London, November 20, 1753

My dear friend:  Two mails are now due from Holland, so that I have no letter from you to acknowledge; but that, you know, by long experience, does not hinder my writing to you.  I always receive your letters with pleasure; but I mean, and endeavor, that you should receive mine with some profit; preferring always your advantage to my own pleasure.

If you find yourself well settled and naturalized at Manheim, stay there some time, and do not leave a certain for an uncertain good; but if you think you shall be as well, or better established at Munich, go there as soon as you please; and if disappointed, you can always return to Manheim I mentioned, in a former letter, your passing the Carnival at Berlin, which I think may be both useful and pleasing to you; however, do as you will; but let me know what you resolve:  That King and that country have, and will have, so great a share in the affairs of Europe, that they are well worth being thoroughly known.

Whether, where you are now, or ever may be hereafter, you speak French, German, or English most, I earnestly recommend to you a particular attention to the propriety and elegance of your style; employ the best words you can find in the language, avoid cacophony, and make your periods as harmonious as you can.  I need not, I am sure, tell you what you must often have felt, how much the elegance of diction adorns the best thoughts, and palliates the worst.  In the House of Commons it is almost everything; and, indeed, in every assembly, whether public or private.  Words, which are the dress of thoughts, deserve surely more care than clothes, which are only the dress of the person, and which, however, ought to have their share of attention.  If you attend to your style in any one language, it will give you a habit of attending to it in every other; and if once you speak either French or German very elegantly, you will afterward speak much the better English for it.  I repeat it to you again, for at least the thousandth time, exert your whole attention now in acquiring the ornamental parts of character.  People know very little of the world, and talk nonsense, when they talk of plainness and solidity unadorned:  they will do in nothing; mankind has been long out of a state of nature, and the golden age of native simplicity will never return.  Whether for the better or the worse, no matter; but we are refined; and plain manners, plain dress, and plain diction, would as little do in life, as acorns, herbage, and the water of the neighboring spring, would do at table.  Some people are just come, who interrupt me in the middle of my sermon; so good-night.

LETTER CXCI

London, November 26, 1753