How trifling soever these things may seem, or really be in themselves, they are no longer so when above half the world thinks them otherwise.  And, as I would have you ‘omnibus ornatum—­excellere rebus’, I think nothing above or below my pointing out to you, or your excelling in.  You have the means of doing it, and time before you to make use of them.  Take my word for it, I ask nothing now but what you will, twenty years hence, most heartily wish that you had done.  Attention to all these things, for the next two or three years, will save you infinite trouble and endless regrets hereafter.  May you, in the whole course of your life, have no reason for any one just regret!  Adieu.

Your Dresden china is arrived, and I have sent it to your Mamma.

LETTER LII

London, September 27, O. S. 1748.

Dear boy:  I have received your Latin “Lecture upon War,” which though it is not exactly the same Latin that Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid spoke, is, however, as good Latin as the erudite Germans speak or write.  I have always observed that the most learned people, that is, those who have read the most Latin, write the worst; and that distinguishes the Latin of gentleman scholar from that of a pedant.  A gentleman has, probably, read no other Latin than that of the Augustan age; and therefore can write no other, whereas the pedant has read much more bad Latin than good, and consequently writes so too.  He looks upon the best classical books, as books for school-boys, and consequently below him; but pores over fragments of obscure authors, treasures up the obsolete words which he meets with there, and uses them upon all occasions to show his reading at the expense of his judgment.  Plautus is his favorite author, not for the sake of the wit and the vis comica of his comedies, but upon account of the many obsolete words, and the cant of low characters, which are to be met with nowhere else.  He will rather use ‘olli’ than ‘illi’, ‘optume’ than ‘optima’, and any bad word rather than any good one, provided he can but prove, that strictly speaking, it is Latin; that is, that it was written by a Roman.  By this rule, I might now write to you in the language of Chaucer or Spenser, and assert that I wrote English, because it was English in their days; but I should be a most affected puppy if I did so, and you would not understand three words of my letter.  All these, and such like affected peculiarities, are the characteristics of learned coxcombs and pedants, and are carefully avoided by all men of sense.

I dipped accidentally, the other day, into Pitiscus’s preface to his “Lexicon,” where I found a word that puzzled me, and which I did not remember ever to have met with before.  It is the adverb ‘praefiscine’, which means, in A good hour; an expression which, by the superstition of it, appears to be low and vulgar.  I looked for it:  and at last I found that it is once or twice made use of in Plautus, upon the strength of which this learned pedant thrusts it into his preface.  Whenever you write Latin, remember that every word or phrase which you make use of, but cannot find in Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Horace, Virgil; and Ovid, is bad, illiberal Latin, though it may have been written by a Roman.