If accidents of bad roads or waters do not detain you at Munich, I do not fancy that pleasures will:  and I rather believe you will seek for, and find them, at the Carnival at Berlin; in which supposition, I eventually direct this letter to your banker there.  While you are at Berlin (I earnestly recommend it to you again and again) pray care to see, hear, know, and mind, everything there.  The ablest prince in Europe is surely an object that deserves attention; and the least thing that he does, like the smallest sketches of the greatest painters, has its value, and a considerable one too.

Read with care the Code Frederick, and inform yourself of the good effects of it in those parts of, his dominions where it has taken place, and where it has banished the former chicanes, quirks, and quibbles of the old law.  Do not think any detail too minute or trifling for your inquiry and observation.  I wish that you could find one hour’s leisure every day, to read some good Italian author, and to converse in that language with our worthy friend Signor Angelo Cori; it would both refresh and improve your Italian, which, of the many languages you know, I take to be that in which you are the least perfect; but of which, too, you already know enough to make yourself master of, with very little trouble, whenever you please.

Live, dwell, and grow at the several courts there; use them so much to your face, that they may not look upon you as a stranger.  Observe, and take their ‘ton’, even to their affectations and follies; for such there are, and perhaps should be, at all courts.  Stay, in all events, at Berlin, till I inform you of Sir Charles Williams’s arrival at Dresden; where I suppose you would not care to be before him, and where you may go as soon after him as ever you please.  Your time there will neither be unprofitably nor disagreeably spent; he will introduce you into all the best company, though he can introduce you to none so good as his own.  He has of late applied himself very seriously to foreign affairs, especially those of Saxony and Poland; he knows them perfectly well, and will tell you what he knows.  He always expresses, and I have good reason to believe very sincerely, great kindness and affection for you.

The works of the late Lord Bolingbroke are just published, and have plunged me into philosophical studies; which hitherto I have not been much used to, or delighted with; convinced of the futility of those researches; but I have read his “Philosophical Essay” upon the extent of human knowledge, which, by the way, makes two large quartos and a half.  He there shows very clearly, and with most splendid eloquence, what the human mind can and cannot do; that our understandings are wisely calculated for our place in this planet, and for the link which we form in the universal chain of things; but that they are by no means capable of that degree of knowledge, which our curiosity makes us search after, and which our vanity makes us often believe we arrive at.  I shall not recommend to you the reading of that work; but, when you return hither, I shall recommend to your frequent and diligent perusal all his tracts that are relative to our history and constitution; upon which he throws lights, and scatters graces, which no other writer has ever done.