Mr. Grevenkop has just received Mr. Harte’s letter of the 19th N. S.

LETTER CVII

London, March 8, O. S. 1750

Young as you are, I hope you are in haste to live; by living, I mean living with lustre and honor to yourself, with utility to society; doing what may deserve to be written, or writing what may deserve to be read; I should wish both.  Those who consider life in that light, will not idly lavish one moment.  The present moments are the only ones we are sure of, and as such the most valuable; but yours are doubly so at your age; for the credit, the dignity, the comfort, and the pleasure of all your future moments, depend upon the use you make of your present ones.

I am extremely satisfied with your present manner of employing your time; but will you always employ it as well?  I am far from meaning always in the same way; but I mean as well in proportion, in the variation of age and circumstances.  You now, study five hours every morning; I neither suppose that you will, nor desire that you should do so for the rest of your life.  Both business and pleasure will justly and equally break in upon those hours.  But then, will you always employ the leisure they leave you in useful studies?  If you have but an hour, will you improve that hour, instead of idling it away?  While you have such a friend and monitor with you as Mr. Harte, I am sure you will.  But suppose that business and situations should, in six or seen months, call Mr. Harte away from you; tell me truly, what may I expect and depend upon from you, when left to yourself?  May I be sure that you will employ some part of every day, in adding something to that stock of knowledge which he will have left you?  May I hope that you will allot one hour in the week to the care of your own affairs, to keep them in that order and method which every prudent man does?  But, above all, may I be convinced that your pleasures, whatever they may be, will be confined within the circle of good company, and people of fashion?  Those pleasures I recommend to you; I will promote them I will pay for them; but I will neither pay for, nor suffer, the unbecoming, disgraceful, and degrading pleasures (they should not be called pleasures), of low and profligate company.  I confess the pleasures of high life are not always strictly philosophical; and I believe a Stoic would blame, my indulgence; but I am yet no Stoic, though turned of five-and-fifty; and I am apt to think that you are rather less so, at eighteen.  The pleasures of the table, among people of the first fashion, may indeed sometimes, by accident, run into excesses:  but they will never sink into a continued course of gluttony and drunkenness.  The gallantry of high life, though not strictly justifiable, carries, at least, no external marks of infamy about it.  Neither the heart nor the constitution is corrupted by it; neither nose nor character lost by it; manners, possibly, improved.  Play, in good company, is only play, and not gaming; not deep, and consequently not dangerous nor dishonorable.  It is only the interacts of other amusements.