by which dances are now pricked down as well as tunes.  Observe and imitate, then, the address, the arts, and the manners of those ‘qui ont du monde’:  see by what methods they first make, and afterward improve impressions in their favor.  Those impressions are much oftener owing to little causes than to intrinsic merit; which is less volatile, and hath not so sudden an effect.  Strong minds have undoubtedly an ascendant over weak ones, as Galigai Marachale d’Ancre very justly observed, when, to the disgrace and reproach of those times, she was executed for having governed Mary of Medicis by the arts of witchcraft and magic.  But then ascendant is to be gained by degrees, and by those arts only which experience and the knowledge of the world teaches; for few are mean enough to be bullied, though most are weak enough to be bubbled.  I have often seen people of superior, governed by people of much inferior parts, without knowing or even suspecting that they were so governed.  This can only happen when those people of inferior parts have more worldly dexterity and experience, than those they govern.  They see the weak and unguarded part, and apply to it they take it, and all the rest follows.  Would you gain either men or women, and every man of sense desires to gain both, ’il faut du monde’.  You have had more opportunities than ever any man had, at your age, of acquiring ‘ce monde’.  You have been in the best companies of most countries, at an age when others have hardly been in any company at all.  You are master of all those languages, which John Trott seldom speaks at all, and never well; consequently you need be a stranger nowhere.  This is the way, and the only way, of having ‘du monde’, but if you have it not, and have still any coarse rusticity about you, may not one apply to you the ‘rusticus expectat’ of Horace?

This knowledge of the world teaches us more particularly two things, both which are of infinite consequence, and to neither of which nature inclines us; I mean, the command of our temper, and of our countenance.  A man who has no ‘monde’ is inflamed with anger, or annihilated with shame, at every disagreeable incident:  the one makes him act and talk like a madman, the other makes him look like a fool.  But a man who has ’du monde’, seems not to understand what he cannot or ought not to resent.  If he makes a slip himself, he recovers it by his coolness, instead of plunging deeper by his confusion like a stumbling horse.  He is firm, but gentle; and practices that most excellent maxim, ’suaviter in modo, fortiter in re’.  The other is the ‘volto sciolto a pensieri stretti’.  People unused to the world have babbling countenances; and are unskillful enough to show what they have sense enough not to tell.  In the course of the world, a man must very often put on an easy, frank countenance, upon very disagreeable occasions; he must seem pleased when he is very much otherwise; he must be able to accost and receive with smiles, those whom he would