There is, in all good company, a fashionable air, countenance, manner, and phraseology, which can only be acquired by being in good company, and very attentive to all that passes there.  There is a certain distinguishing diction of a man of fashion; he will not content himself with saying, like John Trott, to a new-married man, “Sir, I wish you joy”—­or to a man who lost his son, “Sir I am sorry for your loss,” and both with a countenance equally unmoved; but he will say in effect the same thing in a more elegant and less trivial manner, and with a countenance adapted to the occasion.  He will advance with warmth, vivacity, and a cheerful countenance to the new-married man, and, embracing him, perhaps say to him, “If you do justice to my attachment to you, you will judge of the joy that I feel upon this occasion better than I can express it.”  To the other, in affliction, he will advance slowly, with a grave composure of countenance, in a more deliberate manner, and with a lower voice perhaps, say, “I hope you do me the justice to be convinced that I feel whatever you feel, and shall ever be affected where you are concerned.”

V.—­On the Arts

Mr. Harte tells me that he intends to give you, by means of Signor Vincentini, a general notion of civil and military architecture; with which I am very well pleased.  They are frequent subjects of conversation.  I would also have you acquire a liberal taste of the two liberal arts of painting and sculpture.  All these sorts of things I would have you know, to a certain degree; but remember that they must only be the amusements, and not the business, of a man of parts.

As you are now in a musical country [Italy], where singing, fiddling, and piping are not only the common topics of conversation but almost the principal objects of attention, I cannot help cautioning you against giving in to those—­I will call them illiberal—­pleasures, though music is commonly reckoned one of the liberal arts, to the degree that most of your countrymen do when they travel in Italy.  If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you, but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself.  It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light, brings him into a great deal of bad company, and takes up a great deal of time which might be much better employed.

I confess I cannot help forming some opinion of a man’s sense and character from his dress, and I believe most people do as well as myself.  A man of sense carefully avoids any particular character in his dress; he is accurately clean for his own sake; but all the rest is for other people’s.  He dresses as well, and in the same manner, as the people of sense and fashion of the place where he is.  If he dresses better, as he thinks, that is, more than they, he is a fop; if he dresses worse, he is unpardonably negligent; but of the two, I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed—­the excess on that side will wear off with a little age; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old.