two objects, is, that they require nothing, but what one’s own vanity, interest, and pleasure, would make one do independently of them.  If a man were never to be in business, and always to lead a private life, would he not desire to please and to persuade?  So that, in your two destinations, your fortune and figure luckily conspire with your vanity and your pleasures.  Nay more; a foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too.  Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures; his views are carried on, and perhaps best and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.

These objects now draw very near you, and you have no time to lose in preparing yourself to meet them.  You will be in parliament almost as soon as your age will allow, and I believe you will have a foreign department still sooner, and that will be earlier than ever any other body had one.  If you set out well at one-and-twenty, what may you not reasonably hope to be at one-and-forty?  All that I could wish you!  Adieu.

LETTER CLXXIX

London, September 29, 1752.

My dear friend:  There is nothing so necessary, but at the same time there is nothing more difficult (I know it by experience) for you young fellows, than to know how to behave yourselves prudently toward those whom you do not like.  Your passions are warm, and your heads are light; you hate all those who oppose your views, either of ambition or love; and a rival, in either, is almost a synonymous term for an enemy.  Whenever you meet such a man, you are awkwardly cold to him, at best; but often rude, and always desirous to give him some indirect slap.  This is unreasonable; for one man has as good a right to pursue an employment, or a mistress, as another; but it is, into the bargain, extremely imprudent; because you commonly defeat your own purpose by it, and while you are contending with each other, a third often prevails.  I grant you that the situation is irksome; a man cannot help thinking as he thinks, nor feeling what he feels; and it is a very tender and sore point to be thwarted and counterworked in one’s pursuits at court, or with a mistress; but prudence and abilities must check the effects, though they cannot remove the cause.  Both the pretenders make themselves disagreeable to their mistress, when they spoil the company by their pouting, or their sparring; whereas, if one of them has command enough over himself (whatever he may feel inwardly) to be cheerful, gay, and easily and unaffectedly civil to the other, as if there were no manner of competition between them, the lady will certainly like him the best, and his rival will be ten times more humbled and discouraged; for he will look upon such a behavior