Pray show great attention, and make your court to Monsieur de la Gueriniere; he is well with Prince Charles and many people of the first distinction at Paris; his commendations will raise your character there, not to mention that his favor will be of use to you in the Academy itself.  For the reasons which I mentioned to you in my last, I would have you be interne in the Academy for the first six months; but after that, I promise you that you shall have lodgings of your own ’dans un hotel garni’, if in the meantime I hear well of you, and that you frequent, and are esteemed in the best French companies.  You want nothing now, thank God, but exterior advantages, that last polish, that ‘tournure du monde’, and those graces, which are so necessary to adorn, and give efficacy to, the most solid merit.  They are only to be acquired in the best companies, and better in the best French companies than in any other.  You will not want opportunities, for I shall send you letters that will establish you in the most distinguished companies, not only of the beau monde, but of the beaux esprits, too.  Dedicate, therefore, I beg of you, that whole year to your own advantage and final improvement, and do not be diverted from those objects by idle dissipations, low seduction, or bad example.  After that year, do whatever you please; I will interfere no longer in your conduct; for I am sure both you and I shall be safe then.  Adieu!

LETTER CXI

London, April 30, O. S. 1750

My dear friend:  Mr. Harte, who in all his letters gives you some dash of panegyric, told me in his last a thing that pleases me extremely; which was that at Rome you had constantly preferred the established Italian assemblies to the English conventicles setup against them by dissenting English ladies.  That shows sense, and that you know what you are sent abroad for.  It is of much more consequence to know the ’mores multorem hominum’ than the ‘urbes’.  Pray continue this judicious conduct wherever you go, especially at Paris, where, instead of thirty, you will find above three hundred English, herding together and conversing with no one French body.

The life of ‘les Milords Anglois’ is regularly, or, if you will, irregularly, this.  As soon as they rise, which is very late, they breakfast together, to the utter loss of two good morning hours.  Then they go by coachfuls to the Palais, the Invalides, and Notre-Dame; from thence to the English coffee-house, where they make up their tavern party for dinner.  From dinner, where they drink quick, they adjourn in clusters to the play, where they crowd up the stage, dressed up in very fine clothes, very ill-made by a Scotch or Irish tailor.  From the play to the tavern again, where they get very drunk, and where they either quarrel among themselves, or sally forth, commit some riot in the streets, and are taken up by the watch.  Those who do not speak French before they go, are sure to learn none there.  Their tender vows are addressed to their Irish laundress, unless by chance some itinerant Englishwoman, eloped from her husband, or her creditors, defrauds her of them.  Thus they return home, more petulant, but not more informed, than when they left it; and show, as they think, their improvement by affectedly both speaking and dressing in broken French:—­