 Section 49 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 80 London, September 5, Old Style, 1749 Dear Boy, I have received yours from Lawbock of the 17th August, New Style, with the Enclosed for Comptola Scarce, which I have given him, and with which he is extremely pleased, as I am with your account of Carniola. I am very glad that you attend to, and inform yourself of, the political objects of the countries that you go through. Trade and manufacturers are very considerable, not to say the most important one. For, though armies and navies are the shining marks of the strength of countries, they would be very ill-paid, and consequently fight very ill, if manufacturers and commerce did not support them. You have certainly observed in Germany the inefficiency of great powers, with great tracts of country and swarms of men, which are absolutely useless, if not paid by other powers who have the resources of manufacturers and commerce. This we have lately experienced to be the case of the two empresses of Germany and Russia. England, France, and Spain must pay their respective allies, or they may as well be without them. I have not the least objection to your taking into the bargain, the observation of natural curiosities. They are very welcome, provided they do not take up the room of better things. But the forms of government, the maxims of policy, the strength or weakness, the trade and commerce, of the several countries you see or hear of are the important objects, which I recommend to your most minute inquiries, and most serious detention. I thought that the Republic of Venice had by this time laid aside that silly and frivolous piece of policy, of endeavoring to conceal their form of government, which anybody may know, pretty nearly, by taking the pains to read four or five books, which explain all the great parts of it. And as for some of the little wheels of that machine, the knowledge of them would be as little useful to others as dangerous to themselves. Their best policy, I can tell them, is to keep quiet, and to offend no one great power by joining with another. Their escape, after the League of Cambrai, should prove a useful lesson to them. I am glad you frequent the assemblies at Venice. Have you seen Monsieur and Madame Capello, and how did they receive you? Let me know who are the ladies whose houses you frequent the most. Have you seen the Comptes d'Orscella, Princess of Holstein? Is Compte Algarotti, who has the tenet there, at Venice? You will, in many parts of Italy, meet with numbers of the pretenders people, English, Scotch, and Irish fugitives, especially at Rome, probably the pretender himself. It is none of your business to declare war to these people, as little as it is in your interest or, I hope, your inclination, to connect yourself with them, and therefore I recommend to you a perfect neutrality. Avoid them as much as you can with decency and good manners, but where you cannot, avoid any political conversation or debates with them. Tell them that you do not concern yourself with political matters, that you are neither maker nor deposer of kings, that when you left England you left a king in it, and have not since heard either of his death or of any revolution that has happened, and that you take kings and kingdoms as you find them, but enter no further into matters with them, which can be of no use, and might bring on heats and quarrels. When you speak of the old pretender, you will call him only the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, but mention him as seldom as possible. Should he chance to speak to you at any assembly, as I am told he sometimes does to the English, be sure that you seem not to know him, and answer him civilly, but always either in French or in Italian, and give him in the former the appellation of Monsieur, and in the latter of Signore. Should you meet with the Cardinal of York, you will be under no difficulty, for he has as Cardinal an undoubted ride to Imenenza. Upon the whole, see any of those people as little as possible. When you do see them, be civil to them, upon the footing of strangers, but never be drawn into any altercations with them about the imaginary ride of their king, as they call him. It is to no sort of purpose to talk to those people of the natural rites of mankind, and the particular constitution of this country. Blinded by prejudices, soured by misfortunes, and tempted by their necessities, they are as incapable of reasoning rightly as they have hitherto been of acting wisely. The late Lord Pembroke never would know anything that he had not a mind to know, and in this case I advise you to follow his example. Never know either the father or the two sons, any otherwise than his foreigners, and so, not knowing their pretensions, you can have no occasion to dispute them. I can never help recommending to you the utmost attention and care to acquire les maniers, la teneur et les grâces d'une galante homme et d'une homme de coeur. They should appear in every look, in every action, in your address and even in your dress, if you would either please or rise in the world. That you may do both, and both are in your power, is most ardently wished by yours. P.S. I made Compte Lascaris show me your letter, which I liked very well. The style was easy and natural, and the French pretty correct. There were so few faults in the orthography that a little more observation of the best French authors would make you a correct master of that necessary language. I will not conceal from you that I have lately had extraordinary good accounts from you, from an unexpected and judicious person, who promises me that, with a little more of the world, your manners and address will equal your knowledge. This is the more pleasing to me, as those were the two articles of which I was the most doubtful. These commendations will not, I am persuaded, make you vain and cox comical, but only encourage you to go on in the right way. End of Section 49, read by Professor Heathern Bye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 50 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 81, London, September 12, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy. It seems extraordinary, but it is very true, that my anxiety for you increases in proportion to the good accounts which I receive of you from all hands. I promise myself so much from you that I dread the least disappointment. You are now so near the port, which I have so long wished and labored to bring you safe into, that my concern would be doubled, should you be shipwrecked with inside of it. The object, therefore, of this letter is, laying aside all the authority of a parent, to conjure you as a friend, by the affection you have for me, and surely you have reason to have some, and by the regard you have for yourself to go on, with assiduity and attention, to complete that work which, of late, you have carried on so well, and which is now so near being finished. My wishes and my plan were to make you shine and distinguish yourself equally in the learned and polite world. Few have been able to do it. Deep learning is generally tainted with penantry, or at least unadorned by manners. As on the other hand, polite manners and the turn of the world are too often unsupported by knowledge, and consequently end contemptibly in the frivolous dissipation of drawing rooms and rules. You are now got over the dry and difficult parts of learning. What remains requires much more time than trouble. You have lost time by your illness. You must regain it now or never. I therefore most earnestly desire, for your own sake, that for these next six months, at least six hours every morning, uninterruptedly, may be involubly sacred to your studies with Mr. Hart. I do not know whether he will require so much, but I know that I do, and hope you will, and consequently prevail with him to give you that time. I own it is a good deal, but when both you and he consider that the work will be so much better and so much sooner done by such an assiduous and continued application, you will neither of you think it too much, and each will find his account in it. So much for the mornings, which from your own good sense and Mr. Hart's tenderness and care of you will, I am sure, be thus well employed. It is not only reasonable, but useful, too, that your evening should be devoted to amusements and pleasures, and therefore I not only allow but recommend that they should be employed at assemblies, balls, spectacles, and in the best companies, with this restriction only, that the consequences of the evening's diversions may not break in upon the morning's studies by breakfastings, visits, and idle parties into the country. At your age you need not be ashamed, when any of these morning parties are proposed, to say that you must beg to be excused, for you are obliged to devote your mornings to Mr. Hart, that I will have it so, and that you dare not do otherwise. Lay it all upon me, though I am persuaded it will be as much your own inclination as it is mine. But those frivolous, idle people, whose time hangs upon their own hands, and who desire to make others lose theirs, too, are not to be reasoned with, and indeed it would be doing them too much honour. The shortest civil answers are the best. I cannot, I dare not, instead of I will not, for if you were to enter with them into the necessity of study and the usefulness of knowledge, it would only furnish them with matter for silly jests, which, though I would not have you mined, I would not have you invite. I will suppose you at Rome, studying six hours uninterruptedly with Mr. Hart every morning, and passing your evenings with the best company of Rome, observing their manners and forming your own, and I will suppose a number of idle, sauntering, illiterate English, as there commonly is there, living entirely with one another, supping, drinking, and sitting up late at each other's lodgings, commonly in riots and scrapes when drunk, and never in good company when sober. I will take one of these pretty fellows, and give you the dialogue between him and yourself, as I dare say it will be on his side, and such as I hope it will be on yours. Englishman. Will you come in breakfast with me to-morrow? There will be four or five of our countrymen. We have provided chases, and we will drive somewhere out of town after breakfast. Stanhope. I am very sorry I cannot, but I am obliged to be at home all morning. Why then, we will come in breakfast with you. I can't do that neither, I am engaged. Well then, let it be the next day. To tell you the truth, it can be no day in the morning, for I neither go out nor see anybody at home before twelve. And what the devil do you do with yourself till twelve o'clock? I am not by myself, I am with Mr. Hart. Then what the devil do you do with him? We study different things, we read, we converse. Very pretty amusement indeed. Are you to take orders then? Yes, my father's orders, I believe I must take. Why hast thou no more spirit than to mind an old fellow a thousand miles off? If I don't mind his orders he won't mind my drafts. What, does the old prig threaten then? Threatened folks live long, never mind threats. No, I can't say that he has ever threatened me in his life, but I believe I had best not provoke him. Poo! You would have one angry letter from the old fellow and there would be an end of it. You mistake him mightily, he always does more than he says. He has never been angry with me yet that I remember in his life, but if I were to provoke him I am sure he would never forgive me. He would be coolly immovable and I might beg and pray and write my heart out to no purpose. Why then he is an old dog, that's all I can say, and pray, are you to obey this dry nurse too, this same and what's his name, Mr. Hart? Yes. So he stuffs you all the morning with Greek and Latin and logic and all that. E'gad, I have a dry nurse too, but I never looked into a book with him in my life. I have not so much as seen the face of him this week, and don't care a louse if I ever see it again. My dry nurse never desires anything of me that is not reasonable, and for my own good, and therefore I like to be with him. Very sententious and edifying upon my word, at this rate you will be reckoned a very good young man. Why, that will do me no harm. Will you be with us to-morrow in the evening then? We shall be ten with you, and I have got some excellent good wine, and will be very merry. I am very much obliged to you, but I am engaged for all the evening, to-morrow, first at Cardinal Albani's, and then to supper the Venetian ambassadors. How the devil can you like being always with these foreigners? I never go among them with all their formalities and ceremonies. I am never easy in company with them, and I don't know why, but I am ashamed. I am neither ashamed nor afraid. I am very easy with them, they are very easy with me. I get the language and I see their characters by conversing with them, and that is what we are sent abroad for, is it not? I hate your modest woman's company, your women of fashion, as they call them. I don't know what to say to them, for my part. Have you ever conversed with them? No, I never conversed with them, but have been sometimes in their company though much against my will. But at least they have done you no hurt, which is probably more than you can say of the women you do converse with. That's true, I own, but for all that I would rather keep company with my surgeon half the year than with your women of fashion the year round. Tastes are different, you know, and every man follows his own. That's true, but Thine's a devilish odd one, Stan Hope. All morning with Thine dryners, all the evening in formal fine company, and all day long afraid of old Daddy in England. Thou art a queer fellow, and I am afraid there is nothing to be made of thee. I am afraid so too. Well then, good night to you. You have no objection, I hope, to my being drunk to-night, which I certainly will be. Not in the least, nor to your being sick to-morrow, which you as certainly will be, and so good night to. You will observe that I have not put into your mouth those good arguments which upon such an occasion would, I am sure, occur to you, as piety and affection toward me, regard and friendship for Mr. Hart, respect for your own moral character and for all the relative duties of man, son, pupil and citizen. Such solid arguments would be thrown away upon such shallow puppies. Leave them to their ignorance and to their dirty, disgraceful vices. They will severally feel the effects of them when it will be too late. Without the comfortable refuge of learning, and with all the sickness and pains of a ruined stomach, and a rotten carcass, if they happen to arrive at old age, it is an uneasy and ignominious one. The ridicule which such fellows endeavour to throw upon those who are not like them is, in the opinion of all men of sense, the most authentic panageric. Go on, then, my dear child, in the way you are in, for only a year and a half more. That is all I ask of you. After that I promise you shall be your own master, and that I will pretend no other title than that of your best and truest friend. You shall receive advice, but no orders from me, and in truth you will want no other advice but such as youth and inexperience must necessarily require. You shall certainly want nothing that is requisite, not only for your conveniency, but also for your pleasures, which I always desire shall be gratified. You will suppose that I mean the pleasures done on et al. While you are learning Italian, which I hope you do with diligence, pray take care to continue your German, which you may have frequent opportunities of speaking. I would also have you keep up your knowledge of the juice pubicum imperie, by looking over, now and then, those inestimable manuscripts, which Sir Charles Williams, who arrived here last week, assures me you have made upon that subject. It will be a very great use to you when you come to be concerned in foreign affairs, as you shall be, if you qualify yourself for them, younger than ever any other was. I mean before you are twenty. Sir Charles tells me that he will answer for your learning, and that he believes you will acquire that address and those graces, which are so necessary to give it its full luster and value. But he confesses that he doubts more of the latter than of the former. The justice which he does, Mr. Hart, in his panigerics of him, makes me hope that there is likewise a great deal of truth in his ecumeniums of you. Are you pleased with, and proud of the reputation which you have already required? Surely you are, for I am sure I am. Will you do anything to lessen or forfeit it? Surely you will not. And will you not do all you can to extend and increase it? Surely you will. It is only going on for a year and a half longer, as you have gone on for two years last past, and devoting half the day only to application, and you will be sure to make the earliest figure and fortune in the world that ever man made. Adjou. CHESTORFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON. LETTER 82. LONDON. SEPTEMBER 22. OLD STYLE. 1749. DEAR BOY. IF I HAD FAITH IN FILTERS AND LOVE POTIONS, I SHOULD SUSPECT THAT YOU HAD GIVENS OR CHARLES WILLIAMS SOME, BY THE MANNER IN WHICH HE SPEAKS OF YOU, NOT ONLY TO ME, BUT TO EVERYBODY ELSE. I WILL NOT REPEAT TO YOU WHAT HE SAYS OF THE EXTENT AND CORRECTNESS OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE, AS IT MIGHT EITHER MAKE YOU VANE OR PERSUADE YOU THAT YOU HAD ALREADY ENOUGH OF WHAT NOBODY CAN HAVE TOO MUCH. YOU WILL EASILY IMAGINE HOW MANY QUESTIONS I ASKED, AND HOW NARELY I SIFTED HIM APON YOUR SUBJECT. HE ANSWERED ME, AND I DARE SAY WITH TRUTH. JUST AS I COULD HAVE WISHED, till satisfied entirely with his accounts of your character and learning, I inquired into other matters, intrinsically indeed of less consequence, but still of great consequence to every man, and of more to you than to almost any man. I mean your address, manners, and air. To these questions the same truth which he had observed before obliged him to give me much less satisfactory answers. And as he thought himself, in friendship both to you and me, obliged to tell me the disagreeable as well as the agreeable truths, upon the same principle I think myself obliged to repeat them to you. He told me then that in company you were frequently most provokingly inattentive, absent, and distraught, that you came into a room and presented yourself very awkwardly, that at table you constantly threw down knives, forks, napkins, bread, etc., and that you neglected your person and dress, to a degree unpardonable at any age, and much more so at yours. These things, howsoever immaterial they may seem to people who do not know the world, and the nature of mankind, give me who know them to be exceedingly material, very great concern. I have long distrusted you, and therefore frequently admonished you upon these articles, and I tell you plainly that I shall not be easy till I hear a very different account of them. I know no one thing more offensive to a company than in attention and distraction. It is showing them the utmost contempt, and people never forgive contempt. No man is distraught with the man he fears, or the woman he loves, which is a proof that every man can get the better of that distraction, when he thinks it is worth his while to do so, and take my word for it it is always worth his while. For my own part I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one, for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt, whereas the absent man, silently indeed but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention. Besides, can an absent man make any observations upon the characters, customs, and manners of the company? No. He may be in the best company's all his lifetime, if they will admit him, which if I were they I would not, and never be one jot the wiser. I will never converse with an absent man, one may as well talk to a deaf one. It is in truth a practical blunder, to address ourselves to a man who we see plainly neither hears, minds, or understands us. Moreover I have here that no man is, in any degree, fit for either business or conversation, who cannot and does not direct and command his attention to the present object, be that what it will. You know by experience that I grudge no expense in your education, but I will positively not keep you a flapper. You may read in Dr. Swift the description of those flappers, and the use they were of to your friends the lily-pushins, whose minds, Gulliver says, are so taken up with intense speculations that they neither can speak nor tend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external traction upon the organs of speech and hearing, for which reason those people who are able to afford it always keep a flapper in their family, as one of their domestics, nor ever walk about or make visits without him. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master and his wafs, and upon occasion to give a soft flap upon his eye, because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bounding his head against every post, and in the streets of jostling others or being jostled into the kennel himself. If Christian will undertake this province at the bargain with all my heart, but I will not allow him any increase of wages upon that score. In short, I give you a fair warning, that when we meet, if you are absent in mind, I will soon be absent in body, for it will be impossible for me to stay in the room. And if at table you throw down your knife, plate, bread, et cetera, and hack the wing of a chicken for half an hour without being able to cut it off, and your sleeve all the time in another dish, I must rise from the table to escape the fever you would certainly give me. But God, how I should be shocked, if you came into my room for the first time with two left legs, presenting yourself with all the graces and dignity of a tailor, and your clothes hanging upon you like those in Monmouth Street, upon tender hooves, whereas I expect nay require to see you present yourself with the easy and gentile air of a man of fashion, who has kept good company. I expect you not only well-dressed, but very well-dressed. I expect a gracefulness in all your motions, and something particularly engaging in your address. All this I expect, and all this it is in your power, by care and attention, to make me find. But to tell you the plain truth, if I do not find it, we shall not converse very much together, for I cannot stand in attention and awkwardness. It would endanger my health. You have often seen, and I have as often made you observe, El's distinguished inattention and awkwardness, wrapped up like a lapushan in intense thought, and possibly sometimes in no thought at all, which I believe is very often the case with absent people. He does not know his most intimate acquaintance by sight, or answers them as if he were at cross-purposes. He leaves his hat in one room, his sword in another, and would leave his shoes in a third, if his buckles, though a ride, did not save them. His legs and arms, by his awkward management of them, seemed to have undergone the question extraordinaire, and his head, and his hanging upon one or other of his shoulders, seems to have received the first stroke upon a block. I sincerely value and esteem him for his parts, learning in virtue, but for the soul of me I cannot love him in company. This will be universally the case, in common life, of every inattentive awkward man, let his real merit and knowledge be ever so great. When I was of your age I desired to shine, as far as I was able, in every part of life, and was as attentive to my manners, my dress, and my air, in company of evenings, as to my books and my tutor in the mornings. A young fellow should be ambitious to shine in everything, and of the two always rather overdue than under-due. These things are by no means trifles, they are of infinite consequence to those who are to be thrown into the great world, and would make a figure or a fortune in it. It is not sufficient to deserve well, one must please well too. Your disagreeable merit will never carry anybody far. Wherever you find a good dancing-master, pray let him put you upon your haunches, not so much for the sake of dancing as for coming into a room, and presenting yourself gentilily and gracefully. Women whom you ought to endeavor to please, cannot forgive vulgar and awkward air and gestures. Il le faux du briliant. The generality of men are pretty like them, and are equally taken by the same exterior graces. I am very glad that you have received the diamond buckles safe. All I desire in return for them is that they may be buckled even upon your feet, and that your stockings may not hide them. I should be sorry that you were an egregious fob, but I protest that of the two I would rather have you a fob than a sloven. I think negligence in my own dress, even at my age, when certainly I expect no advantages from my dress, would be indecent with regard to others. I have done with fine clothes, but I will have my plain clothes fit me and made like other peoples. In the evenings I recommend to you the company of women of fashion who have a right to attention and will be paid it. Their company will smooth your manners and give you a habit of attention and respect, of which you will find the advantage among men. My plan for you, from the beginning, has been to make you shine equally in the learned and in the polite world. The former part is almost completed to my wishes, and will I am persuaded in a little time more be quite so. The latter part is still in your power to complete, and I flatter myself that you will do it, or else the former part will avail you very little, especially in your department where the exterior address and graces do half the business. They must be the harbingers of your merit, or your merit will be very coldly received. All can and do judge of the former, view of the latter. Mr. Hart tells me that you have grown very much since your illness. If you get up to five feet ten, or even nine inches, your figure will probably be a good one. And if well-dressed and gentile, will probably please, which is a much greater advantage to a man than people commonly think. Lord Bacon calls it a letter of recommendation. I would wish you to be the Amnes Homo, l'homme universelle. You are nearer it, if you please, than ever anybody was at your age. And if you will but, for the course of this next year only, exert your whole attention to your studies in the morning, and to your address, manners, air, and tournure in the evenings, you will be the man I wish you, and the man that is rarely seen. Our letters go at best so irregularly, and so often miscarry totally, that for greater security I repeat the same things. So I acknowledge by the last post Mr. Hart's letter of the eighth September new-style. I acknowledge it again by this to you. If this should find you still at Verona, let it inform you that I wish you would set out soon for Naples, unless Mr. Hart should think it better for you to stay at Verona, or any other place on this side of Rome, till you go there for the Jubilee. Nay, if he likes it better, I am very willing that you should go directly from Verona to Rome, for you cannot have too much of Rome, whether upon account of the language, the curiosities, or the company. My only reason for mentioning Naples is for the sake of the climate, upon account of your health. But if Mr. Hart thinks that your health is now so well restored as to be above climate, he may steer your course wherever he thinks proper, and for ought I know, you're going directly to Rome, and consequently staying there so much the longer, may be as well as anything else. I think you and I cannot put our affairs in better hands than in Mr. Hart's, and I will stake his infallibility against the Pope's, with some odds on his side. I propose of the Pope, remember to be presented to him before you leave Rome, and go through the necessary ceremonies for it, whether of kissing his slipper or something else, for I would never deprive myself of anything that I wanted to do or see by refusing to comply with an established custom. When I was in Catholic countries, I never declined kneeling in their churches at the Elevation, nor elsewhere when the host went by. It is a complacence due to the custom of the place, and by no means as some silly people have imagined, and implied approbation of their doctrine. Bodily attitudes and situations are things so very different in themselves that I would quarrel with nobody about them. It may indeed be improper for Mr. Hart to pay that tribute of complacence upon account of his character. This letter is a very long and possibly a very tedious one, but my anxiety for your perfection is so great, and particularly at this critical and decisive period of your life, that I am only afraid of omitting, but never of repeating or dwelling too long upon anything that I think may be of the least used to you. Have the same anxiety for yourself, that I have for you, and all will do well. At you, my dear child. End of Section 51, read by Professor Heather M. Bye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. Section 52 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibreVox.org into the public domain. Letter 83, London, September 27th, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy, a vulgar, ordinary way of thinking, acting, or speaking implies a low education and a habit of low company. Young people contracted at school, or among servants, with whom they are too often used to converse. But after they frequent good company, they must want attention and observation very much, if they do not lay it quite aside. And indeed, if they do not, good company will be very apt to lay them aside. The various kinds of vulgarisms are infinite. I cannot pretend to point them out to you, but I will give some examples by which you may guess at the rest. A vulgar man is capcious and jealous, eager and impetuous about trifles. He suspects himself to be slighted, thinks everything that is said is meant at him. If the company happens to laugh, he is persuaded they laugh at him. He grows angry and testy, says something very impertinent, and draws himself into a scrape, by showing what he calls a proper spirit, and asserting himself. A man of fashion does not suppose himself to be either the soul or principal object of the thoughts, looks, or words of the company, and never suspects that he is either slighted or laughed at, unless he is conscious that he deserves it. And if, which very seldom happens, the company is absurd or ill-bred enough to do either, he does not care twopence, unless the insult be so gross and plain as to require satisfaction of another kind. As he is above trifles, he is never vehement and eager about them, and wherever they are concerned, rather acquiesces than wrangles. A vulgar man's conversation always savers strongly of the lowness of his education and company. It turns chiefly upon his domestic affairs, his servants, the excellent order he keeps in his own family, and the little anecdotes of the neighborhood, all which he relates with emphasis as interesting matters. He is a man gossip. Vulgarism in language is the next and distinguishing characteristic of bad company and bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Perverbial expressions and trite sayings are the flowers of the rhetoric of a vulgar man. Would he say that men differ in their tastes? He both supports and adorns that opinion by the good old saying, as he respectfully calls it, that what is one man's meat is another man's poison. If anybody attempts being smart, as he calls it, upon him, he gives them a tip for tat, I, that he does. He has always some favorite word for the time being, which for the sake of using often he commonly abuses, such as vastly angry, vastly kind, vastly handsome, and vastly ugly. Even his pronunciation of proper words carries the mark of the beast along with it. He calls the earth earth. He is obliged, not obliged to you. He goes towards, and not towards, such a place. He sometimes affects hard words by way of ornament, which he always mangles like a learned woman. A man of fashion never has recourse to proverbs and vulgar aphorisms, uses neither favorite words nor hard words, but takes great care to speak very correctly and grammatically, and to pronounce properly, that is, according to the usage of the best companies. An awkward address, ungraceful attitudes and actions, and a certain left-handedness, if I may use that word, loudly proclaim low education in low company, for it is impossible to suppose that a man can have frequented good company without having catched something, at least, of their air and motions. A new raised man is distinguished in a regiment by his awkwardness, but he must be impenetrably dull, if in a month or two's time he cannot perform at least the common manual exercise and look like a soldier. The very accoutrement of a man of fashion are grievous encumbrances to a vulgar man. He is at a loss what to do with his hat, when it is not upon his head. His cane, if unfortunately he wears one, is at perpetual war with every cup of tea or coffee he drinks, destroys them first, and then accompanies them in their fall. His sword is formidable only to his own legs, which would possibly carry him fast enough out of the way of any swords but his own. His clothes fit him so ill and constrain him so much, that he seems rather their prisoner than their proprietor. He presents himself in company like a criminal in a court of justice. Their air condemns him, and people of fashion will no more connect themselves with the one than people of character with the other. This repulse drives and sinks him into low company, a gulf from once no man, after a certain age, ever emerged. Les manières nobelles et assies, la tenue d'une homme de conditions, le temps de la bonne compagnie, les gosses, les jeûnes et quoi, qui plaient, are as necessary to adorn and introduce your intrinsic merit and knowledge, as the polish is to the diamond, which without that polish would never be worn whatever it might weigh. Do not imagine that these accompaniments are only useful with women. They are much more so with men. In a public assembly what an advantage has a graceful speaker, with genteel motions, a handsome figure, and a liberal air, over one who shall speak full as much good sense but destitute of these ornaments. In business how prevalent are the graces, how detrimental is the want of them? By the help of these I have known some men refuse favors less offensively than others grant them. The utility of them in courts and negotiations is inconceivable. You gain the hearts and consequently the secrets of nine in ten that you have to do with, in spite even of their prudence, which will, nine times in ten, be the dupe of their hearts and of their senses. Consider the importance of these things as they deserve, and you will not lose one minute in the pursuit of them. You are travelling now in a country once so famous both for arts and arms, that, however degenerate at present, it still deserves your attention and reflection. View it therefore with care, compare its former with its present state, and examine into the causes of its rise and its decay. Consider it classically and politically, and do not run through it, as too many of your young countrymen do, musically, and to use a ridiculous word, knick knackily. No piping or fiddling I beseech you, no days lost in pouring upon most imperceptible entaglios and cameos, and do not become a virtuoso of small wares. Form a taste of painting, sculpture and architecture, if you please, by a careful examination of the works of the best ancient and modern artists. Those are liberal arts, and a real taste and knowledge of them become a man of fashion very well. But beyond certain bounds the man of taste ends and the frivolous virtuoso begins. Your friend Mendy's, the good Samaritan, dined with me yesterday. He has more good nature and generosity than parts. However I will show him all the civilities that his kindness to you so justly deserves. He tells me that you are taller than I am, which I am very glad of. I desire that you may excel me in everything else too, and far from a pining I shall rejoice at your superiority. He commends your friend Mr. Stevens extremely, of whom too I have heard so good a character from other people that I am very glad of your connection with him. It may prove of use to you hereafter. When you meet with such sort of Englishmen abroad, who either from their parts or their rank are likely to make a figure at home, I would advise you to cultivate them and get their favourable testimony of you here, especially those who are to return to England before you. Sir Charles Williams has puffed you, as the mob call it, here extremely. If three or four more people of parts do the same, before you come back, your first appearance in London will be to great advantage. Many people do, and indeed ought, to take things upon trust. Many more do, who need not, and few dare dissent from an established opinion. Atchoo! End of Section 52. Read by Professor Heather and By. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 53 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the Public Domain. Letter 84. London, October 2nd, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy. I received by the post your letter of the 22nd September, New Style, but I have not received that from Mr. Hart to which you refer, and which you say contained your reasons for leaving Barona, and returning to Venice, so that I am entirely ignorant of them. Indeed the irregularity and negligence of the post provoked me, as they break the threat of the accounts I want to receive from you, and of the instructions and orders which I send you, almost every post of these last twenty posts. I am sure that I have wrote eighteen, either to you or to Mr. Hart, and it does not appear by your letter, that all or even any of my letters have been received. I desire for the future that both you and Mr. Hart will constantly, in your letters, mention the dates of mine. Had it not been for their miscarriage, you would not have been in the uncertainty which you seem to be in present with regard to your future motions. Had you received my letters, you would have been by this time at Naples, but we must now take things where they are. Upon the receipt, then, of this letter you will as soon as conveniently you can set out for Rome, where you will not arrive too long before the Jubilee, considering the difficulties of getting lodgings and other accommodations there at this time. I leave the choice of the route to you, but I do by no means intend that you should leave Rome after the Jubilee, as you seem to hint in your letter. On the contrary, I will have Rome your headquarters for six months at least, till you shall have, in a manner, acquired the Juicivitas there. More things are to be seen and learned there than in any other town in Europe. There are the best masters to instruct, and the best companies to polish you. In the spring you may make, if you please, frequent excursions to Naples, but Rome must still be your headquarters, till the heats of June drive you from thence to some other place in Italy, which we shall think of by that time. As to the expense which you mention, I do not regard it in the least. From your infancy to this day I never grudged any expense in your education, and still less do it now, that it is become more important and decisive. I attend to the object of your expenses but not to the sums. I will certainly not pay one shilling for your losing your nose, your money, or your reason, that is, I will not contribute to women, gaming, and drinking. But I will most cheerfully supply not only every necessary, but every decent expense you can make. I do not care what the best masters cost. I would have you well-dressed, lodged, and attended, as any reasonable man of the world is in his travels. I would have you have that pocket money that should enable you to make the proper expense d'une honnette homme. In short, I bar no expense that has neither vice nor folly for its object, and under those two reasonable restrictions draw and welcome. As for Turin, you may go there hereafter as a traveler for a month or two, but you cannot conveniently reside there as an academician, for reasons which I have formerly communicated to Mr. Hart, and which Mr. Villettes, since his return here, has shown me in a still stronger light than he had done by his letters from Turin, of which I sent copies to Mr. Hart, though probably he never received them. After you have left Rome, Florence is one of the places with which you should be thoroughly acquainted. I know that there is a great deal of gaming there, but at the same time there are in every place some people whose fortunes are either too small or whose understandings are too good to allow them to play for anything above tribals, and with those people you will associate yourself. If you have not, as I am assured you have not in the least, the spirit of gaming in you. Moreover, at suspected places, such as Florence, Turin, and Paris, I shall be more attentive to your drafts, and such as exceed a proper and handsome expense will not be answered, for I can easily know whether you game or not without being told. Mr. Hart will determine your route to Rome as he shall think best, whether along the coast of the Adriatic or that of the Mediterranean. It is equal to me, but you will observe to come back a different way than you went. Since your health is so well restored, I am not sorry that you have returned to Venice, for I love capitals. Everything is best at capitals, the best masters, the best companions, and the best manners. Many other places are worth seeing, but capitals are worth residing at. I am very glad that Madame Capello received you so well. Monsieur I was sure would. Pray assure them both of my respects and of my sensibility at their kindness to you. Your house will be a very good one for you at Rome, and I would advise you to be domestic in it if you can. But Madame, I can tell you requires great attentions. Madame Michelli has written a very favourable account of you to my friend the Abbe Grossatesta, in a letter which she showed me, and in which there are so many civil things to myself, that I would wish to tell her how much I think myself obliged to her. I approve very much of the allotment of your time at Venice. Pray go on so for twelve months at least, wherever you are. You will find your own account in it. I like your last letter, which gives me an account of yourself and your own transactions. For though I do not recommend the egotism to you, with regard to anybody else, I desire that you will use it with me, and with me only. I interest myself in all that you do, and as yet, accepting Mr. Hart, nobody else does. He must, of course, know all, and I desire to know a great deal. I am glad you have received, and that you like the diamond buckles. I am very willing that you should make, but very unwilling that you should cut a figure with them at the jubilee, cutting a figure being the very lowest vulgarism in the English language, and equal in elegancy to yes my lady and no my lady. The word vast and vastly you will have found by my former letter that I had described out of the diction of a gentleman, unless in their proper signification of sizes and bulk. Not only in language, but in everything else, take great care that the first impressions you give of yourself may be not only favourable, but pleasing, engaging, nay, seducing. They are often decisive. I confess they are a good deal so with me, and I cannot wish for further acquaintance with a man whose first abhorred and addressed displeased me. So many of my letters have miscarried, and I know so little which, that I am forced to repeat the same thing over and over again eventually. This is one. I have wrote twice to Mr. Hart to have your picture drawn in miniature, while you were at Venice, and send it me in a letter. It is all one to me whether in enamel or in watercolours, provided it is but very like you. I would have you drawn exactly as you are, and in no whimsical dress, and I lay more stress upon the likeness of the picture than upon the taste and skill of the painter. If this be not already done, I desire that you will have it done forthwith before you leave Venice, and enclose it in a letter to me, which letter, for greater security, I would have you desire Sir James Gray to enclose in his packet to the office. I, for the same reason, send this under his cover. If the picture be done upon vellum, it will be the most portable. Send me, at the same time, a thread of silk of your own length exactly. I am solicitous about your figure, convinced by a thousand instances, that a good one is a real advantage. Mensanga and Corporessano is the first and greatest blessing. I would add a pucro to complete it. May you have that and every other. Adieu. Have you received my letters of recommendation to Cardinal Abani and the Duke de Nivernoy at Rome? End of Section 53. Read by Professor Heathernby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 54 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 85. London, October 9th, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy, if this letter finds you at all, of which I am very doubtful, it will find you at Venice, preparing for your journey to Rome, which by my last letter to Mr. Hart I advise you to make along the coast of the Adriatic, through Rimini, Loretto, Ancona, et cetera, places that are all worth seeing but not worth staying at, and such I reckon all places where the eyes only are employed, remains of antiquity, public buildings, paintings, sculptures, et cetera ought to be seen, and that with a proper degree of attention. But this is soon done, for they are only outsides. It is not so with more important objects, the insides of which must be seen, and they require and deserve much more attention. The characters, the heads, and the hearts of men are the useful science of which I would have you be perfect master. That science is best taught and best learned in capitals, where every human passion has its object, and exerts all its force or all its art in the pursuit. I believe there is no place in the world where every passion is busier, appears in more shapes, and is conducted with more art than at Rome. Therefore when you are there, do not imagine that the capital, the Vatican, and the Pantheon are the principal objects of your curiosity. But for one minute that you bestow upon those, employ ten days in informing yourself of the nature of that government, the rise and decay of the papal power, the politics of that court, the briggs of the cardinals, the tricks of the conclaves, and in general, everything that relates to the interior of that extraordinary government, founded originally upon the ignorance and superstition of mankind, extended by the weakness of some princes and the ambition of others, declining of late in proportion as knowledge has increased, and owing its present precarious security not to the religion, the affection or the fear of the temporal powers, but to the jealousy of each other. The Pope's excommunications are no longer dreaded. His indulgences little solicited, and sell very cheap, and his territories formidable to no power, are coveted by many, and will most undoubtedly within a century be scantled out among the great powers, who have now a footing in Italy, whenever they can agree upon the division of the bear's skin. Pray inform yourself thoroughly of the history of the popes and the popetum, which for many centuries is interwoven with the history of all Europe. Read the best authors who treat of these matters, and especially Fra Paolo de Beneficias, a short but very material book. You will find at Rome some of all the religious orders in the Christian world. Inform yourself carefully of their origin, their founders, their rules, their reforms, and even their dresses. Get acquainted with some of all of them, but particularly with the Jesuits, whose society I look upon to be the most able and best-governed society in the world. Get acquainted, if you can, with their general, who always resides at Rome, and who, though he has no seeming power out of his own society, has, it may be, more real influence over the whole world than any temporal prince in it. They have almost engrossed the education of youth. They are, in general, confessors to most of the princes of Europe, and they are the principal missionaries out of it. Which three articles give them a most extensive influence and solid advantages? Witness their settlement in Paraguay. The Catholics, in general, declaim against that society, and yet all are governed by individuals of it. They have, by turns, been banished and with infamy from almost every country in Europe, and have always found means to be restored, even with triumph. In short, I know no government in the world that is carried on upon such deep principles of policy. I will not add morality. Converse with them, frequent them, court them, but know them. Assume yourself, too, of that infernal court the Inquisition, which, though not so considerable at Rome as in Spain and Portugal, will, however, be a good sample to you of what the villainy of some men can contrive, the folly of others receive, and both together establish, in spite of the first natural principles of reason, justice, and equity. These are the proper and useful objects of the attention of a man of sense when he travels, and these are the objects for which I have sent you abroad, and I hope you will return thoroughly informed of them. I received this very moment, Mr. Hart's letter of the first October new-style, but I never received his former, to which he refers in this, and you refer in your last, in which he gave me the reasons for your leaving Barona so soon, nor have I ever received that letter in which your case was stated by your physicians. Letters to and from me have worse luck than other peoples, for you have written to me and I to you for these last three months, by way of Germany, with as little success as before. I am edified with your morning applications and your evening gallantries at Venice, of which Mr. Hart gives me an account. Pray go on with both there, and afterward at Rome, where, provided you arrive in the beginning of December, you may stay at Venice as much longer as you please. Make my compliments to Sir James Gray and Mr. Smith, with my acknowledgments for the great civilities they show you. I wrote to Mr. Hart by the last post, October 6, the old style, and will write to him in a post or two upon the contents of his last. Adieu. Pente de destruction, and remember the graces. End of Section Fifty-Four. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section Fifty-Five of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter Eighty-Six. London, October Seventeenth, Old Style, Seventeen-Forty-Nine. Your boy. I have at last received Mr. Hart's letter of the nineteenth September new style from Verona. Your reasons for leaving that place were very good ones, and as you stayed there long enough to see what was to be seen, Venice as a capital is, in my opinion, a much better place for your residence. Capitals are always the seats of arts and sciences and the best companies. I have stuck to them all my lifetime, and I advise you to do so too. You will have received in my three or four last letters my directions for your further motions to another capital, where I propose that your stay shall be pretty considerable. The expense I am well aware will be so too, but that, as I told you before, will have no weight when your improvement and advantage are in the other scale. I do not care-a-grote what it is, if neither vice nor folly are the objects of it, and if Mr. Hart gives his sanction. I am very well pleased with your account of carniola. Those are the kind of objects worthy of your inquiries and knowledge. The produce, the taxes, the trade, the manufacturers, the strength, the weakness, the government of the several countries which a man of sense travels through are the material points to which he attends, and leaves the steeples, the marketplaces, and the signs to the laborious and curious researches of Dutch and German travelers. Mr. Hart tells me that he intends to give you, by means of senior Vincentini, a general notion of civil and military architecture, with which I am very well pleased. They are frequent subjects of conversation, and it is very right that you should have some idea of the latter, and a good taste of the former, and you may soon learn as much as you need know of either. If you read about one-third of Palladio's book of architecture with some skillful person, and then with that person examine the best buildings by those rules, you will know the different proportions of the different orders, the several diameters of their columns, their inter-columniations, their several uses, etc. The Corinthian order is chiefly used in magnificent buildings, where ornament and decoration are the principal objects. The Doric is calculated for strength, and the Ionic partakes of the Doric's strength, and of the Corinthian ornaments. The composite and the Tuscan orders are more modern, and were unknown to the Greeks. The one is too light, the other too clumsy. You may soon be acquainted with the considerable parts of civil architecture, and for the minute and mechanical parts of it, leave them to Masons, Bricklayers, and Lord Burlington, who has to a certain extent lessened himself by knowing them too well. Observe the same method as to military architecture. Understand the terms, know the general rules, and then see them in execution with some skillful person. Go with some engineer or old officer, and view with care the real fortifications of some strong place, and you will get a clearer idea of bastions, half-moons, hornworks, ravelands, glasses, etc., than all the masters in the world could give you upon paper. And thus much I would, by all means, have you know of both civil and military architecture. I would also have you acquire a liberal taste of the two liberal arts of painting and sculpture, but without descending into those minutiae which our modern virtuosy most effectively dwell upon. Observe the great parts attentively, see if nature be truly represented, if the passions are strongly expressed, if the characters are preserved, and leave the trifling parts with their little jargon to affected puppies. I would advise you also to read the history of the painters and sculptors, and I know none better than Fela Bience. There are many in Italian, and you will inform yourself which are the best. It is a part of history very entertaining, curious enough, and not quite useless. All these sort of things I would have you know, to a certain degree, but remember that they must be only the amusements and not the business of a man of parts. Since writing to me in German would take up so much of your time, of which I would not now have one moment wasted, I will accept of your composition and content myself with a moderate German letter once a fortnight to Lady Chesterfield or Mr. Grevenkopf. My meaning was only that you should not forget what you had already learned of the German language and character, but on the contrary, that by frequent use it should grow more easy and familiar. Should you take care of that, I do not care by what means. But I do desire that you will every day of your life speak German to somebody or other, for you will meet with Germans enough, and write a line or two of it every day to keep your hand in. Why should you not, for instance, write your little memorandums and accounts in that language and character, by which, too, you would have this advantage into the bargain, that if mislaid, few but yourself could read them. I am extremely glad to hear that you like the assemblies at Venice well enough to sacrifice some suppers to them, for I hear that you do not dislike your suppers neither. It is therefore plain that there is somebody or something at those assemblies which you like better than your meat. And as I know that there is none but good company at those assemblies, I am very glad to find that you like good company so well. I already imagine that you are a little smoothed by it, and that you have either reasoned yourself or that they have laughed you out of your absences and distractions, for I cannot suppose you go there to insult them. I likewise imagine that you wish to be welcome where you wish to go, and consequently that you both present and behave yourself there, un garlant homme, et pas un bourgeois. If you have vowed to anybody there one of those eternal passions, which I have sometimes known, by great accident, to last three months, I can tell you that without great attention, infinite politeness, and engaging air and manners, the omens will be sinister and the goddess unpropitious. Pray, tell me what are the amusements of those assemblies? Are they little commercial play? Are they music? Are they la belle conversation? Or are they all three? Y feel tonne le parfait amor, y débiter tonne les beaux sentiments, ou est-ce qu'on y parle épigramme? And pray, which is your department, tu tite des ponts et les rebousses, whichever it is, endeavor to shine and excel in it. Aim, at least, at the perfection of everything that is worth doing at all, and you will come nearer at than you would imagine. But those always crawl indefinitely short of it, whose aim is only mediocrity. Adieu. P.S. By an uncommon diligence of the post, I have this moment received yours of the ninth new style. End of Section Fifty-Five, read by Professor Heather Mbye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section Fifty-Six of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter Eighty-Seven, London, October Twenty-Fourth, Old Style, Seventeen Forty-Nine. Dear Boy, by my last I only acknowledged, by this I answer, your letter of the ninth October, new style. I am very glad that you approved of my letter of September the Twelfth, Old Style, because it is upon that footing that I always propose living with you. I will advise you seriously, as a friend of some experience, and I will converse with you cheerfully as a companion. The authority of a parent shall forever be laid aside. For wherever it is exerted, it is useless. Since if you have neither sense nor sentiments enough to follow my advice as a friend, your unwilling obedience to my orders as a father will be a very awkward and unavailing one, both to yourself and me. Tacitus, speaking of an army that awkwardly and unwillingly obeyed its generals, only from the fear of punishment, says they obeyed indeed, sedut qua malent, giusa imperioritum interpretere, quam execi. For my own part I disclaim such obedience. You think I find that you do not understand Italian, but I can tell you that like the bourgeois gentilome, who spoke prose without knowing it, you understand a great deal, though you do not know that you do. For whoever understands French and Latin so well as you do, understands at least half the Italian language, and has very little occasion for a dictionary. And for the idioms, the phrases, and the delicacies of it, conversation and a little attention will teach them to you, and that soon. Therefore pray speak it in company, right or wrong, atturtu attravers, as soon as ever you have got words enough to ask a common question, or give a common answer. If you can only say buongiorno, say it, instead of saying bonjour, I mean to every Italian. The answer to it will teach you more words, and insensibly you will be very soon master of that easy language. You are quite right in not neglecting your German for it, and in thinking that it will be of more use to you. It certainly will, in the course of your business. But Italian has its use too, and is an ornament into the bargain. You are being very many polite and good authors in that language. The reason you assign for having hitherto met with none of my swarms of Germans in Italy is a very solid one, and I can easily conceive that the expense necessary for a traveler must amount to a number of Dollars, Groschen, and Kruzzers tremendous to a German fortune. However, you will find several at Rome, either ecclesiastics, or in the suite of the Imperial Minister, and more when you come into the Milanese, among the Queen of Hungary's officers. Besides, you have a Saxon servant, to whom I hope you speak nothing but German. I have had the most obliging letter in the world from Monsieur Capello, in which he speaks very advantageously of you, and promises you his protection at Rome. I have wrote him an answer by which I hope I have domesticated you at his hotel there, which I advise you to frequent as much as you can. Il est vrai qu'il ne paye beaucoup de sa figure, but he has sense and knowledge at bottom, with a great deal of experience of business, having been already ambassador at Madrid, Vienna, and London. And I am very sure that he will be willing to give you any informations in that way that he can. Madame was a capricious, whimsical, fine lady, till the smallpox, which she got here, lessened her beauty, lessened her humours, too, but as I presume it did not change her sex, I trust to that for her having such a share of them left, as may contribute to smooth and polish you. She doubtless still thinks that she has beauty enough remaining to entitle her to the attentions always paid to beauty, and she certainly has rank enough to require respect. Those are the sort of women who polish a young man the most, and who give him that habit of complacence, and that flexibility and versatility of manners, which prove of great use to him with men and in the course of business. You must always expect to hear more or less from me upon that important subject of manners, graces, address, and that indefinable je ne sais quoi that ever pleases. I have reason to believe that you want nothing else, but I have reason to fear, too, that you want those, and that will keep you poor in the midst of all the plenty of knowledge which you have treasured up. Adieu. CHESTERFIELDS' OLD STYLE 1749 Dear Boy. From the time that you have had life it has been the principal and favorite object of mine to make you as perfect as the imperfections of human nature will allow. In this view I have grudged no pains nor expense in your education. Convinced that education, more than nature, is the cause of that great difference which you see in the characters of men. While you were a child I endeavored to form your heart habitually to virtue and honor, before your understanding was capable of showing you their beauty and utility. Those principles, which you then got, like your grammar rules, only by rote, are now I am persuaded fixed and confirmed by reason. And indeed they are so plain and clear that they require but a very moderate degree of understanding, either to comprehend or practice them. Lord Shaffsbury says, very prettily, that he would be virtuous for his own sake, though nobody were to know it, as he would be clean for his own sake, though nobody were to see him. I have therefore, since you have had the use of your reason, never written to you upon those subjects. They speak best for themselves, and I should now just as soon think of warning you gravely not to fall into the dirt or the fire as to dishonor or vice. This view of mine I consider as fully attained. My next object was sound and useful learning. My own care first, Mr. Hart's afterward, and of late, I will own it to your praise, your own application, have more than answered my expectations in that particular. And I have reason to believe, will answer even my wishes. All that remains for me then to wish, to recommend, to inculcate, to order, and to insist upon, is good breeding, without which all your other qualifications will be lame, unadorned, and to a certain degree unavailing. And here I fear, and have too much reason to believe, that you are greatly deficient. The remainder of this letter therefore shall be, and it will not be the last by a great many upon that subject. A friend of yours and mine has very justly defined good breeding to be, the result of much good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence from them. Taking this for granted, as I think it cannot be disputed, it is astonishing to me that anybody who has good sense and good nature, and I believe you have both, can essentially fail in good breeding. As to the modes of it, indeed, they vary according to persons, and places, and circumstances, and are only to be acquired by observation and experience, but the substance of it is everywhere and eternally the same. Good manners are, to particular societies, what good morals are to society in general, their cement and their security. And as laws are enacted to enforce good morals, or at least to prevent the ill effects of bad ones, so there are certain rules of civility, universally implied and received, to enforce good manners and punish bad ones. And indeed there seems to me to be less difference both between the crimes and between the punishments than at first one would imagine. The immoral man, who invades another man's property, is justly hanged for it, and the ill-bred man, who by his ill manners invades and disturbs the quiet and comforts of private life, is by common consent as justly banished from society. Mutual complacences, attentions, and sacrifices of little conveniences are as natural and implied compact between civilized people as protection and obedience are between kings and subjects, whoever in either case violates that compact justly forfeits all advantages arising from it. For my own part I really think that next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing, and the epithet which I should covet the most, next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred. This much for good breeding in general I will now consider some of the various modes and degrees of it. Very few, scarcely any, are wanting in the respect which they should show to those whom they acknowledge to be infinitely their superiors, such as crowned heads, princes, and public persons of distinguished and eminent posts. It is the manner of showing that respect which is different. The man of fashion and of the world expresses it in its fullest extent, but naturally, easily, and without concern, whereas a man who is not used to keep good company expresses it awkwardly. One sees that he is not used to it, and that it costs him a great deal. But I never saw the worst bred man living, guilty of lawling, whistling, scratching his head, and such like indecencies, in company that he respected. And such companies, therefore, the only point to be attended is to show that respect, which everybody means to show, in an easy, unembarrassed, and graceful manner. This is what observation and experience must teach you. In mixed companies, whoever is admitted to make a part of them, is, for the time at least, supposed to be upon a footing of equality with the rest, and consequently, as there is no one principal object of awe and respect, people are apt to take a greater latitude in their behavior, and to be less upon their guard. And so they may, provided it be within certain bounds, which are upon no occasion to be transgressed. But upon these occasions, though no one is entitled to distinguish marks of respect, every one claims, and very justly, every mark of civility and good breeding. Ease is allowed, but carelessness and negligence are strictly forbidden. If a man accosts you and talks to you ever so doly or frivolously, it is worse than rudeness. It is brutality to show him, by a manifest inattention to what he says, that you think him a fool or a blockhead and not worth hearing. It is much more so with regard to women, who, of whatever rank they are, are entitled in consideration of their sex, not only to an attentive but an officious good breeding from men. Their little wants, likings, dislikes, preferences, antipathies, nuances, whims, and even impertenancies, must be officiously attended to, flattered, and, if possible, guessed at and anticipated by a well-bred man. You must never usurp yourself to those conveniences and aggrimands, which are of common right, such as the best places, the best dishes, etc., but on the contrary always decline them yourself, and offer them to others, who in their turns will offer them to you. So that upon the whole you will in your turn enjoy your share of the common right. It would be endless for me to enumerate all the particular instances in which a well-bred man shows his good breeding in good company, and it would be injurious to you to suppose that your own good sense will not point them out to you, and then your own good nature will recommend and your self-interest enforce the practice. There is a third sort of good breeding in which people are the most apt to fail, from a very mistaken notion that they cannot fail at all. I mean with regard to one's most familiar friends and acquaintances, or those who really are our inferiors, and there undoubtedly a greater degree of ease is not only allowed but proper, and contributes much to the comforts of a private social life. But that ease and freedom have their bounds, too, which must by no means be violated. A certain degree of negligence and carelessness becomes injurious and insulting from the real or supposed inferiority of the persons, and that delightful liberty of conversation among a few friends is soon destroyed, as liberty often has been, by being carried to licentiousness. But example explains things best, and I will put a pretty strong case. Suppose you and me alone together. I believe you will allow that I have as good a right to unlimited freedom in your company as either you or I can possibly have in any other. And I am apt to believe, too, that you would indulge me in that freedom as far as anybody would. But notwithstanding this, do you imagine that I should think there were no bounds to that freedom? I assure you I should not think so, and I take myself to be as much tied down by a certain degree of good manners to you as by other degrees of them to other people. Were I to show you, by a manifest inattention to what you said to me, that I was thinking of something else the whole time, were I to yawn extremely, snore, or break wind in your company, I should think that I behaved myself to you like a beast, and should not expect that you would care to frequent me. No, the most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, and friendships require a degree of good breeding, both to preserve and cement them. If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust. The best of us have our bad sides, and it is as imprudent as it is ill-bred to exhibit them. I shall certainly not use ceremony with you. It would be misplaced between us. But I shall certainly observe that degree of good breeding with you, which is, in the first place, decent, and which I am sure is absolutely necessary to make us like one another's company long. I will say no more now upon this important subject of good breeding, upon which I have already dwelt too long it may be for one letter, and upon which I shall frequently refresh your memory hereafter, but I will conclude with these axioms, that the deepest learning, without good breeding, is unwelcome and tiresome pedantry, and of use nowhere but a man's own closet, and consequently of little or no use at all, that a man who is not perfectly well-bred is unfit for good company and unwelcome in it, will consequently dislike it soon, and afterward renounce it, and be reduced to solitude, or, what is worse, low and bad company. That a man who is not well-bred is full as unfit for business as for company. Make then, my dear child, I conjure you good breeding the great object of your thoughts and actions, at least half the day. Observe carefully the behaviors and manners of those who are distinguished by their good breeding. Imitate, nay, endeavor to excel, that you may at least reach them, and be convinced that good breeding is, to all worldly qualifications, what charity is, to all Christian virtues. Observe how it adorns merit, and how often it covers the want of it. May you wear it to adorn, and not to cover you. Adjou. End of Section 57. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 58 of Chesterfield's Letters to its Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter 89. London, November 14, old style, 1749. Dear Boy, there is a natural good breeding which occurs to every man of common sense, and is practiced by every man of common good nature. This good breeding is general, independent of modes, and consists in endeavors to please and oblige our fellow creatures by all good offices, short of moral duties. This will be practiced by a good-natured American savage, as essentially as by the best bred European. But then I do not take it to extend to the sacrifice of our own conveniences for the sake of other peoples. Utility introduced this sort of good breeding as it introduced commerce, and established a truck of the little agre-mant and pleasures of life. I sacrifice such a conveniency to you. You sacrifice another to me. This commerce circulates, and every individual finds his account in it upon the whole. The third sort of good breeding is local, and is variously modified in not only different countries, but in different towns of the same country. But it must be founded upon the two former sorts. They are the matter to which, in this case, fashion and custom, only give the different shapes and impressions. Whoever has the first two sorts will easily acquire this third sort of good breeding, which depends singly upon attention and observation. It is properly the polish, the luster, the last finishing stroke of good breeding. It is to be found only in capitals, and even there it varies. The good breeding of Rome differing in some things from that of Paris, that of Paris in others from that of Madrid, and that of Madrid in many things from that of London. A man of sense therefore carefully attends to the local manners of the respective places where he is, and takes for his models those persons whom he observes to be at the head of fashion and good breeding. He watches how they address themselves to their superiors, how they accost their equals, and how they treat their inferiors, and lets none of those little niceties escape him which are to good breeding what the last delicate and masterly touches are to a good picture. And of which the vulgar have no notion, but by which good judges distinguish the master. He attends even to their air, dress, and motions, and imitates them, liberally, and not surveily. He copies, but does not mimic. These personal graces are a very great consequence. They anticipate the sentiments before merit can engage the understanding. They captivate the heart, and give rise, I believe, to the extravagant notions of charms and filters. Their effects were so surprising that they were reckoned supernatural. The most graceful and best-bred men, and the handsomest and gentilist women, give the most filters, and, as I verily believe, without the least assistance of the devil. Pray be not only well-dressed, but shining in your dress. Let it have du brillant. I do not mean by a clumsy load of gold and silver, but by the taste and fashion of it. The women like and require it. They think it and attention do them. But on the other hand, if your motions and carriage are not graceful, genteel, and natural, your fine clothes will only display your awkwardness the more. But I am unwilling to suppose you still awkward. For surely by this time you must have catched a good air in good company. When you went from hence you were naturally awkward, but your awkwardness was adventurous and west-monsterial. This sigai apprehend is not the seat of the graces, and I presume you acquired none there. But now, if you will be pleased to observe what people of the first fashion do with their arms and legs, heads and bodies, you will reduce yours to certain decent laws of motion. You danced pretty well here, and ought to dance very well before you come home. For what one is obliged to do sometimes, one ought to be able to do well. Besides, la belle-dance donne un brillant à un jeune homme. You should endeavor to shine. A calm serenity, negative merit and graces, do not become your age. You should be à l'aute, à droit, vive, be wanted, talked of, impatiently expected, and unwillingly parted with in company. I should be glad to hear half a dozen women of fashion say, Où est donc le petit stanope? De ne vient-il? Il faut avouer qu'il est amiable. All this I do not mean singly with regard to women as the principal object, but with regard to men, and with a view of your making yourself considerable. For with very small variations the same things that please women please men, and a man whose manners are softened and polished by women of fashion, and who is formed by them to an habitual attention and complacence, will please engage and connect men much easier and more than he would otherwise. You must be sensible that you cannot rise in the world without forming connections, and engaging different characters to conspire in your point. You must make them your dependents without their knowing it, and dictate to them while you seem to be directed by them. Those necessary connections can never be formed or preserved, but by an uninterrupted series of complacence, attentions, politeness, and some constraints. You must engage their hearts if you would have their support. You must watch the molia tempora and captivate them by the agremal and charms of conversation. People will not be called out to your service only when you want them, and if you expect to receive strength from them, they must receive either pleasure or advantage from you. I received in this instant a letter from Mr. Hart of the second new style, which I will answer soon. In the meantime return him my thanks for it through you. The constant good accounts which he gives me of you will make me suspect him of partiality, and think him le mens sans tant mieux. Better therefore what weight any future disposition of his against you must necessarily have with me. As in that case he will be a very unwilling, he must consequently be a very important witness. Adieu. I think it rather set before you the unfitness and disadvantages of ill-breeding than the utility and necessity of good. It was rather negative than positive. This therefore should go further and explain to you the necessity which you of all people living lie under, not only of being positively and actively well-bred, but of shining and distinguishing yourself by your good-breeding. Consider your own situation in every particular, and judge whether it is not essentially your interest, by your own good-breeding to others, to secure theirs to you and that, let me assure you, is the only way of doing it. Your people will repay, and with interest to, in attention with inattention, neglect with neglect, and ill-manners with worse, which may engage you in very disagreeable affairs. In the next place your profession requires, more than any other, the nicest and most distinguished good-breeding. You will negotiate with very little success, if you do not previously, by your manners, conciliate and engage the affections of those with whom you are to negotiate. Can you ever get into the confidence and secrets of the courts where you may happen to reside, if you have not those pleasing insinuating manners which alone can procure them? Upon my word I do not say too much, when I say that superior good-breeding, insinuating manners, and gentile address are half your business. Your knowledge will have but very little influence upon the mind, if your manners prejudice the heart against you. But on the other hand, how easily will you dupe the understanding where you have first engaged the heart, and hearts are by no means to be gained by that mere common civility which everybody practices, bowing again to those who bow to you, answering dryly those who speak to you, and saying nothing offensive to anybody is such negative good-breeding that it is only not being a brute, as it would be but a very poor commendation of any man's cleanliness, to say that he did not stink. It is an active, cheerful, officious, seducing, good-breeding that must gain you the good-will and first sentiments of men, and the affections of the women. You must carefully watch and attend to their passions, their tastes, their little humours and weaknesses, and aller au-devant. You must do it at the same time with alacrity and impressement, and not as if you graciously condescended to humour their weaknesses. For instance, suppose you invited anybody to dine or sup with you. You ought to recollect if you had observed that they had any favourite dish, and take care to provide it for them. And when it came, you should say, you seem to me, at such and such a place, to give this dish a preference, and therefore I ordered it. This is the wine that I observed you liked, and therefore I procured some. The more trifling these things are, the more they prove your attention for the person, and are consequently the more engaging. Consult your own breast, and recollect how these little attentions, when shown to you by others, flatter that degree of self-love and vanity from which no living man is free. Reflect how they incline and attract you to that person, and how you are propitiated afterwards to all which that person says or does. The same causes will have the same effects in your behaviour. Women, in a great degree, establish or destroy every man's reputation of good breeding. You must, therefore, in a manner overwhelm them with these attentions. If they are used to them, they expect them, and to do them justice they commonly requite them. You must be seditious, and rather over-efficient than under, in procuring them their coaches, their chairs, their conveniences in public places, not see what you should not see, and rather assist where you cannot help seeing. Opportunities of showing these attentions present themselves perpetually, but if they do not, make them. As Ovid advises his lover, when he sits in the circus near his mistress, to wipe the dust off her neck, even if there be none, see Nullus, tommen, exucute, nullum. Your conversation with women should always be respectful, but at the same time en jus, and always address to their vanity. Everything you say or do should convince them of the regard you have, whether you have it or not, for their beauty, their wit, or their merit. Men have possibly as much vanity as women, though of another kind, and both art and good-breeding require, that instead of mortifying you should please and flatter it, by words and looks of approbation. Suppose, which is by no means improbable, that at your return to England I should place you near the person of some one of the royal family. In that situation, good-breeding, engaging address, adorned with all the graces that dwell at courts, would very probably make you a favourite, and, from a favourite, a minister. But all the knowledge and learning in the world without them never would. The penetration of princes seldom goes deeper than the surface. It is the exterior that always engages their hearts, and I would never advise you to give yourself much trouble about their understanding. Princes in general, I mean those porphyrogenets who are born and bred in purple, are about the pitch of women, bred up like them, and are to be addressed and gained in the same manner. They always see, they seldom weigh. Your luster, not your solidity, must take them. Your inside will afterwards support and secure what your outside has acquired. With weak people, and they undoubtedly are three parts and four of mankind, good-breeding, address, and manners are everything. They can go no deeper. But let me assure you that they are a great deal even with people of the best understandings. Where the eyes are not pleased, and the heart is not flattered, the mind will be apt to stand out. Be this writer wrong, I confess I am so made myself. Awkwardness and ill-breeding shocked me to that degree. That where I meet with them I cannot find in my heart to inquire into the intrinsic merit of the person. I hastily decide in myself that he can have none, and I am not sure that I should even be sorry to know that he had any. I often paint you in my imagination, in your present Londonanza, and while I view you in the light of ancient and modern learning, useful and ornamental knowledge, I am charmed with the prospect. But when I view you in another light, and represent you awkward, ungraceful, ill-bred, with vulgar air and manners, shambling toward me with inattention and distractions, I shall not pretend to describe to you what I feel, but will do as a skillful painter did formerly, draw avail before the countness of the father. I dare say you know already enough of architecture to know that the Tuscan is the strongest and most solid of all the orders, but at the same time it is the coarsest and clumsiest of them. Its solidity does extremely well for the foundation and base floor of a great edifice, but if the whole building be Tuscan it will attract no eyes, it will stop no passengers, it will invite no interior examination. People will take it for granted that the finishing and furnishing cannot be worth seeing, where the front is so unadorned and clumsy. But if, upon the solid Tuscan foundation, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian orders rise gradually with all their beauty, proportions, and ornaments, the fabric seizes the most incurious eye, and stops the most careless passenger, who solicits admission as a favour, nay often purchases it. Just so will it fare with your little fabric, which at present I fear has more of the Tuscan than of the Corinthian order. You must absolutely change the whole front or nobody will knock at the door. The several parts which must compose this new front are elegant, easy, natural, superior good-breeding, an engaging address, genteel motions, and insinuating softness in your looks, words, and actions, a spruce, lively air, fashionable dress, and all the glitter that a young fellow should have. I am sure you would do a great deal for my sake and therefore consider at your return here what a disappointment and concern it would be to me, if I could not safely depute you to do the honours of my house and table, and if I should be ashamed to present you to those who frequent both. Should you be awkward, inattentive, and astrayed, and happen to meet Mr. L. at my table, the consequences of that meeting must be fatal. You would run your heads against each other, cut each other's fingers, instead of your meat, or die by the precipitate infusion of scalding soup. This is really so copious a subject that there is no end of being either serious or ludicrous upon it. It is impossible, too, to enumerate or state to you the various cases in good-breeding. They are infinite. There is no situational relation in the world so remote or so intimate that does not require a degree of it. Your own good sense must point it out to you. Your own good nature must incline, and your interests prompt you to practice it. And observation and experience must give you the manner, the air, and the graces which complete the whole. This letter will hardly overtake you till you are at or near Rome. I expect a great deal in every way from your six months stay there. My mourning hopes are justly placed in Mr. Hart, and the masters he will give you, my evening ones in the Roman ladies. Pray be attentive to both. But I must hint to you that the Roman ladies are not so sincere in their way as they are as they are in the Roman ladies. You must be to others who know that they have quite a lot of knowledge about the image and the reason behind it, and what your responsibility is. Why, now, do you want to be a lawyer here? And you should be the business people are looking for. I'm not going to be to bring up your business because you have always been. But I think you're going to be happy to work with me. engaged myself to exhibit to you, as proof of the truth of this ascitation. Should you, instead of that, happen to disprove me, the concern, indeed, would be mine, but the loss will be yours. Lord Bolingbroke is a strong instance on my side of the question. He joins to the deepest erudition, the most elegant politeness and good-breeding, that ever any courtier and man of the world was adorned with. And Pope very justly called him, all accomplished Saint John, with regard to his knowledge and his manners. He had it is true his faults, which proceeded from unbounded ambition and impetuous passions, but they have now subsided by age and experience, and I can wish you nothing better than to be what he is now, without being what he has been formerly. His address pre-engages, his eloquence persuades, and his knowledge informs all who approach him. Upon the whole I do desire and insist that from after dinner till you go to bed, you make good-breeding, address, and manners, through serious object and your only care. Without them you will be nobody. With them you may be anything. Adieu, my dear child, my compliments to Mr. Hart. DEAR BOY Every rational being, I take it for granted, proposes to himself some object more important than mere respiration and obscure animal existence. He desires to distinguish himself among his fellow creatures, and, allu qui negotio intentus, preclari facendoris, ot artist bonei, famine carit. Caesar, when embarking in his storm, said that it was not necessary he should live, but that it was absolutely necessary he should get to the place to which he was going. And Pliny leaves mankind this only alternative, either of doing what deserves to be written, or of writing what deserves to be read. As for those who do neither, Iorum vitum mortemke juxta estimo, quonium deotric silitur. You have, I am convinced, one or both of these objects in view, but you must know and use the necessary means, or your pursuit will be vain and frivolous. In either case, sapere est princihium et fonce, but it is by no means all. That knowledge must be adorned it must have luster as well as weight, or it will be often or taken, for lead than for gold. Knowledge you have and will have. I am easy upon that article. But my business as your friend is not to compliment you upon what you have, but to tell you with freedom what you want, and I must tell you plainly that I fear you want everything but knowledge. I have written to you so often of late upon good-breeding a dress, les manières liantes, that I shall confine this letter to another subject, pretty nearer kin to them, and which I am sure you are full as deficient in. I mean style. Style is the dress of thoughts, and let them be ever suggest. If your style is homely, coarse and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill-received as your person, though ever so well-proportioned would, if dressed in rags, dirt and tatters. It is not every understanding that can judge of matter, but every ear can and does judge more or less of style. And where I either to speak or write to the public, I should prefer moderate manner, adorned with all the beauties and elegancies of style, to the strongest matter in the world, ill-worded and ill-delivered. Your business is negotiation abroad, and oratory in the House of Commons at home. What figure can you make, in either case, if your style be inelegant? I do not say bad. Imagine yourself writing an office letter to a Secretary of State, which letter is to be read by the whole Cabinet Council, and very possibly afterward laid before Parliament. Any one barbarism, solicism, or vulgarism in it, would in a very few days circulate through the whole Kingdom, to your disgrace and ridicule. For instance, I will suppose you had written the following letter from the Hague to the Secretary of State at London, and leave you to suppose the consequences of it. My Lord, I had last night the honour of Your Lordship's letter of the twenty-fourth, and will set about doing the orders contained therein, and if so be that I can get that affair done by the next post, I will not fail for to give Your Lordship an account of it by next post. I have told the French minister, as how that if that affair be not soon concluded, Your Lordship would think it all long of him, and that he must have neglected for to have wrote to his court about it. I must beg leave to put Your Lordship in mind, as how, that I am now full three quarter in a rear, and if so be that I do not very soon receive at least one half year, I shall cut a very bad figure, for this here place is very dear. I shall be vastly beholden to Your Lordship for that there mark of Your favour, and so I rest or remain Your, etc. You will tell me possibly that this is a caricatura of an illiberal and inelegant style. I will admit it, but I assure you at the same time that a dispatch with less than half these faults would blow you up forever. It is by no means sufficient to be free from faults in speaking and writing, but you must do both correctly and elegantly. In faults of this kind it is not ill, optimus, cheminimus, argatur, but he is unpardonable who has any at all, because it is his own fault. He need only attend to, observe, and imitate the best authors. It is a very true saying that a man must be born a poet, but that he may make himself an orator, and the very first principle of an orator is to speak his own language particularly with the utmost purity and elegance. A man will be forgiven even great errors in a foreign language, but in his own even the least slips are justly laid hold of and ridiculed. A person of the House of Commons, speaking two years ago upon naval affairs, asserted that we had, then, the finest navy upon the face of the earth. This happy mixture of blunder and vulgarism you may easily imagine was matter of immediate ridicule, but I can assure you that it continues so still, and will be remembered as long as he lives and speaks. Another, speaking in defence of a gentleman, upon whom a censure was moved, happily said that he thought that gentleman was more liable to be thanked and rewarded than censured. You know, I presume, that liable can never be used in a good sense. You have with you three or four of the best English authors, Dryden, Adderbury, and Swift. Read them with the utmost care and with a particular view to their language, and they may possibly correct that curious, involicity of diction which you acquired at Westminster. Mr. Hart accepted, I will admit that you have met with very few English abroad who could improve your style, and with many, I dare say, who speak as ill as yourself, and it may be worse. You must, therefore, take the more pains and consult your authors and Mr. Hart the more. I need not tell you how attentive the Romans and Greeks, particularly the Athenians, were to this object. It is also a study among the Italians and the French, witness their respective academies and dictionaries for improving and fixing their languages. To our shame be it spoken, it is less attended to here than in any polite country, but that is no reason why you should not attend to it. On the contrary, it will distinguish you the more. Cicero says very truly that it is glorious to excel other men in that very article, in which men excel brutes. Speech. The experience has shown me that great purity and elegance of style, with a graceful elocution, cover a multitude of faults, in either a speaker or a writer. For my own part I confess, and I believe most people are of my mind, that if a speaker should ungracefully mutter or stammer out to me the sense of an angel, deformed by barbarism and solicisms, or larded with vulgarisms, he should never speak to me a second time if I could help it. Gain the heart or you gain nothing. The eyes and the ears are the only roads to the heart. Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained. Pray have that truth ever in your mind. Engage the eyes by your address, air and motions. Soothe the ears by the elegance and harmony of your diction. The heart will certainly follow, and the whole man or woman will as certainly follow the heart. I must repeat it to you, over and over again, that with all the knowledge which you have at present, or hereafter acquire, and with all merit that ever man had, if you have not a graceful address, liberal and engaging manners, a prepossessing air, and a good degree of eloquence in speaking and writing, you will be nobody, but will have the daily mortification of seeing people with not one-tenth part of your merit or knowledge, get the start of you, and disgrace you, both in company and in business. You have read Quintillian, the best book in the world to form an orator. Pray read Cicero de Oratory, the best book in the world to finish one. Translate and re-translate from and to Latin, Greek, and English. Make yourself a pure and elegant English style. It requires nothing but application. I do not find that God has made you a poet, and I am very glad that he is not. Therefore, for God's sake, make yourself an orator, which you may do. Though I still call you boy, I consider you no longer as such. And when I reflect upon the prodigious quantity of manure that has been laid upon you, I expect that you should produce more at eighteen than uncultivated soils do at eight and twenty. Pray tell Mr. Hart that I have received his letter of the thirteenth new style. Mr. Smith was much in the right not to let you go at this time of the year by sea. In the summer you may navigate as much as you please, as, for example, from Leghorn to Genoa, etc. Atchoo! End of Section 60. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 61 of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter 92. London, November 27th, Old Style, 1749. Dear Boy. While the Roman Republic flourished, while glory was pursued and virtue practised, and while even little irregularities and indecencies, not cognisable by law, were, however, not thought below the public care, censors were established, discretionally to supply, in particular cases, the inevitable defects of the law, which must and can only be general. This employment I assume to myself with regard to your little republic, leaving the legislative power entirely to Mr. Hart. I hope and believe that he will seldom, or rather never, have occasion to exert his supreme authority, and I do by no means suspect you of any faults that may require that interposition. But to tell you the plain truth, I am of opinion that my sensorial power will not be useless to you, nor a sinecure to me. The sooner you make it both, the better for us both. I can now exercise this employment only upon hearsay, or at most written evidence, and therefore shall exercise it with great leniency and some diffidence. But when we meet, and that I conform my judgment upon ocular and auricular evidence, I shall no more let the least impropriety, indecorum, or irregularity pass uncensored, when my predecessor Cato did. I shall read you with the attention of a critic, not with the partiality of an author, different in this respect, indeed, for most critics, that I shall seek for faults only to correct and not to expose them. I have often thought, and still think, that there are few things which people in general know less than how to love and how to hate. They hurt those they love by a mistaken indulgence, by a blindness, nay, often by a partiality to their faults. Where they hate they hurt themselves by ill-timed passion and rage. Fortunately for you, I never loved you in that mistaken manner. From your infancy I made you the object of my most serious attention, and not my plaything. I consulted your real good, not your humours or fancies, and I shall continue to do so while you want it, which will probably be the case during our joint lives. For considering the difference of our ages, in the course of nature, you will hardly have acquired experience enough of your own, while I shall be in condition of lending you any of mine. People in general will much better bear being, told of their vices or crimes, than of their little failings and weaknesses. They, in some degree, justify or excuse as they think, the former, by strong passions, seductions, and artifices of others. But to be told of, or to confess, their little failings and weaknesses, implies an inferiority of parts, too mortifying to that self-love and vanity, which are inseparable from our natures. I have been intimate enough with several people to tell them that they had said or done a very criminal thing. But I never was intimate enough with any man to tell him, very seriously, that he had said or done a very foolish one. Nothing less than the relation between you and me can possibly authorize that freedom. But fortunately for you, my parental rights, join to my sensorial powers, give it me in its fullest extent, and my concern for you will make me exert it. Rejoice, therefore, that there is one person in the world who can and will tell you what will be very useful to you to know, and yet what no other man living could or would tell you. Whatever I shall tell you of this kind, you are very sure, can have no other motive than your interest. I can neither be jealous nor envious of your reputation or fortune, which I must be both desirous and proud to establish and promote. I cannot be your rival either in love or in business. On the contrary, I want the rays of your rising to reflect new luster upon my setting light. In order to this, I shall analyze you minutely and censor you freely, that you may not, if possible, have one single spot when in your meridian. There is nothing that a young fellow at his first appearance in the world has more reason to dread and consequently should take more pains to avoid than having any ridicule fixed upon him. It degrades him with the most reasonable part of mankind, but it ruins him with the rest, and I have known many a man undone by acquiring a ridiculous nickname. I would not for all the riches in the world that you should acquire one when you return to England. Vices and crimes excite hatred and reproach. Failings, weaknesses, and awkwardnesses excite ridicule. They are laid holed up by mimics, who, though very contemptible, wretches themselves, often by their buffoonery, fix ridicule upon their betters. The little defects in manners, elocution, address, and air, and even a figure, though very unjustly, are the objects of ridicule and the causes of nicknames. You cannot imagine the grief it would give me, and the prejudice it would do you, if by way of distinguishing you from others of your name you should happen to be called muttering stanhope, absent stanhope, ill-bred stanhope, or awkward, left-legged stanhope. Therefore, take great care to put it out of the power of ridicule itself to give you any of these ridiculous epithets, for if you get one it will stick to you like the inventum'd shirt. The very first day that I see you I shall be able to tell you, and certainly shall tell you, what degree of danger you are in, and I hope that my admonitions as censor may prevent the censures of the public. Admonitions are always useful. Is this one or not? You are the best judge. It is your own picture which I send you, drawn at my request, by a lady at Venice. Pray let me know how far in your conscience you think it like, for there are some parts of it which I wish may, and others which I should be sorry were. I send you literally the copy of that part of her letter to her friend here, which relates to you. In compliance to your orders I have examined young stanhope carefully, and think I have penetrated into his character. This is his portrait, which I take to be a faithful one. His face is pleasing, his countenance sensible, and his look clever. His figure is at present rather too square, but if he shoots up, which he has matter and years for, he will then be of a good size. He has undoubtedly a great fund of acquired knowledge. I am assured that he is master of the learned languages. As for French, I know he speaks it perfectly, and I am told German as well. The questions he asks are judicious, and denote a thirst after knowledge. I cannot say that he appears equally desirous of pleasing, for he seems to neglect attentions and the graces. He does not come into a room well, nor has he that easy, noble carriage, which would be proper for him. It is true he is as yet young and inexperienced. One may therefore reasonably hope that his exercises, which he has not yet gone through, and good company, in which he is still a novice, will polish, and give all that is wanting to complete him. What seems necessary for that purpose would be an attachment to some woman of fashion, and who knows the world. Some Madame de l'Ersé would be the proper person. In short, I can assure you that he is everything which Lord Chesterfield can wish him, accepting that carriage, those graces, and the style used in the best company, which he will certainly acquire in time, and by frequenting the polite world. If he should not, it would be great pity, since he so well deserves to possess them. You know their importance. My Lord his Father knows it too, he being master of them all. To conclude, if little stand-hope acquires the graces, I promise you he will make his way. If not, he will be stopped in a course, the goal of which he might attain with honour. Tell Mr. Hart that I have this moment received as letter of the twenty-second news-style, and that I approve extremely of the long stay you have made at Venice. I love long residences at capitals. Running posts through different places is a most unprofitable way of travelling, and admits of no application. Adieu. You see by this extract of what consequence other people think these things. Therefore I hope you will no longer look upon them as trifles. It is the character of an able man to despise little things in great business. But then he knows what things are little and what not. He does not suppose things are little because they are commonly called so, but by the consequences that may or may not attend them. If gaining people's affections and interesting their hearts in your favour, be of consequence, as it undoubtedly is, he knows very well that a happy concurrence of all those commonly called little things, manners, air, address, graces, etc., is of the utmost consequence, and will never be at rest till he has acquired them. The world is taken by the outside of things, and we must take the world as it is. You nor I cannot set it right. I know at this time a man of great quality in station, who has not the parts of a porter, but raised himself to the station he is in, singly by having a graceful figure, polite manners, and an engaging address, which, by the way, he only acquired by habit, for he had not sense enough to get them by reflection. Parts and habit should conspire to complete you. You will have the habit of good company, and you have reflection in your power. End of Section 61, read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.