Now that you are to be soon a man of business, I heartily wish that you would immediately begin to be a man of method; nothing contributing more to facilitate and dispatch business, than method and order.  Have order and method in your accounts, in your reading, in the allotment of your time; in short, in everything.  You cannot conceive how much time you will save by it, nor how much better everything you do will be done.  The Duke of Marlborough did by no means spend, but he slatterned himself into that immense debt, which is not yet near paid off.  The hurry and confusion of the Duke of Newcastle do not proceed from his business, but from his want of method in it.  Sir Robert Walpole, who had ten times the business to do, was never seen in a hurry, because he always did it with method.  The head of a man who has business, and no method nor order, is properly that ‘rudis indigestaque moles quam dixere chaos’.  As you must be conscious that you are extremely negligent and slatternly, I hope you will resolve not to be so for the future.  Prevail with yourself, only to observe good method and order for one fortnight; and I will venture to assure you that you will never neglect them afterward, you will find such conveniency and advantage arising from them.  Method is the great advantage that lawyers have over other people, in speaking in parliament; for, as they must necessarily observe it in their pleadings in the courts of justice, it becomes habitual to them everywhere else.  Without making you a compliment, I can tell you with pleasure, that order, method, and more activity of mind, are all that you want, to make, some day or other, a considerable figure in business.  You have more useful knowledge, more discernment of characters, and much more discretion, than is common at your age; much more, I am sure, than I had at that age.  Experience you cannot yet have, and therefore trust in the meantime to mine.  I am an old traveler; am well acquainted with all the bye as well as the great roads; I cannot misguide you from ignorance, and you are very sure I shall not from design.

I can assure you, that you will have no opportunity of subscribing yourself my Excellency’s, etc.  Retirement and quiet were my choice some years ago, while I had all my senses, and health and spirits enough to carry on business; but now that I have lost my hearing, and that I find my constitution declining daily, they are become my necessary and only refuge.  I know myself (no common piece of knowledge, let me tell you), I know what I can, what I cannot, and consequently what I ought to do.  I ought not, and therefore will not, return to business when I am much less fit for it than I was when I quitted it.  Still less will I go to Ireland, where, from my deafness and infirmities, I must necessarily make a different figure from that which I once made there.  My pride would be too much mortified by that difference.  The two important senses of seeing and hearing should