St. Thomas’s day now draws near, when you are to leave Saxony and go to Berlin; and I take it for granted, that if anything is yet wanting to complete your knowledge of the state of that electorate, you will not fail to procure it before you go away.  I do not mean, as you will easily believe, the number of churches, parishes, or towns; but I mean the constitution, the revenues, the troops, and the trade of that electorate.  A few questions, sensibly asked, of sensible people, will produce you the necessary informations; which I desire you will enter in your little book, Berlin will be entirely a new scene to you, and I look upon it, in a manner, as your first step into the great world; take care that step be not a false one, and that you do not stumble at the threshold.  You will there be in more company than you have yet been; manners and attentions will therefore be more necessary.  Pleasing in company is the only way of being pleased in it yourself.  Sense and knowledge are the first and necessary foundations for pleasing in company; but they will by no means do alone, and they will never be perfectly welcome if they are not accompanied with manners and attentions.  You will best acquire these by frequenting the companies of people of fashion; but then you must resolve to acquire them, in those companies, by proper care and observation; for I have known people, who, though they have frequented good company all their lifetime, have done it in so inattentive and unobserving a manner, as to be never the better for it, and to remain as disagreeable, as awkward, and as vulgar, as if they had never seen any person of fashion.  When you go into good company (by good company is meant the people of the first fashion of the place) observe carefully their turn, their manners, their address; and conform your own to them.  But this is not all neither; go deeper still; observe their characters, and pray, as far as you can, into both their hearts and their heads.  Seek for their particular merit, their predominant passion, or their prevailing weakness; and you will then know what to bait your hook with to catch them.  Man is a composition of so many, and such various ingredients, that it requires both time and care to analyze him:  for though we have all the same ingredients in our general composition, as reason, will, passions, and appetites; yet the different proportions and combinations of them in each individual, produce that infinite variety of characters, which, in some particular or other, distinguishes every individual from another.  Reason ought to direct the whole, but seldom does.  And he who addresses himself singly to another man’s reason, without endeavoring to engage his heart in his interest also, is no more likely to succeed, than a man who should apply only to a king’s nominal minister, and neglect his favorite.  I will recommend to your attentive perusal, now that you are going into the world, two books, which will let you as much into