Mr. Harte tells me, that your acquaintance with the classics is renewed; the suspension of which has been so short, that I dare say it has produced no coldness.  I hope and believe, you are now so much master of them, that two hours every day, uninterruptedly, for a year or two more, will make you perfectly so; and I think you cannot now allot them a greater share than that of your time, considering the many other things you have to learn and to do.  You must know how to speak and write Italian perfectly; you must learn some logic, some geometry, and some astronomy; not to mention your exercises, where they are to be learned; and, above all, you must learn the world, which is not soon learned; and only to be learned by frequenting good and various companies.

Consider, therefore, how precious every moment of time is to you now.  The more you apply to your business, the more you will taste your pleasures.  The exercise of the mind in the morning whets the appetite for the pleasures of the evening, as much as the exercise of the body whets the appetite for dinner.  Business and pleasure, rightly understood, mutually assist each other, instead of being enemies, as silly or dull people often think them.  No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them by previous business, and few people do business well, who do nothing else.  Remember that when I speak of pleasures, I always mean the elegant pleasures of a rational being, and, not the brutal ones of a swine.  I mean ‘la bonne Chere’, short of gluttony; wine, infinitely short of drunkenness; play, without the least gaming; and gallantry without debauchery.  There is a line in all these things which men of sense, for greater security, take care to keep a good deal on the right side of; for sickness, pain, contempt and infamy, lie immediately on the other side of it.  Men of sense and merit, in all other respects, may have had some of these failings; but then those few examples, instead of inviting us to imitation, should only put us the more upon our guard against such weaknesses:  and whoever thinks them fashionable, will not be so himself; I have often known a fashionable man have some one vice; but I never in my life knew a vicious man a fashionable man.  Vice is as degrading as it is criminal.  God bless you, my dear child!

LETTER LXXVIII

London, August 20, O. S. 1749.

Dear boy:  Let us resume our reflections upon men, their characters, their manners, in a word, our reflections upon the world.  They may help you to form yourself, and to know others; a knowledge very useful at all ages, very rare at yours.  It seems as if it were nobody’s business to communicate it to young men.  Their masters teach them, singly, the languages or the sciences of their several departments; and are indeed generally incapable of teaching them the world:  their parents are often so too, or at least neglect doing it, either