As for Operas, they are essentially too absurd and extravagant to mention; I look upon them as a magic scene, contrived to please the eyes and the ears, at the expense of the understanding; and I consider singing, rhyming, and chiming heroes, and princesses, and philosophers, as I do the hills, the trees, the birds, and the beasts, who amicably joined in one common country dance, to the irresistible turn of Orpheus’s lyre.  Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.

Thus I have made you my poetical confession; in which I have acknowledged as many sins against the established taste in both countries, as a frank heretic could have owned against the established church in either, but I am now privileged by my age to taste and think for myself, and not to care what other people think of me in those respects; an advantage which youth, among its many advantages, hath not.  It must occasionally and outwardly conform, to a certain degree, to establish tastes, fashions, and decisions.  A young man may, with a becoming modesty, dissent, in private companies, from public opinions and prejudices:  but he must not attack them with warmth, nor magisterially set up his own sentiments against them.  Endeavor to hear, and know all opinions; receive them with complaisance; form your own with coolness, and give it with modesty.

I have received a letter from Sir John Lambert, in which he requests me to use my interest to procure him the remittance of Mr. Spencer’s money, when he goes abroad and also desires to know to whose account he is to place the postage of my letters.  I do not trouble him with a letter in answer, since you can execute the commission.  Pray make my compliments to him, and assure him that I will do all I can to procure him Mr. Spencer’s business; but that his most effectual way will be by Messrs. Hoare, who are Mr. Spencer’s cashiers, and who will undoubtedly have their choice upon whom they will give him his credit.  As for the postage of the letters, your purse and mine being pretty near the same, do you pay it, over and above your next draught.

Your relations, the Princes B-----, will soon be with you at Paris; for
they leave London this week:  whenever you converse with them, I desire it
may be in Italian; that language not being yet familiar enough to you.

By our printed papers, there seems to be a sort of compromise between the King and the parliament, with regard to the affairs of the hospitals, by taking them out of the hands of the Archbishop of Paris, and placing them in Monsieur d’Argenson’s:  if this be true, that compromise, as it is called, is clearly a victory on the side of the court, and a defeat on the part of the parliament; for if the parliament had a right, they had it as much to the exclusion of Monsieur d’Argenson as of the Archbishop.  Adieu.

LETTER CLVIII