I have lately received two volumes of treaties, in German and Latin, from Hawkins, with your orders, under your own hand, to take care of them for you, which orders I shall most dutifully and punctually obey, and they wait for you in my library, together with your great collection of rare books, which your Mamma sent me upon removing from her old house.

I hope you not only keep up, but improve in your German, for it will be of great use to you when you cone into business; and the more so, as you will be almost the only Englishman who either can speak or understand it.  Pray speak it constantly to all Germans, wherever you meet them, and you will meet multitudes of them at Paris.  Is Italian now become easy and familiar to you?  Can you speak it with the same fluency that you can speak German?  You cannot conceive what an advantage it will give you in negotiations to possess Italian, German, and French perfectly, so as to understand all the force and finesse of those three languages.  If two men of equal talents negotiate together, he who best understands the language in which the negotiation is carried on, will infallibly get the better of the other.  The signification and force of one single word is often of great consequence in a treaty, and even in a letter.

Remember the graces, for without them ‘ogni fatica e vana’.  Adieu.

LETTER CXIII

London, May 17, O. S. 1750

My dear friend:  Your apprenticeship is near out, and you are soon to set up for yourself; that approaching moment is a critical one for you, and an anxious one for me.  A tradesman who would succeed in his way, must begin by establishing a character of integrity and good manners; without the former, nobody will go to his shop at all; without the latter, nobody will go there twice.  This rule does not exclude the fair arts of trade.  He may sell his goods at the best price he can, within certain bounds.  He may avail himself of the humor, the whims, and the fantastical tastes of his customers; but what he warrants to be good must be really so, what he seriously asserts must be true, or his first fraudulent profits will soon end in a bankruptcy.  It is the same in higher life, and in the great business of the world.  A man who does not solidly establish, and really deserve, a character of truth, probity, good manners, and good morals, at his first setting out in the world, may impose, and shine like a meteor for a very short time, but will very soon vanish, and be extinguished with contempt.  People easily pardon, in young men, the common irregularities of the senses:  but they do not forgive the least vice of the heart.  The heart never grows better by age; I fear rather worse; always harder.  A young liar will be an old one; and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older.  But should a bad young heart, accompanied with a good