What is the common revenue of the electorate, one year with another?

What number of troops does the elector now maintain? and what is the greatest number that the electorate is able to maintain?

I do not expect to have all these questions answered at once; but you will answer them, in proportion as you get the necessary and authentic informations.

You are, you see, my German oracle; and I consult you with so much faith, that you need not, like the oracles of old, return ambiguous answers; especially as you have this advantage over them, too, that I only consult you about past end present, but not about what is to come.

I wish you a good Easter-fair at Leipsig.  See, with attention all the shops, drolls, tumblers, rope-dancers, and ‘hoc genus omne’:  but inform yourself more particularly of the several parts of trade there.  Adieu.

LETTER XXXIII

London, March 25, O. S. 1748.

Dear boy:  I am in great joy at the written and the verbal accounts which I have received lately of you.

The former, from Mr. Harte; the latter, from Mr. Trevanion, who is arrived here:  they conspire to convince me that you employ your time well at Leipsig.  I am glad to find you consult your own interest and your own pleasure so much; for the knowledge which you will acquire in these two years is equally necessary for both.  I am likewise particularly pleased to find that you turn yourself to that sort of knowledge which is more peculiarly necessary for your destination:  for Mr. Harte tells me you have read, with attention, Caillieres, Pequet, and Richelieu’s “Letters.”  The “Memoirs” of the Cardinal de Retz will both entertain and instruct you; they relate to a very interesting period of the French history, the ministry of Cardinal Mazarin, during the minority of Lewis XIV.  The characters of all the considerable people of that time are drawn, in a short, strong, and masterly manner; and the political reflections, which are most of them printed in italics, are the justest that ever I met with:  they are not the labored reflections of a systematical closet politician, who, without the least experience of business, sits at home and writes maxims; but they are the reflections which a great and able man formed from long experience and practice in great business.  They are true conclusions, drawn from facts, not from speculations.

As modern history is particularly your business, I will give you some rules to direct your study of it.  It begins, properly with Charlemagne, in the year 800.  But as, in those times of ignorance, the priests and monks were almost the only people that could or did write, we have scarcely any histories of those times but such as they have been pleased to give us, which are compounds of ignorance, superstition, and party zeal.  So that a general notion of what is rather supposed, than really known to be, the history