to show the least symptom of resentment which you cannot to a certain degree gratify; but always to smile, where you cannot strike.  There would be no living in courts, nor indeed in the world if one could not conceal, and even dissemble, the just causes of resentment, which one meets with every day in active and busy life.  Whoever cannot master his humor enough, ‘pour faire bonne mine a mauvais jeu’, should leave the world, and retire to some hermitage, in an unfrequented desert.  By showing an unavailing and sullen resentment, you authorize the resentment of those who can hurt you and whom you cannot hurt; and give them that very pretense, which perhaps they wished for, of breaking with, and injuring you; whereas the contrary behavior would lay them under, the restraints of decency at least; and either shackle or expose their malice.  Besides, captiousness, sullenness, and pouting are most exceedingly illiberal and vulgar.  ’Un honnete homme ne les connoit point’.

I am extremely glad to hear that you are soon to have Voltaire at Manheim:  immediately upon his arrival, pray make him a thousand compliments from me.  I admire him most exceedingly; and, whether as an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet, or prose-writer, I think I justly apply to him the ‘Nil molitur inepte’.  I long to read his own correct edition of ‘Les Annales de l’Empire’, of which the ’Abrege Chronologique de l’Histoire Universelle’, which I have read, is, I suppose, a stolen and imperfect part; however, imperfect as it is, it has explained to me that chaos of history, of seven hundred years more clearly than any other book had done before.  You judge very rightly that I love ’le style le r et fleuri’.  I do, and so does everybody who has any parts and taste.  It should, I confess, be more or less ‘fleuri’, according to the subject; but at the same time I assert that there is no subject that may not properly, and which ought not to be adorned, by a certain elegance and beauty of style.  What can be more adorned than Cicero’s Philosophical Works?  What more than Plato’s?  It is their eloquence only that has preserved and transmitted them down to us through so many centuries; for the philosophy of them is wretched, and the reasoning part miserable.  But eloquence will always please, and has always pleased.  Study it therefore; make it the object of your thoughts and attention.  Use yourself to relate elegantly; that is a good step toward speaking well in parliament.  Take some political subject, turn it in your thoughts, consider what may be said both for and against it, then put those arguments into writing, in the most correct and elegant English you can.  For instance, a standing army, a place bill, etc.; as to the former, consider, on one side, the dangers arising to a free country from a great standing military force; on the other side, consider the necessity of a force to repel force with.  Examine whether a standing army, though in itself an evil, may not, from circumstances, become