I am extremely satisfied with your present manner of employing your time; but will you always employ it as well?  I am far from meaning always in the same way; but I mean as well in proportion, in the variation of age and circumstances.  You now, study five hours every morning; I neither suppose that you will, nor desire that you should do so for the rest of your life.  Both business and pleasure will justly and equally break in upon those hours.  But then, will you always employ the leisure they leave you in useful studies?  If you have but an hour, will you improve that hour, instead of idling it away?  While you have such a friend and monitor with you as Mr. Harte, I am sure you will.  But suppose that business and situations should, in six or seen months, call Mr. Harte away from you; tell me truly, what may I expect and depend upon from you, when left to yourself?  May I be sure that you will employ some part of every day, in adding something to that stock of knowledge which he will have left you?  May I hope that you will allot one hour in the week to the care of your own affairs, to keep them in that order and method which every prudent man does?  But, above all, may I be convinced that your pleasures, whatever they may be, will be confined within the circle of good company, and people of fashion?  Those pleasures I recommend to you; I will promote them I will pay for them; but I will neither pay for, nor suffer, the unbecoming, disgraceful, and degrading pleasures (they should not be called pleasures), of low and profligate company.  I confess the pleasures of high life are not always strictly philosophical; and I believe a Stoic would blame, my indulgence; but I am yet no Stoic, though turned of five-and-fifty; and I am apt to think that you are rather less so, at eighteen.  The pleasures of the table, among people of the first fashion, may indeed sometimes, by accident, run into excesses:  but they will never sink into a continued course of gluttony and drunkenness.  The gallantry of high life, though not strictly justifiable, carries, at least, no external marks of infamy about it.  Neither the heart nor the constitution is corrupted by it; neither nose nor character lost by it; manners, possibly, improved.  Play, in good company, is only play, and not gaming; not deep, and consequently not dangerous nor dishonorable.  It is only the interacts of other amusements.

This, I am sure, is not talking to you like an old man, though it is talking to you like an old friend; these are not hard conditions to ask of you.  I am certain you have sense enough to know how reasonable they are on my part, how advantageous they are on yours:  but have you resolution enough to perform them?  Can you withstand the examples, and the invitations, of the profligate, and their infamous missionaries?  For I have known many a young fellow seduced by a ‘mauvaise honte’, that made him ashamed to refuse.  These are resolutions which you must form, and steadily execute for yourself, whenever you lose the friendly care and assistance of your Mentor.  In the meantime, make a greedy use of him; exhaust him, if you can, of all his knowledge; and get the prophet’s mantle from him, before he is taken away himself.