Dear boy:  As often as I write to you (and that you know is pretty often), so often I am in doubt whether it is to any purpose, and whether it is not labor and paper lost.  This entirely depends upon the degree of reason and reflection which you are master of, or think proper to exert.  If you give yourself time to think, and have sense enough to think right, two reflections must necessarily occur to you; the one is, that I have a great deal of experience, and that you have none:  the other is, that I am the only man living who cannot have, directly or indirectly, any interest concerning you, but your own.  From which two undeniable principles, the obvious and necessary conclusion is, that you ought, for your own sake, to attend to and follow my advice.

If, by the application which I recommend to you, you acquire great knowledge, you alone are the gainer; I pay for it.  If you should deserve either a good or a bad character, mine will be exactly what it is now, and will neither be the better in the first case, nor worse in the latter.  You alone will be the gainer or the loser.

Whatever your pleasures may be, I neither can nor shall envy you them, as old people are sometimes suspected by young people to do; and I shall only lament, if they should prove such as are unbecoming a man of honor, or below a man of sense.  But you will be the real sufferer, if they are such.  As therefore, it is plain that I can have no other motive than that of affection in whatever I say to you, you ought to look upon me as your best, and, for some years to come, your only friend.

True friendship requires certain proportions of age and manners, and can never subsist where they are extremely different, except in the relations of parent and child, where affection on one side, and regard on the other, make up the difference.  The friendship which you may contract with people of your own age may be sincere, may be warm; but must be, for some time, reciprocally unprofitable, as there can be no experience on either side.  The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; (they will both fall into the ditch.) The only sure guide is, he who has often gone the road which you want to go.  Let me be that guide; who have gone all roads, and who can consequently point out to you the best.  If you ask me why I went any of the bad roads myself, I will answer you very truly, That it was for want of a good guide:  ill example invited me one way, and a good guide was wanting to show me a better.  But if anybody, capable of advising me, had taken the same pains with me, which I have taken, and will continue to take with you, I should have avoided many follies and inconveniences, which undirected youth run me into.  My father was neither desirous nor able to advise me; which is what, I hope, you cannot say of yours.  You see that I make use, only of the word advice; because I would much rather have the assent of your reason to my advice, than the submission of your will to my, authority.  This, I persuade myself, will happen, from that degree of sense which I think you have; and therefore I will go on advising, and with hopes of success.