Paris is the place in the world where, if you please, you may the best unite the ‘utile’ and the ‘dulce’.  Even your pleasures will be your improvements, if you take them with the people of the place, and in high life.  From what you have hitherto done everywhere else, I have just reason to believe, that you will do everything that you ought at Paris.  Remember that it is your decisive moment; whatever you do there will be known to thousands here, and your character there, whatever it is, will get before you here.  You will meet with it at London.  May you and I both have reason to rejoice at that meeting!  Adieu.

LETTER CXII

London, May 8, O. S. 1750

My dear friend:  At your age the love of pleasures is extremely natural, and the enjoyment of them not unbecoming:  but the danger, at your age, is mistaking the object, and setting out wrong in the pursuit.  The character of a man of pleasure dazzles young eyes; they do not see their way to it distinctly, and fall into vice and profligacy.  I remember a strong instance of this a great many years ago.  A young fellow, determined to shine as a man of pleasure, was at the play called the “Libertine Destroyed,” a translation of ‘Le Festin de Pierre’ of Molieire’s.  He was so struck with what he thought the fine character of the libertine, that he swore he would be the libertine destroyed. Some friends asked him, whether he had not better content himself with being only the libertine, but without being destroyed? to which he answered with great warmth, “No, for that being destroyed was the perfection of the whole.”  This, extravagant as it seems in this light, is really the case of many an unfortunate young fellow, who, captivated by the name of pleasures, rushes indiscriminately, and without taste, into them all, and is finally destroyed. I am not stoically advising, nor parsonically preaching to you to be a Stoic at your age; far from it:  I am pointing out to you the paths to pleasures, and am endeavoring only to quicken and heighten them for you.  Enjoy pleasures, but let them be your own, and then you will taste them; but adopt none; trust to nature for genuine ones.  The pleasures that you would feel you must earn; the man who gives himself up to all, feels none sensibly.  Sardanapalus, I am convinced, never felt any in his life.  Those only who join serious occupations with pleasures, feel either as they should do.  Alcibiades, though addicted to the most shameful excesses, gave some time to philosophy, and some to business.  Julius Caesar joined business with pleasure so properly, that they mutually assisted each other; and though he was the husband of all the wives at Rome, he found time to be one of the best scholars, almost the best orator, and absolutely the best general there.  An uninterrupted life of pleasures is as insipid as contemptible.  Some hours given every day to serious business must whet