Women are very apt to be mingled in court intrigues; but they deserve attention better than confidence; to hold by them is a very precarious tenure.

I am agreeably interrupted in these reflections by a letter which I have this moment received from Baron Firmian.  It contains your panegyric, and with the strongest protestations imaginable that he does you only justice.  I received this favorable account of you with pleasure, and I communicate it to you with as much.  While you deserve praise, it is reasonable you should know that you meet with it; and I make no doubt, but that it will encourage you in persevering to deserve it.  This is one paragraph of the Baron’s letter:  Ses moeurs dans un age si tendre, reglees selon toutes les loix d’une morale exacte et sensee; son application (that is what I like) a tout ce qui s’appelle etude serieuse, et Belles Lettres,—­“Notwithstanding his great youth, his manners are regulated by the most unexceptionable rules of sense and of morality.  His application that is what I like to every kind of serious study, as well as to polite literature, without even the least appearance of ostentatious pedantry, render him worthy of your most tender affection; and I have the honor of assuring you, that everyone cannot but be pleased with the acquisition of his acquaintance or of his friendship.  I have profited of it, both here and at Vienna; and shall esteem myself very happy to make use of the permission he has given me of continuing it by letter.”  Reputation, like health, is preserved and increased by the same means by which it is acquired.  Continue to desire and deserve praise, and you will certainly find it.  Knowledge, adorned by manners, will infallibly procure it.  Consider, that you have but a little way further to get to your journey’s end; therefore, for God’s sake, do not slacken your pace; one year and a half more of sound application, Mr. Harte assures me, will finish this work; and when this work is finished well, your own will be very easily done afterward.  ‘Les Manieres et les Graces’ are no immaterial parts of that work; and I beg that you will give as much of your attention to them as to your books.  Everything depends upon them; ‘senza di noi ogni fatica e vana’.  The various companies you now go into will procure them you, if you will carefully observe, and form yourself upon those who have them.

Adieu!  God bless you! and may you ever deserve that affection with which I am now, Yours.

LETTER LXXX

London, September 5, O. S. 1749.