Go to the Duchess of Courland’s as often as she and your leisure will permit.  The company of women of fashion will improve your manners, though not your understanding; and that complaisance and politeness, which are so useful in men’s company, can only be acquired in women’s.

Remember always what I have told you a thousand times, that all the talents in the world will want all their lustre, and some part of their use, too, if they are not advanced with that easy good-breeding, that engaging manner, and those graces, which seduce and prepossess people in your favour at first sight.  A proper care of your person is by no means to be neglected; always extremely clean; upon proper occasions, fine.  Your carriage genteel, and your motions graceful.  Take particular care of your manners and address when you present yourself in company.  Let them be respectful without meanness, easy without too much familiarity, genteel without affectation, and insinuating without any seeming art or design....  Adieu!

II.—­On the Art of Pleasing

Bath, March 9, 1748.  I must from time to time remind you of what I have often recommended to you, and of what you cannot attend to too much:  sacrifice to the graces.  Intrinsic merit alone will not do; it will gain you the general esteem of all, but not the particular affection, that is the heart, of any.  To engage the affections of any particular person you must, over and above your general merit, have some particular merit to that person; by services done, or offered; by expressions of regard and esteem; by complaisance, attentions, etc., for him; and the graceful manner of doing all these things opens the way to the heart, and facilitates, or rather, insures, their effects.

A thousand little things, not separately to be described, conspire to form these graces, this je ne scais quoi, that always pleases.  A pretty person, a proper degree of dress, an harmonious voice, something open and cheerful in the countenance, but without laughing; a distinct and properly varied manner of speaking; all these things and many others are necessary ingredients in the composition of the pleasing je ne scais quoi, which everybody feels, though nobody can describe.  Observe carefully, then, what displeases or pleases you in others, and be persuaded that, in general, the same things will please or displease them in you.

Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it; and I would heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.  Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry.  In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.  I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh.  Many people, at first, from awkwardness and mauvaise honte, have got a very disagreeable and silly trick of laughing whenever they speak.