Dear Boy:  This letter will, I hope, find you safely arrived and well settled at Rome, after the usual distresses and accidents of a winter journey; which are very proper to teach you patience.  Your stay there I look upon as a very important period of your life; and I do believe that you will fill it up well.  I hope you will employ the mornings diligently with Mr. Harte, in acquiring weight; and the evenings in the best companies at Rome, in acquiring lustre.  A formal, dull father, would recommend to you to plod out the evenings, too, at home, over a book by a dim taper; but I recommend to you the evenings for your pleasures, which are as much a part of your education, and almost as necessary a one, as your morning studies.  Go to whatever assemblies or spectacles people of fashion go to, and when you are there do as they do.  Endeavor to outshine those who shine there the most, get the ‘Garbo’, the ‘Gentilezza’, the ‘Leggeadria’ of the; Italians; make love to the most impertinent beauty of condition that you meet with, and be gallant with all the rest.  Speak Italian, right or wrong, to everybody; and if you do but laugh at yourself first for your bad Italian, nobody else will laugh at you for it.  That is the only way to speak it perfectly; which I expect you will do, because I am sure you may, before you leave Rome.  View the most curious remains of antiquity with a classical spirit; and they will clear up to you many passages of the classical authors; particularly the Trajan and Antonine Columns; where you find the warlike instruments, the dresses, and the triumphal ornaments of the Romans.  Buy also the prints and explanations of all those respectable remains of Roman grandeur, and compare them with the originals.  Most young travelers are contented with a general view of those things, say they are very fine, and then go about their business.  I hope you will examine them in a very different way.  ‘Approfondissez’ everything you see or hear; and learn, if you can, the why and the wherefore.  Inquire into the meaning and the objects of the innumerable processions, which you will see at Rome at this time.  Assist at all the ceremonies, and know the reason, or at least the pretenses of them, and however absurd they may be, see and speak of them with great decency.  Of all things, I beg of you not to herd with your own countrymen, but to be always either with the Romans, or with the foreign ministers residing at Rome.  You are sent abroad to see the manners and characters, and learn the languages of foreign countries; and not to converse with English, in English; which would defeat all those ends.  Among your graver company, I recommend (as I have done before) the Jesuits to you; whose learning and address will both please and improve you; inform yourself, as much as you can, of the history, policy, and practice of that society, from the time of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, who was himself a madman.  If you would know their