Whether, where you are now, or ever may be hereafter, you speak French, German, or English most, I earnestly recommend to you a particular attention to the propriety and elegance of your style; employ the best words you can find in the language, avoid cacophony, and make your periods as harmonious as you can.  I need not, I am sure, tell you what you must often have felt, how much the elegance of diction adorns the best thoughts, and palliates the worst.  In the House of Commons it is almost everything; and, indeed, in every assembly, whether public or private.  Words, which are the dress of thoughts, deserve surely more care than clothes, which are only the dress of the person, and which, however, ought to have their share of attention.  If you attend to your style in any one language, it will give you a habit of attending to it in every other; and if once you speak either French or German very elegantly, you will afterward speak much the better English for it.  I repeat it to you again, for at least the thousandth time, exert your whole attention now in acquiring the ornamental parts of character.  People know very little of the world, and talk nonsense, when they talk of plainness and solidity unadorned:  they will do in nothing; mankind has been long out of a state of nature, and the golden age of native simplicity will never return.  Whether for the better or the worse, no matter; but we are refined; and plain manners, plain dress, and plain diction, would as little do in life, as acorns, herbage, and the water of the neighboring spring, would do at table.  Some people are just come, who interrupt me in the middle of my sermon; so good-night.

LETTER CXCI

London, November 26, 1753

Dear friend:  Fine doings at Manheim!  If one may give credit to the weekly histories of Monsieur Roderigue, the finest writer among the moderns; not only ’des chasses brillantes et nombreuses des operas ou les acteurs se surpassent les jours des Saints de L. L. A. A. E. E. serenissimes celebres; en grand gala’; but to crown the whole, Monsieur Zuchmantel is happily arrived, and Monsieur Wartenslebeu hourly expected.  I hope that you are ‘pars magna’ of all these delights; though, as Noll Bluff says, in the “Old Bachelor,” That rascally gazetteer takes no more notice of you than if you were not in the land of the living.  I should think that he might at least have taken notice that in these rejoicings you appeared with a rejoicing, and not a gloomy countenance; and you distinguished yourself in that numerous and shining company, by your air, dress, address, and attentions.  If this was the case, as I will both hope and suppose it was, I will, if you require it, have him written to, to do you justice in his next ‘supplement’.  Seriously, I am very glad that you are whirled in that ‘tourbillon’ of pleasures; they smooth, polish, and rub off rough corners:  perhaps too, you have some particular collision, which is still more effectual.