguished themselves in particular professions, as the army, the navy, and the law, may by their own merit raise themselves to a certain degree. But you may observe, too, that they never get to the top without the assistance of parliamentary talents and influence. The means of distinguishing yourself in parliament are, as I told you in my last, much more easily attained than I believe you imagine. Close attendance to the business of the house will soon give you the parliamentary routine, and strict attention to your style will soon make you, not only a speaker, but a good one. The vulgar look upon a man who is reckoned to find speaker as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiar gift of heaven. They stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a gesture light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of the belocution, and the elegance of style. The miracle will then cease, and you will be convinced that with the same application and attention to the same objects, you may certainly equal and perhaps surpass this prodigy. Sir, W.Y., with not a quarter of your parts, and not a thousandth part of your knowledge, has, by a glibness of tongue simply, raised him successively to the best employments of the kingdom. He has been Lord of the Admiralty, Lord of the Treasury, Secretary at War, and is now Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, and all this with a most sullied, not to say, blasted character. Represent the thing to yourself as it really is, easily attainable and you will find it so. Have but ambition enough passionately to desire the object, and spirit enough to use the means, and I will be answerable for your success. When I was younger than you are, I resolved within myself that I would, in all events, be a speaker in Parliament and a good one too, if I could. I consequently never lost sight of that object, and never neglected any of the means that I thought led to it. I succeeded to a certain degree, and I assure you with great ease and with superior talents. Young people are very apt to overrate both men and things, from not being enough acquainted with them. In proportion as you come to know them better, you will value them less. You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind seldom does, but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp its seat and rule in its stead. You will find that the ablest have their weak sides too, and are only comparatively able, with regard to the still weaker herd. Having fewer weaknesses themselves, they are able to avail themselves of the innumerable ones of the generality of mankind. Being more masters of themselves, they become more easily masters of others. They address themselves to their weaknesses, their senses, their passions, never to their reason, and consequently seldom fail of success. But then analyze those great, those governing, as the vulgar imagine, those perfect characters, and you will find the great Brutus a thief in Macedonia, the great Cardinal Richelieu a jealous potaster, and the great Duke of Marlboro a miser. Till you come to know mankind by your own experience I know no thing, nor no man, that can, in the meantime, bring you so well acquainted with them as Le Duc de la Rochefoucault. His little book of maxims, which I would advise you to look into, for some moments at least every day of your life, is, I fear, too like and too exact a picture of human nature. I own it seems to degrade it, but yet my experience does not convince me that it degrades it unjustly. Now to bring all this home to my first point. All these considerations should not only invite you to attempt to make a figure in Parliament, but encourage you to hope that you shall succeed. To govern mankind one must not overrate them, and to please an audience as a speaker one must not overvalue it. When I first came into the House of Commons I respected that assembly as a venerable one, and felt a certain awe upon me, but upon better acquaintance that awe soon vanished, and I discovered that of the five hundred and sixty, not above thirty could understand reason, and that all the rest were popla, that those thirty only required plain common sense dressed up in good language, that all the others only required flowing and harmonious periods, whether they conveyed any meaning or not, having ears to hear but not sense enough to judge. These considerations made me speak with little concern the first time, with less the second, and with none at all the third. I gave myself no further trouble about anything except my elocution and my style, presuming without much vanity that I had common sense sufficient not to talk nonsense. Fix these three truths strongly in your mind. First that it is absolutely necessary for you to speak in Parliament, secondly that it only requires a little human attention and no supernatural gifts, and thirdly that you have all the reason in the world to think that you shall speak well. When we meet, this shall be the principal subject of our conversations, and if you will follow my advice I will answer for your success. Now from great things to little ones, the transition to me is easy, because nothing seems little to me that can be of any use to you. I hope you take great care of your mouth and teeth, and that you clean them well every morning with a sponge and tepid water, with a few drops of archbishop water dropped into it, besides washing your mouth carefully after every meal. I do insist upon your never using those sticks, or any hard substance whatsoever, which always rub the gums and destroy the varnish of the teeth. I speak this from woeful experience, for my negligence of my teeth when I was younger than you are made them bad, and afterward my desire to have them look better made me use sticks, irons, etc., which totally destroyed them, so that I have not now above six or seven left. I lost one this morning which suggested this advice to you. I have received the tremendous wild boar which your still more tremendous arm slew in the immense deserts of the palatinate, but have not yet tasted of it. It is hitherto above my low regimen. The late king of Prussia, whenever he killed any number of wild boars, used to oblige the Jews to buy them at a high price, though they could eat none of them, so they defrayed the expense of his hunting. His son has jester rules of government, as the code Frederick plainly shows. I hope that, by this time, you are as well anchor at Berlin as you were at Munich, but if not, you are sure of being so at Dresden. Adieu. I have received your letters of the fourth from Munich and of the eleventh from Ratisbon, but I have not received that of the thirty-first January to which you refer in the former. It is to this negligence and uncertainty of the post that you owe your accidents between Munich and Ratisbon, for had you received my letters regularly you would have received one from me before you left Munich, in which I advised you to stay, since you were so well there. But at all events you were in the wrong to set out from Munich in such weather and in such roads, since you could never imagine that I had set my heart so much upon your going to Berlin, as to venture your being buried in the snow for it. Upon the whole, considering all, you are very well off. You do very well in my mind to return to Munich, or at least to keep within the circle of Munich, Ratisbon, and Mannheim, till the weather and the roads are good. Stay at each or any of those places as long as ever you please, for I am extremely indifferent about your going to Berlin. Just to our meeting I will tell you my plan, and you may form your own accordingly. I propose setting out from Hentz the last week in April, then drinking the Ick-sla-Chapelle waters for a week, and from thence being at Spa about the fifteenth of May, where I shall stay two months at most, and then return straight to England. As I both hope and believe that there will be no mortal at Spa during my residence there, the fashionable season not beginning till the middle of July, I would by no means have you come there at first, to be locked up with me and some few capuchins for two months in that miserable whole. But I would advise you to stay where you like the best till about the first week in July, and then to come and pick me up at Spa, or meet me in the road at Liege or Brussels. As for the intermediate time, should you be weary of Mannheim and Munich, you may, if you please, go to Dresden, to Sir Charles Williams, who will be there before that time, or you may come for a month or six weeks to the Hague, or in short go or stay wherever you like best, so much for your motions. As you have sent for all the letters directed to you at Berlin, you will receive from thence three volumes of mine, among which you will easily perceive that some were calculated for a supposed perusal previous to your opening them. I will not repeat anything contained in them, accepting that I desire you will send me a warm and cordial letter of thanks for Mr. Eliot, who has, in the most friendly manner imaginable, fixed you at his own borough of Lysgaard, where you will be elected jointly with him, without the least opposition or difficulty. I will forward that letter to him in Cornwall, where he now is. Now that you are soon to be a man of business, I heartily wish that you would immediately begin to be a man of method. Nothing contributing more to facilitate and dispatch business than method and order. Have order and method in your accounts, in your reading, in the allotment of your time, in short in everything. You cannot conceive how much time you will save by it, nor how much better everything you do will be done. The Duke of Marlborough did by no means spend, but he slatterned himself into that immense debt, which is not yet near paid off. The hurry and confusion of the Duke of Newcastle do not proceed from his business, but from his want of method in it. Mr. Robert Walpole, who had ten times the business to do, was never seen in a hurry, because he always did it with method. The head of a man who has business and no method nor order is properly that, rudus ingestiche molis quam dicere chaos. As you must be conscious that you are extremely negligent and slatternly, I hope you will resolve not to be so for the future. Prevail with yourself only to observe good method in order for one fortnight, and I will venture to assure you that you will never neglect them afterward. You will find such convenience and advantage arising from them. Method is the great advantage that lawyers have over other people, in speaking in Parliament, for as they must necessarily observe it in their pleadings in the courts of justice, it becomes habitual to them everywhere else. Without making you a compliment, I can tell you with pleasure that order, method, and more activity of mind are all that you want, to make, some day or other, a considerable figure in business. You have more useful knowledge, more discernment of characters, and much more discretion than is common at your age. Much more I am sure than I had at that age. Experience you cannot yet have, and therefore trust in the meantime to mine. I am an old traveller. I am well acquainted with all the by as well as all the great roads. I cannot misguide you from ignorance, and you are still very sure that I shall not from design. I can assure you that you will have no opportunity of subscribing yourself my excellencies, etc. Retirement and quiet were my choice some years ago, while I had all my senses, and health and spirits enough to carry on business. But now that I have lost my hearing, and that I find my constitution declining daily, they are become my necessary and only refuge. I know myself, no common piece of knowledge, let me tell you. I know what I can, what I cannot, and consequently what I ought to do. I ought not, and therefore will not, return to business when I am much less fit for it than I was when I quitted it. Still less will I go to Ireland, where from my deafness and infirmities I must necessarily make a different figure from that which I once made there. My pride would be too much mortified by that difference. The two important senses of seeing and hearing should not only be good, but quick in business, and the business of a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, if he will do it himself, requires both those senses in the highest perfection. It was the Duke of Dorset's not doing the business himself, but giving it up to favourites that has occasioned all this confusion in Ireland, and it was my doing the whole myself, without either favourite, minister, or mistress, that made my administration so smooth and quiet. I remember when I named the late Mr. Lydell for my secretary, everybody was much surprised at it, and some of my friends represented to me that he was no man of business, but only a very gentile, pretty young fellow. I assured them, and with truth, that that was the very reason why I chose him, for that I was resolved to do all the business myself and without even the suspicion of having a minister, which the Lord Lieutenant's secretary, if he is a man of business, is always supposed, and commonly with reason, to be. Moreover, I look upon myself now to be emeritus in business, in which I have been near forty years together, I give it up to you, apply yourself to it, as I have done, for forty years, and then I consent to your leaving it for a philosophical retirement among your friends in your books. Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay, and too often sanguinely hope to shine on in their meridian, often set with contempt and ridicule. I retired in time, ute cum viva satur, or as Pope says, still the better, ere tittering youth shall shove you from the stage. My only remaining ambition is to be the counselor and minister of your rising ambition. Let me see my own youth revived in you. Let me be your mentor, and with your parts and knowledge I promise you, you shall go far. You must bring on your part activity and attention, and I will point out to you the proper objects for them. I own, I fear but one thing for you, and that is, what one has generally the least reason to fear from one of your age. I mean your laziness, which, if you indulge, will make you stagnate in a contemptible obscurity all your life. It will hinder you from doing anything that will deserve to be written, or from writing anything that may deserve to be read, and yet one or other of those two objects should be at least aimed at by every rational being. I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide, for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive. Business by no means forbids pleasures. On the contrary, they reciprocally season each other, and I will venture to affirm that no man enjoys either imperfection that does not join both. They wet the desire for each other. Use yourself therefore in time to be alert and diligent in your little concerns. Never procrastinate, never put off till tomorrow what you can do today, and never do two things at a time. Pursue your object, be it what it will, steadily and individually, and let any difficulties, if surmountable, rather animate than slacken your endeavors. Perseverance has surprising effects. I wish you would use yourself to translate every day only three or four lines from any book in any language into the correctest and most elegant English that you can think of. You cannot imagine how it will insensibly form your style, and give you an habitual elegance. It would not take you up a quarter of an hour in a day. This letter is so long that it will hardly leave you that quarter of an hour, the day you receive it. So good night. End of Section 165. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 166 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 198. London, March 8th, 1754. My dear friend, a great and unexpected event has lately happened in our ministerial world. Mr. Pelham died last Monday of a fever and mortification, occasioned by a general corruption of his whole mass of blood, which had broke out in sores in his back. I regret him as an old acquaintance, a pretty near relation and a private man, with whom I have lived many years in a social and friendly way. He meant well to the public, and was incorrupt in a post where corruption is commonly contagious. If he was no shining enterprising minister, he was a safe one, which I like better. Very shining ministers, like the sun, are apt to scorch when they shine the brightest. In our Constitution I prefer the milder light of a less glaring minister. His successor is not yet, at least publicly, designatus. You will easily suppose that many are very willing and very few able to fill that post. These persons are talked of by different people for it, according as their interest prompts them to wish or their ignorance to conjecture. Mr. Fox is the most talked of. He is strongly supported by the Duke of Cumberland. Mr. Legg, the solicitor general, and Dr. Lee, are likewise all spoken of upon the foot of the Duke of Newcastle's and the Chancellor's interest. Should it be any one of the last three, I think no great alterations will ensue. But should Mr. Fox prevail, it would, in my opinion, soon produce changes by no means favourable to the Duke of Newcastle. In the meantime, the wild conjectures of volunteer politicians, and the ridiculous importance which, upon these occasions, blockheads always endeavour to give themselves, by grave looks, significant strugs, and insignificant whispers, are very entertaining to a bystander, as thank God I now am. One knows something, but is not yet at liberty to tell it. Another has heard something from a very good hand. A third congratulates himself upon a certain degree of intimacy, which he has long had with every one of the candidates, though perhaps he has never spoken twice to any one of them. In short, in these sort of intervals, vanity, interest, and absurdity, always display themselves in the most ridiculous light. One who has been so long behind the scenes as I have is much more diverted with the entertainment than those can be who only see it from the pit and boxes. I know the whole machinery of the interior, and can laugh the better at the silly wonder in the wild conjectures of the uninformed spectators. This accident, I think, cannot in the least affect your election, which is finally settled with your friend, Mr. Eliot. For, let who will prevail, I presume he will consider me enough not to overturn an arrangement of that sort, in which he cannot possibly be personally interested. So pray go on with your parliamentary preparations. Have that object always in your view, and pursue it with attention. I take it for granted that your late residence in Germany has made you as perfect and correct in German as you were before in French. At least it is worth your while to be so, because it is worth every man's while to be perfect master of whatever language he may ever have occasion to speak. A man is not himself in a language which he does not thoroughly possess. His thoughts are degraded, when inelegantly or imperfectly expressed. He is cramped and confined, and consequently can never appear to advantage. Examine and analyze those thoughts that strike you the most, either in conversation or in books, and you will find that they owe at least half their merit to the turn and expression of them. There is nothing truer than the old saying, nie heel dictum quad non prins dictum. It is only the matter of saying or writing that makes it appear new. Convince yourself that manner is almost everything, in everything, and study it accordingly. I am this moment informed, and I believe truly, that Mr. Fox is to succeed Mr. Pelham as First Commissioner of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and your friend Mr. York of the Hague to succeed Mr. Fox as Secretary of War. EDITORS NOTE HENRY FOX CREATED LORD HOLAND BARONNA FOXLEY IN THE YEAR SEVENTEEN SIXTEEN SIXTEEN THREE END NOTE I am not sorry for this promotion of Mr. Fox, as I have always been upon civil terms with him, and found him ready to do me any little services. He is frank and gentleman-like in his manner, and to a certain degree, I really believe, will be your friend upon my account. If you can afterward make him yours upon your own, time you. I have nothing more to say now, but adieu. SEXTEEN 166 RED FRIED Professor Heather Ambi For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org SEXTEEN 167 OF CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON REDFURLIBREVOX.ORGAN TO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN LETTER 1099 LUNDON MARCH FIPTEENTH SEVENTEEN FIFTY FOUR MY DEAR FRIEND WE ARE HERE IN THE MIDST OF A SECOND WINNER THE COLD IS MORE SEVERE AND THE SNOW DEEPER THAN THEY were in the first. I presume your weather in Germany is not much more gentle, and therefore I hope that you are quietly and warmly fixed at some good town, and will not risk a second burial in the snow, after your late, fortunate resurrection out of it. Your letters, I suppose, have not been able to make their way through the ice, for I have received none from you since that of the 12th of February from Ratisbon. I am the more uneasy at this state of ignorance, because I fear that you may have found some subsequent inconveniences from your overturn, which you might not be aware of at first. The curtain of the political theatre was partly drawn up the day before yesterday, and exhibited a scene which the public in general did not expect. The Duke of Newcastle was declared First Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, Mr. Fox, Secretary of State in his room, and Mr. Henry-led Chancellor of the Exchequer. The employments of the Treasurer of the Navy, and Secretary of War, were supposed to be vacant by the promotion of Mr. Fox and Mr. Leg, were to be kept in petto till the dissolution of this Parliament, which will probably be next week, to avoid the expense and trouble of unnecessary re-elections. But it was generally supposed that Colonel York of the Hague was to succeed Mr. Fox, and George Greenville, Mr. Leg. This scheme had it taken place, you are, I believe, aware, was more a temporary expedient for securing the elections of the new Parliament, and forming it, at its first meeting, to the interests and the inclinations of the Duke of Newcastle and the Chancellor, than a plan of administration either intended or wished to be permanent. This scheme was disturbed yesterday. Mr. Fox, who had sullenly accepted the seals the day before, more sullenly refused them yesterday. His object was to be first Commissioner of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and consequently to have a share in the election of the new Parliament, and a much greater in the management of it when chosen. This necessary consequence of his view defeated it, and the Duke of Newcastle and the Chancellor chose to kick him upstairs into the secretarieship of state, rather than trust him with either the election or the management of the new Parliament. In this, considering their respective situations, they certainly acted wisely. But whether Mr. Fox has done so or not, in refusing the seals, is a point which I cannot determine. If he is, as I presume he is, animated with revenge, and I believe would not be overscrupulous in the means of gratifying it, I should have thought he could have done it better, as Secretary of State, with constant admission into the closet, than as a private man at the head of an opposition. But I see all these things at too great a distance to be able to judge soundly of them. The true springs and motives of political measures are confined within a very narrow circle, and known to a very few. The good reasons alleged are seldom the true ones. The public commonly judges, or rather guesses, wrong, and I am now one of that public. I therefore recommend to you a prudent piranism in all matters of state, until you become one of the wheels of them yourself, and consequently acquainted with the general motion at least of the others. For as to all the minute and secret springs that contribute more or less to the whole machine, no man living ever knows them all, not even he who has the principal direction of it. As in the human body there are innumerable little vessels and glands that have a good deal to do, and yet escape the knowledge of the most skillful anatomist. He will know more, indeed, than those who only see the exterior of our bodies, but he will never know all. This bustle and these changes at court, far from having disturbed the quiet and security of your election, have, if possible, rather confirmed them. For the Duke of Newcastle, I must do him justice, has, in the kindest manner imaginable to you, wrote a letter to Mr. Elliot, to recommend to him the utmost care of your election. Though the plan of administration is thus unsettled, mine for my travels this summer is finally settled, and I now communicate it to you that you may form your own upon it. I propose being at Spa on the tenth or twelfth of May and staying there till the tenth of July. As there will be no mortal there during my stay, it would be both unpleasant and unprofitable to you to be shut up, tet-a-tet with me the whole time. I should therefore think it best for you not to come to me there till the last week of June. In the meantime I suppose that by the middle of April you will think that you have had enough of Mannheim, Munich, or Rettusbone, and that district. Where would you choose to go then? For I leave you absolutely your choice. Would you go to Dresden, for a month or six weeks? That is a good deal out of your way, and I am not sure that Sir Charles will be there by that time. Or would you rather take Bonn in your way, and pass the time till we meet at the Hague? For Mannheim you will have a great many good letters of recommendation to the court at Bonn, which court, and its elector, in one light or another, are worth your seeing. From thence your journey to the Hague will be but a short one, and you would arrive there at the season of the year when the Hague is, in my mind, the most agreeable, smiling scene in Europe, and from the Hague you would have but three very easy days' journey to me at Spa. Do as you like, for as I told you before, villa e absolutamente padrone. But lest you should answer that you desire to be determined by me, I will eventually tell you my opinion. I am rather inclined to the latter plan. I mean, that of your coming to Bonn, staying there accordingly as you like it, and then passing the remainder of your time, that is, May and June, at the Hague. Our connection and transactions with the Republic of the United Provinces are such, that you cannot be too well acquainted with that constitution and with those people. You have established good acquaintances there, and you have been feted around by the foreign ministers, so that you will be there in Peicot-Nu. Moreover, you have not seen the Stadtholter, the gouvernant, nor the court there, which a Boncompt should be seen. Upon the whole then you cannot, in my opinion, pass the months of May and June more agreeably or more usefully than at the Hague. But, however, if you have any other plan that you like better, pursue it. Only let me know what you intend to do, and I shall most cheerfully agree to it. The Parliament will be dissolved in about ten days, and the ritz for the election of the new one issued out immediately afterward, so that by the end of next month you may depend upon being Membre de la Chambre bus, a title that sounds high in foreign countries, and perhaps higher than it deserves. I hope you will add a better title to it in your own. I mean, that of a good speaker in Parliament. You have, I am sure, all the materials necessary for it, if you will, but put them together and adorn them. I spoke in Parliament the first month I was in it, and a month before I was of age, and from the day I was elected till the day that I spoke, I am sure I thought nor dreamed of nothing but speaking. The first time to say the truth I spoke very indifferently as to the matter, but it passed tolerably, in favour of the spirit with which I uttered it, and the words in which I had dressed it. I am proved by degrees, till at last it did tolerably well. The house it must be owned is always extremely indulgent to the first two or three attempts of a young speaker, and if they find any degree of common sense in what he says, they make great allowances for his inexperience and for the concern which they suppose him to be under. I experienced that indulgence, for, had I not been a young member, I should certainly have been, as I own I deserved, reprimanded by the house for some strong and indiscreet things that I said. I do, it is indeed high time.