Use and assert your own reason; reflect, examine, and analyze everything, in order to form a sound and mature judgement; let no [Greek:  outos epha] impose upon your understanding, mislead your actions, or dictate your conversation.  Be early what, if you are not, you will when too late wish you had been.  Consult your reason betimes:  I do not say, that it will always prove an unerring guide; for human reason is not infallible; but it will prove the least erring guide that you can follow.  Books and conversation may assist it; but adopt neither, blindly and implicitly:  try both by that best rule which God has given to direct us, reason.  Of all the troubles, do not decline, as many people do, that of thinking.

TO THE SAME

Public speaking

London, 9 Dec. o.s. 1749.

DEAR BOY,

It is now above forty years since I have never spoken nor written one single word, without giving myself at least one moment’s time to consider, whether it was a good one or a bad one, and whether I could not find out a better in its place.  An unharmonious and rugged period, at this time, shocks my ears; and I, like all the rest of the world, will willingly exchange and give up some degree of rough sense, for a good degree of pleasing sound.  I will freely and truly own to you, without either vanity or false modesty, that whatever reputation I have acquired as a speaker, is more owing to my constant attention to my diction than to my matter, which was necessarily just the same as other people’s.  When you come into parliament, your reputation as a speaker will depend much more upon your words, and your periods than upon the subject.  The same matter occurs equally to everybody of common sense, upon the same question:  the dressing it well, is what excites the attention and admiration of the audience.

It is in parliament that I have set my heart upon your making a figure; it is there that I want to have you justly proud of yourself, and to make me justly proud of you.  This means that you must be a good speaker there; I use the word must, because I know you may if you will.  The vulgar, who are always mistaken, look upon a speaker and a comet with the same astonishment and admiration, taking them both for preternatural phenomena.  This error discourages many young men from attempting that character; and good speakers are willing to have their talent considered as something very extraordinary, if not a peculiar gift of God to his elect.  But, let you and I analyze and simplify this good speaker; let us strip him of those adventitious plumes with which his own pride and the ignorance of others have decked him; and we shall find the true definition of him to be no more than this:  a man of good common sense, who reasons justly, and expresses himself elegantly, on that subject upon which he speaks.  There is, surely, no witchcraft in this.  A man of sense, without a superior and