LETTER I
London, New Years’ Day, 1753
My dear friend:
It is now above a fortnight since I have received a
letter from you. I hope, however, that you are
well, but engrossed by the business of Lord Albemarle’s
‘bureau’ in the mornings, and by business
of a genteeler nature in the evenings; for I willingly
give up my own satisfaction to your improvement, either
in business or manners.
Here have been lately imported from
Paris two gentlemen, who, I find, were much acquainted
with you there Comte Zinzendorf, and Monsieur Clairant
the Academician. The former is a very pretty man,
well-bred, and with a great deal of useful knowledge;
for those two things are very consistent. I examined
him about you, thinking him a competent judge.
He told me, ’que vous parliez l’Allemand
comme un Allemand; que vous saviez
lé droit public de l’empire parfaitement
bien; que vous aviez lé gout
sur, et des connoissances fort étendues’.
I told him that I knew all this very well; but that
I wanted to know whether you had l’air, les manieres,
les attentions, en fin lé
brillant d’un honnête homme’:
his answer was, ‘Mais oui en
vérité, c’est fort bien’.
This, you see, is but cold in comparison of what I
do wish, and of what you ought to wish. Your friend
Clairant interposed, and said, ‘Mais je
vous assure qu’il est fort
poli’; to which I answered, ’Je
lé crois bien, vis-a-vis des
Lapons vos amis; je vous recuse
pour juge, jusqu’à ce que
vous ayez été delaponne, au moins
dix ans, parmi les honnêtes
gens’. These testimonies in your favor
are such as perhaps you are satisfied with, and think
sufficient; but I am not; they are only the cold depositions
of disinterested and unconcerned witnesses, upon a
strict examination. When, upon a trial, a man
calls witnesses to his character, and that those witnesses
only say that they never heard, nor do not know any
ill of him, it intimates at best a neutral and insignificant,
though innocent character. Now I want, and you
ought to endeavor, that ‘les agremens, les graces,
les attentions’, etc., should be a distinguishing
part of your character, and specified of you by people
unasked. I wish to hear people say of you, ’Ah
qu’il est aimable! Quelles
manieres, quelles graces, quel art de
Claire’! Nature, thank God, has given
you all the powers necessary; and if she has not yet,
I hope in God she will give you the will of exerting
them.
I have lately read with great pleasure
Voltaire’s two little histories of ‘Les
Croisades’, and ‘l’Esprit Humain’;
which I recommend to your perusal, if you have not
already read them. They are bound up with a most
poor performance called ‘Micromegas’, which
is said to be Voltaire’s too, but I cannot believe
it, it is so very unworthy of him; it consists only
of thoughts stolen from Swift, but miserably mangled
and disfigured. But his history of the ‘Croisades’
shows, in a very short and strong light, the
most immoral and wicked scheme that was ever contrived
by knaves, and executed by madmen and fools, against
humanity. There is a strange but never-failing
relation between honest madmen and skillful knaves;
and whenever one meets with collected numbers of the
former, one may be very sure that they are secretly
directed by the latter. The popes, who have generally
been both the ablest and the greatest knaves in Europe,
wanted all the power and money of the East; for they
had all that was in Europe already. The times
and the minds favored their design, for they were dark
and uniformed; and Peter the Hermit, at once a knave
and a madman, was a fine papal tool for so wild and
wicked an undertaking. I wish we had good histories
of every part of Europe, and indeed of the world, written
upon the plan of Voltaire’s ‘de l’Esprit
Humain’; for, I own, I am provoked at the contempt
which most historians show for humanity in general:
one would think by them that the whole human species
consisted but of about a hundred and fifty people,
called and dignified (commonly very undeservedly too)
by the titles of emperors, kings, popes, generals,
and ministers.
I have never seen in any of the newspapers
any mention of the affairs of the Cevennes, or Grenoble,
which you gave me an account of some time ago; and
the Duke de Mirepoix pretends, at least, to know nothing
of either. Were they false reports? or does the
French court choose to stifle them? I hope that
they are both true, because I am very willing that
the cares of the French government should be employed
and confined to themselves.
Your friend, the Electress Palatine,
has sent me six wild boars’ heads, and other
‘pieces de sa châsse’,
in return for the fans, which she approved of extremely.
This present was signified to me by one Mr. Harold,
who wrote me a letter in very indifferent English;
I suppose he is a Dane who has been in England.
Mr. Harte came to town yesterday,
and dined with me to-day. We talked you over;
and I can assure you, that though a parson, and no
member ’du beau monde’, he thinks all
the most shining accomplishments of it full as necessary
for you as I do. His expression was, that
is all that he wants; but
if he wants that, considering
his situation and destination,
he might as well want everything
else.
This is the day when people reciprocally
offer and receive the kindest and the warmest wishes,
though, in general, without meaning them on one side,
or believing them on the other. They are formed
by the head, in compliance with custom, though disavowed
by the heart, in consequence of nature. His wishes
upon this occasion are the best that are the best
turned; you do not, I am sure, doubt the truth of mine,
and therefore I will express them with a Quaker-like
simplicity. May this new year be a very new one
indeed to you; may you put off the old, and put on
the new man! but I mean the outward, not the inward
man. With this alteration, I might justly sum
up all my wishes for you in these words:
Dii tibi dent annos,
de to nam caetera sumes.
This minute, I receive your letter
of the 26th past, which gives me a very disagreeable
reason for your late silence. By the symptoms
which you mention of your illness, I both hope and
believe that it was wholly owing to your own want
of care. You are rather inclined to be fat, you
have naturally a good stomach, and you eat at the
best tables; which must of course make you plethoric:
and upon my word you will be very subject to these
accidents, if you will not, from time to time, when
you find yourself full, heated, or your head aching,
take some little, easy, preventative purge, that would
not confine you; such as chewing a little rhubarb
when you go to bed at night; or some senna tea in the
morning. You do very well to live extremely low,
for some time; and I could wish, though I do not expect
it, that you would take one gentle vomit; for those
giddinesses and swimmings in the head always proceed
from some foulness of the stomach. However, upon
the whole, I am very glad that your old complaint
has not mixed itself with this, which I am fully convinced
arises simply from your own negligence. Adieu.
I am sorry for Monsieur Kurze, upon his sister’s
account.
LETTER II
London, January 15, 1753
My dear friend:
I never think my time so well employed, as when I think
it employed to your advantage. You have long had
the greatest share of it; you now engross it.
The moment is now decisive; the piece is going to
be exhibited to the public; the mere out lines and
the general coloring are not sufficient to attract
the eyes and to secure applause; but the last finishing,
artful, and delicate strokes are necessary. Skillful
judges will discern and acknowledge their merit; the
ignorant will, without knowing why, feel their power.
In that view, I have thrown together, for your perusal,
some maxims; or, to speak more properly, observations
on men and things; for I have no merit as to the invention:
I am no system monger; and, instead of giving way to
my imagination, I have only consulted my memory; and
my conclusions are all drawn from facts, not from
fancy. Most maxim mongers have preferred the prettiness
to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth;
but I have refused myself to everything that my own
experience did not justify and confirm. I wish
you would consider them seriously, and separately,
and recur to them again ‘pro re nata’
in similar cases. Young men are as apt to think
themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think
themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit
to be a much better thing than experience; which they
call coldness. They are but half mistaken; for
though spirit, without experience, is dangerous, experience,
without spirit, is languid and defective. Their
union, which is very rare, is perfection; you may
join them, if you please; for all my experience is
at your service; and I do not desire one grain of
your spirit in return. Use them both, and let
them reciprocally animate and check each other.
I mean here, by the spirit of youth, only the vivacity
and presumption of youth, which hinder them from seeing
the difficulties or dangers of an undertaking, but
I do not mean what the silly vulgar call spirit, by
which they are captious, jealous of their rank, suspicious
of being undervalued, and tart (as they call it) in
their repartees, upon the slightest occasions.
This is an evil, and a very silly spirit, which should
be driven out, and transferred to an herd of swine.
This is not the spirit of a man of fashion, who has
kept good company. People of an ordinary, low
education, when they happen to fail into good company,
imagine themselves the only object of its attention;
if the company whispers, it is, to be sure, concerning
them; if they laugh, it is at them; and if anything
ambiguous, that by the most forced interpretation
can be applied to them, happens to be said, they are
convinced that it was meant at them; upon which they
grow out of countenance first, and then angry.
This mistake is very well ridiculed in the “Stratagem,”
where Scrub says, I am sure they talked
of me for they laughed consumedly.
A well-bred man seldom thinks, but never seems to
think himself slighted, undervalued, or laughed at
in company, unless where it is so plainly marked out,
that his honor obliges him to resent it in a proper
manner; ‘maïs les honnêtes gens
ne se boudent jamais’. I
will admit that it is very difficult to command one’s
self enough, to behave with ease, frankness, and good-breeding
toward those, who one knows dislike, slight, and injure
one, as far as they can, without personal consequences;
but I assert that it is absolutely necessary to do
it: you must embrace the man you hate, if you
cannot be justified in knocking him down; for otherwise
you avow the injury which you cannot revenge.
A prudent cuckold (and there are many such at Paris)
pockets his horns when he cannot gore with them; and
will not add to the triumph of his maker by only butting
with them ineffectually. A seeming ignorance
is very often a most necessary part of worldly knowledge.
It is, for instance, commonly advisable to seem ignorant
of what people offer to tell you; and when they say,
Have you not heard of such a thing? to answer No,
and to let them go on; though you know it already.
Some have a pleasure in telling it, because they think
that they tell it well; others have a pride in it,
as being the sagacious discoverers; and many have
a vanity in showing that they have been, though very
undeservedly, trusted; all these would be disappointed,
and consequently displeased, if you said Yes.
Seem always ignorant (unless to one’s most intimate
friend) of all matters of private scandal and defamation,
though you should hear them a thousand times; for
the parties affected always look upon the receiver
to be almost as bad as the thief: and, whenever
they become the topic of conversation seem to be a
skeptic, though you are really a serious believer;
and always take the extenuating part. But all
this seeming ignorance should be joined to thorough
and extensive private informations: and, indeed,
it is the best method of procuring them; for most
people have such a vanity in showing a superiority
over others, though but for a moment, and in the merest
trifles, that they will tell you what they should not,
rather than not show that they can tell what you did
not know; besides that such seeming ignorance will
make you pass for incurious and consequently undesigning.
However, fish for facts, and take pains to be well
informed of everything that passes; but fish judiciously,
and not always, nor indeed often, in the shape of
direct questions, which always put people upon their
guard, and, often repeated, grow tiresome. But
sometimes take the things that you would know for
granted; upon which somebody will, kindly and officiously,
set you right: sometimes say that you have heard
so and so; and at other times seem to know more than
you do, in order to know all that you want; but avoid
direct questioning as much as you can. All these
necessary arts of the world require constant attention,
presence of mind, and coolness. Achilles, though
invulnerable, never went to battle but completely
armed. Courts are to be the theatres of your wars,
where you should be always as completely armed, and
even with the addition of a heel-piece. The least
inattention, the least distraction, may prove
fatal. I would fain see you what pedants call
‘omnis homo’, and what Pope
much better calls all-accomplished:
you have the means in your power; add the will; and
you may bring it about. The vulgar have a coarse
saying, of spoiling A Ship for A halfpenny
worth of tar; prevent the application
by providing the tar: it is very easily to be
had in comparison with what you have already got.
The fine Mrs. Pitt, who it seems saw
you often at Paris, speaking of you the other day,
said, in French, for she speaks little English, . .
. whether it is that you did not pay the homage due
to her beauty, or that it did not strike you as it
does others, I cannot determine; but I hope she had
some other reason than truth for saying it. I
will suppose that you did not care a pin for her;
but, however, she surely deserved a degree of propitiatory
adoration from you, which I am afraid you neglected.
Had I been in your case, I should have endeavored,
at least, to have supplanted Mr. Mackay in his office
of nocturnal reader to her. I played at cards,
two days ago, with your friend Mrs. Fitzgerald, and
her most sublime mother, Mrs. Seagrave; they both
inquired after you; and Mrs. Fitzgerald said, she
hoped you went on with your dancing; I said, Yes,
and that you assured me, you had made such considerable
improvements in it, that you had now learned to stand
still, and even upright. Your ‘virtuosa’,
la Signora Vestri, sung here the other day, with great
applause: I presume you are intimately acquainted
with her merit. Good night to you, whoever you
pass it with.
I have this moment received a packet,
sealed with your seal, though not directed by your
hand, for Lady Hervey. No letter from you!
Are you not well?
LETTER III
London, May 27, O. .
My dear friend:
I have this day been tired, jaded, nay, tormented,
by the company of a most worthy, sensible, and learned
man, a near relation of mine, who dined and passed
the evening with me. This seems a paradox, but
is a plain truth; he has no knowledge of the world,
no manners, no address; far from talking without book,
as is commonly said of people who talk sillily, he
only talks by book; which in general conversation is
ten times worse. He has formed in his own closet
from books, certain systems of everything, argues
tenaciously upon those principles, and is both surprised
and angry at whatever deviates from them. His
theories are good, but, unfortunately, are all impracticable.
Why? because he has only read and not conversed.
He is acquainted with books, and an absolute stranger
to men. Laboring with his matter, he is delivered
of it with pangs; he hesitates, stops in his utterance,
and always expresses himself inelegantly. His
actions are all ungraceful; so that, with all his merit
and knowledge, I would rather converse six hours with
the most frivolous tittle-tattle woman who knew something
of the world, than with him. The preposterous
notions of a systematical man who does not know the
world, tire the patience of a man who does. It
would be endless to correct his mistakes, nor would
he take it kindly: for he has considered everything
deliberately, and is very sure that he is in the right.
Impropriety is a characteristic, and a never-failing
one, of these people. Regardless, because ignorant,
of customs and manners, they violate them every moment.
They often shock, though they never mean to offend:
never attending either to the general character, or
the particular distinguishing circumstances of the
people to whom, or before whom they talk; whereas
the knowledge of the world teaches one, that the very
same things which are exceedingly right and proper
in one company, time and place, are exceedingly absurd
in others. In short, a man who has great knowledge,
from experience and observation, of the characters,
customs, and manners of mankind, is a being as different
from, and as superior to, a man of mere book and systematical
knowledge, as a well-managed horse is to an ass.
Study, therefore, cultivate, and frequent men and women;
not only in their outward, and consequently, guarded,
but in their interior, domestic, and consequently
less disguised, characters and manners. Take
your notions of things, as by observation and experience
you find they really are, and not as you read that
they are or should be; for they never are quite what
they should be. For this purpose do not content
yourself with general and common acquaintance; but
wherever you can, establish yourself, with a kind
of domestic familiarity, in good houses. For
instance, go again to Orli, for two or three days,
and so at two or three ‘reprises’.
Go and stay two or three days at a time at Versailles,
and improve and extend the acquaintance you have there.
Be at home at St. Cloud; and, whenever any private
person of fashion invites you to, pass a few days
at his country-house, accept of the invitation.
This will necessarily give you a versatility of mind,
and a facility to adopt various manners and customs;
for everybody desires to please those in whose house
they are; and people are only to be pleased in their
own way. Nothing is more engaging than a cheerful
and easy conformity to people’s particular manners,
habits, and even weaknesses; nothing (to use a vulgar
expression) should come amiss to a young fellow.
He should be, for good purposes, what Alcibiades was
commonly for bad ones, a Proteus, assuming with ease,
and wearing with cheerfulness, any shape. Heat,
cold, luxury, abstinence, gravity, gayety, ceremony,
easiness, learning, trifling, business, and pleasure,
are modes which he should be able to take, lay aside,
or change occasionally, with as much ease as he would
take or lay aside his hat. All this is only to
be acquired by use and knowledge of the world, by
keeping a great deal of company, analyzing every character,
and insinuating yourself into the familiarity of various
acquaintance. A right, a generous ambition to
make a figure in the world, necessarily gives the
desire of pleasing; the desire of pleasing points out,
to a great degree, the means of doing it; and the
art of pleasing is, in truth, the art of rising, of
distinguishing one’s self, of making a figure
and a fortune in the world. But without pleasing,
without the graces, as I have told you a thousand
times, ‘ogni fatica e vana’.
You are now but nineteen, an age at which most of
your countrymen are illiberally getting drunk in port,
at the university. You have greatly got the start
of them in learning; and if you can equally get the
start of them in the knowledge and manners of the
world, you may be very sure of outrunning them in
court and parliament, as you set out much earlier
than they. They generally begin but to see the
world at one-and-twenty; you will by that age have
seen all Europe. They set out upon their travels
unlicked cubs: and in their travels they only
lick one another, for they seldom go into any other
company. They know nothing but the English world,
and the worst part of that too, and generally very
little of any but the English language; and they come
home, at three or four-and-twenty, refined and polished
(as is said in one of Congreve’s plays) like
Dutch skippers from a whale-fishing. The care
which has been taken of you, and (to do you justice)
the care that you have taken of yourself, has left
you, at the age of nineteen only, nothing to acquire
but the knowledge of the world, manners, address, and
those exterior accomplishments. But they are
great and necessary acquisitions, to those who have
sense enough to know their true value; and your getting
them before you are one-and-twenty, and before you
enter upon the active and shining scene of life, will
give you such an advantage over all your contemporaries,
that they cannot overtake you: they must be distanced.
You may probably be placed about a young prince, who
will probably be a young king. There all the
various arts of pleasing, the engaging address, the
versatility of manners, the brillant, the graces,
will outweigh, and yet outrun all solid knowledge
and unpolished merit. Oil yourself, therefore,
and be both supple and shining, for that race, if you
would be first, or early at the goal. Ladies
will most probably too have something to say there;
and those who are best with them will probably be best
somewhere else. Labor this great point,
my dear child, indefatigably; attend to the very smallest
parts, the minutest graces, the most trifling circumstances,
that can possibly concur in forming the shining character
of a complete gentleman, ‘un galant homme,
un homme de cour’, a man
of business and pleasure; ’estime des
hommes, recherche des femmes, aime
de tout lé monde’. In this
view, observe the shining part of every man of fashion,
who is liked and esteemed; attend to, and imitate that
particular accomplishment for which you hear him chiefly
celebrated and distinguished: then collect those
various parts, and make yourself a mosiac of the whole.
No one body possesses everything, and almost everybody
possesses some one thing worthy of imitation:
only choose your models well; and in order to do so,
choose by your ear more than by your eye. The
best model is always that which is most universally
allowed to be the best, though in strictness it may
possibly not be so. We must take most things
as they are, we cannot make them what we would, nor
often what they should be; and where moral duties
are not concerned, it is more prudent to follow than
to attempt to lead. Adieu.
LETTER IV
Bath, October 3, 1753
My dear friend:
You have set out well at The Hague; you are in love
with Madame Munter, which I am very glad of:
you are in the fine company there, and I hope one
of it: for it is not enough, at your age, to be
merely in good company; but you should, by your address
and attentions, make that good company think you one
of them. There is a tribute due to beauty, even
independently of further views; which tribute I hope
you paid with alacrity to Madame Munter and Madame
Degenfeldt: depend upon it, they expected it,
and were offended in proportion as that tribute seemed
either unwillingly or scantily paid. I believe
my friend Kreuningen admits nobody now to his table,
for fear of their communicating the plague to him,
or at least the bite of a mad dog. Pray profit
of the entrees libres that the French Ambassador
has given you; frequent him, and speak to him.
I think you will not do amiss to call upon Mr. Burrish,
at Aix-la-Chapelle, since it is so little out of your
way; and you will do still better, if you would, which
I know you will not, drink those waters for five or
six days only, to scour your stomach and bowels a
little; I am sure it would do you a great deal of good
Mr. Burrish can, doubtless, give you the best letters
to Munich; and he will naturally give you some to
Comte Preysing, or Comte Sinsheim, and such sort of
grave people; but I could wish that you would ask him
for some to young fellows of pleasure, or fashionable
coquettes, that, you may be ‘dans l’honnete
débauche de Munich’. A propos
of your future motions; I leave you in a great measure
the master of them, so shall only suggest my thoughts
to you upon that subject.
You have three electoral courts in
view, Bonn, Munich, and Manheim. I would advise
you to see two of them rather cursorily, and fix your
tabernacle at the third, whichever that may be, for
a considerable time. For instance, should you
choose (as I fancy you will), to make Manheim the
place of your residence, stay only ten or twelve days
at Bonn, and as long at Munich, and then go and fix
at Manheim; and so, vice versa, if you should like
Bonn or Munich better than you think you would Manheim,
make that the place of your residence, and only visit
the other two. It is certain that no man can
be much pleased himself, or please others much, in
any place where he is only a bird of passage for eight
or ten days; neither party thinking it worth while
to make an acquaintance, still less to form any connection,
for so short a time; but when months are the case,
a man may domesticate himself pretty well, and very
soon not be looked upon as a stranger. This is
the real utility of traveling, when, by contracting
a familiarity at any place, you get into the inside
of it, and see it in its undress. That is the
only way of knowing the customs, the manners, and
all the little characteristical peculiarities that
distinguish one place from another; but then this familiarity
is not to be brought about by cold, formal visits
of half an hour: no; you must show a willingness,
a desire, an impatience of forming connections, ’il
faut s’y prêter, et y mettre
du liant, du désir de plaire.
Whatever you do approve, you must be lavish in your
praises of; and you must learn to commend what you
do not approve of, if it is approved of there.
You are not much given to praise, I know; but it is
because you do not yet know how extremely people are
engaged by a seeming sanction to their own opinions,
prejudices, and weaknesses, even in the merest trifles.
Our self-love is mortified when we think our opinions,
and even our tastes, customs, and dresses, either
arraigned or condemned; as on the contrary, it is
tickled and flattered by approbation. I will give
you a remarkable instance of this kind. The famous
Earl of Shaftesbury, in the flagitious reign of Charles
the Second, while he was Chancellor, had a mind to
be a favorite, as well as a minister of the King;
in order, therefore, to please his Majesty, whose
prevailing passion was women, my Lord kept a w e,
whom he had no occasion for, and made no manner of
use of. The King soon heard of it, and asked
him if it was true; he owned it was; but that, though
he kept that one woman, he had several others besides,
for he loved variety. A few days afterward, the
King, at his public levee, saw Lord Shaftesbury at
some distance, and said in the circle, “One would
not think that that little, weak man is the greatest
whore-master in England; but I can assure you that
he is.” Upon Lord Shaftesbury’s coming
into the circle, there was a general smile; the King
said, “This is concerning you, my Lord.” “Me,
sir?” answered the Chancellor, with some surprise.
“Yes, you,” answered the King; “for
I had just said that you were the greatest whore-master
in England! Is it not true?” “Of
a subject, Sir,” replied Lord Shaftesbury,
“perhaps I am.” It is the same in
everything; we think a difference of opinion, of conduct,
of manners, a tacit reproach, at least, upon our own;
we must therefore use ourselves to a ready conformity
to whatever is neither criminal nor dishonorable.
Whoever differs from any general custom, is supposed
both to think, and proclaim himself wiser than the
rest of the world: which the rest of the world
cannot bear, especially in a young man. A young
fellow is always forgiven and often applauded, when
he carries a fashion to an excess; but never if he
stops short of it. The first is ascribed to youth
and fire; but the latter is imputed to an affectation
of singularity or superiority. At your age, one
is allowed to ‘outrer’ fashion, dress,
vivacity, gallantry, etc., but by no means to
be behindhand in any one of them. And one may
apply to youth in this case, ’Si non errasset,
fecerat ille minus’. Adieu.
LETTER V
Bath, October 19, 1753
My dear friend:
Of all the various ingredients that compose the useful
and necessary art of pleasing, no one is so effectual
and engaging as that gentleness, that ‘douceur’
of countenance and manner, to which you are no stranger,
though (God knows why) a sworn enemy. Other people
take great pains to conceal or disguise their natural
imperfections; some by the make of their clothes and
other arts, endeavor to conceal the defects of their
shape; women, who unfortunately have natural bad complexions,
lay on good ones; and both men and women upon whom
unkind nature has inflicted a surliness and ferocity
of countenance, do at least all they can, though often
without success, to soften and mitigate it; they affect
‘douceur’, and aim at smiles, though often
in the attempt, like the Devil in Milton, they grin
horribly A ghastly smile. But you
are the only person I ever knew in the whole course
of my life, who not only disdain, but absolutely reject
and disguise a great advantage that nature has kindly
granted. You easily guess I mean countenance;
for she has given you a very pleasing one; but you
beg to be excused, you will not accept it; but on
the contrary, take singular pains to put on the most
‘funeste’, forbidding, and unpleasing
one that can possibly be imagined. This one would
think impossible; but you know it to be true.
If you imagine that it gives you a manly, thoughtful,
and decisive air, as some, though very few of your
countrymen do, you are most exceedingly mistaken;
for it is at best the air of a German corporal, part
of whose exercise is to look fierce, and to ‘blasemeer-op’.
You will say, perhaps, What, am I always to be studying
my countenance, in order to wear this ‘douceur’?
I answer, No; do it but for a fortnight, and you never
will have occasion to think of it more. Take
but half the pains to recover the countenance that
nature gave you, that you must have taken to disguise
and deform it as you have, and the business will be
done. Accustom your eyes to a certain softness,
of which they are very capable, and your face to smiles,
which become it more than most faces I know. Give
all your motions, too, an air of ‘douceur’,
which is directly the reverse of their present celerity
and rapidity. I wish you would adopt a little
of ’l’air du Couvent’
(you very well know what I mean) to a certain degree;
it has something extremely engaging; there is a mixture
of benevolence, affection, and unction in it; it is
frequently really sincere, but is almost always thought
so, and consequently pleasing. Will you call this
trouble? It will not be half an hour’s trouble
to you in a week’s time. But suppose it
be, pray tell me, why did you give yourself the trouble
of learning to dance so well as you do? It is
neither a religious, moral, or civil duty. You
must own, that you did it then singly to please, and
you were, in the right on’t. Why do you
wear fine clothes, and curl your hair? Both are
troublesome; lank locks, and plain flimsy rags are
much easier. This then you also do in order to
please, and you do very right. But then, for
God’s sake, reason and act consequentially; and
endeavor to please in other things too, still more
essential; and without which the trouble you have
taken in those is wholly thrown away. You show
your dancing, perhaps six times a year, at most; but
you show your countenance and your common motions
every day, and all day. Which then, I appeal to
yourself, ought you to think of the most, and care
to render easy, graceful, and engaging? Douceur
of countenance and gesture can alone make them so.
You are by no means ill-natured; and would you then
most unjustly be reckoned so? Yet your common
countenance intimates, and would make anybody who
did not know you, believe it. ‘A propos’
of this, I must tell you what was said the other day
to a fine lady whom you know, who is very good-natured
in truth, but whose common countenance implies ill-nature,
even to brutality. It was Miss H n,
Lady M y’s niece, whom you have seen
both at Blackheath and at Lady Hervey’s.
Lady M y was saying to me that you had
a very engaging countenance when you had a mind to
it, but that you had not always that mind; upon which
Miss H n said, that she liked your
countenance best, when it was as glum as her own.
Why then, replied Lady M y, you two should
marry; for while you both wear your worst countenances,
nobody else will venture upon either of you; and they
call her now Mrs. Stanhope. To complete this ‘douceur’
of countenance and motions, which I so earnestly recommend
to you, you should carry it also to your expressions
and manner of thinking, ’mettez y toujours
de l’affectueux de l’onction’;
take the gentle, the favorable, the indulgent side
of most questions. I own that the manly and sublime
John Trott, your countryman, seldom does; but, to show
his spirit and decision, takes the rough and harsh
side, which he generally adorns with an oath, to seem
more formidable. This he only thinks fine; for
to do John justice, he is commonly as good-natured
as anybody. These are among the many little things
which you have not, and I have, lived long enough
in the world to know of what infinite consequence they
are in the course of life. Reason then, I repeat
it again, within yourself, consequentially; and
let not the pains you have taken, and still take, to
please in some things be a ‘pure perte’,
by your negligence of, and inattention to others of
much less trouble, and much more consequence.
I have been of late much engaged,
or rather bewildered, in Oriental history, particularly
that of the Jews, since the destruction of their temple,
and their dispersion by Titus; but the confusion and
uncertainty of the whole, and the monstrous extravagances
and falsehoods of the greatest part of it, disgusted
me extremely. Their Talmud, their Mischna, their
Targums, and other traditions and writings of their
Rabbins and Doctors, who were most of them Cabalists,
are really more extravagant and absurd, if possible,
than all that you have read in Comte de Gabalis; and
indeed most of his stuff is taken from them. Take
this sample of their nonsense, which is transmitted
in the writings of one of their most considerable
Rabbins: “One Abas Saul, a man of ten
feet high, was digging a grave, and happened to find
the eye of Goliah, in which he thought proper to bury
himself, and so he did, all but his head, which the
Giant’s eye was unfortunately not quite deep
enough to receive.” This, I assure you,
is the most modest lie of ten thousand. I have
also read the Turkish history which, excepting the
religious part, is not fabulous, though very possibly
not true. For the Turks, having no notion of letters
and being, even by their religion, forbid the use of
them, except for reading and transcribing the Koran,
they have no historians of their own, nor any authentic
records nor memorials for other historians to work
upon; so that what histories we have of that country
are written by foreigners; as Platina, Sir Paul Rycaut,
Prince Cantimer, etc., or else snatches only
of particular and short periods, by some who happened
to reside there at those times; such as Busbequius,
whom I have just finished. I like him, as far
as he goes, much the best of any of them: but
then his account is, properly, only an account of his
own Embassy, from the Emperor Charles the Fifth to
Solyman the Magnificent. However, there he gives,
episodically, the best account I know of the customs
and manners of the Turks, and of the nature of that
government, which is a most extraordinary one.
For, despotic as it always seems, and sometimes is,
it is in truth a military republic, and the real power
resides in the Janissaries; who sometimes order their
Sultan to strangle his Vizir, and sometimes the
Vizir to depose or strangle his Sultan, according
as they happen to be angry at the one or the other.
I own I am glad that the capital strangler should,
in his turn, be strangle-able, and now and
then strangled; for I know of no brute so fierce,
nor no criminal so guilty, as the creature called
a Sovereign, whether King, Sultan, or Sophy, who thinks
himself, either by divine or human right, vested with
an absolute power of destroying his fellow-creatures;
or who, without inquiring into his right, lawlessly
exerts that power. The most excusable of all those
human monsters are the Turks, whose religion teaches
them inevitable fatalism. A propos of the Turks,
my Loyola, I pretend, is superior to your Sultan.
Perhaps you think this impossible, and wonder who this
Loyola is. Know then, that I have had a Barbet
brought me from France, so exactly like the Sultan
that he has been mistaken for him several times; only
his snout is shorter, and his ears longer than the
Sultan’s. He has also the acquired knowledge
of the Sultan; and I am apt to think that he studied
under the same master at Paris. His habit and
his white band show him to be an ecclesiastic; and
his begging, which he does very earnestly, proves
him to be of a mendicant order; which, added to his
flattery and insinuation, make him supposed to be
a Jesuit, and have acquired him the name of Loyola.
I must not omit too, that when he breaks wind he smells
exactly like the Sultan.
I do not yet hear one jot the better
for all my bathings and pumpings, though I have been
here already full half my time; I consequently go very
little into company, being very little fit for any.
I hope you keep company enough for us both; you will
get more by that, than I shall by all my reading.
I read simply to amuse myself and fill up my time,
of which I have too much; but you have two much better
reasons for going into company, pleasure and profit.
May you find a great deal of both in a great deal
of company! Adieu.
LETTER VI
London, November 20, 1753
My dear friend:
Two mails are now due from Holland, so that I have
no letter from you to acknowledge; but that, you know,
by long experience, does not hinder my writing to
you. I always receive your letters with pleasure;
but I mean, and endeavor, that you should receive mine
with some profit; preferring always your advantage
to my own pleasure.
If you find yourself well settled
and naturalized at Manheim, stay there some time,
and do not leave a certain for an uncertain good; but
if you think you shall be as well, or better established
at Munich, go there as soon as you please; and if
disappointed, you can always return to Manheim I mentioned,
in a former letter, your passing the Carnival at Berlin,
which I think may be both useful and pleasing to you;
however, do as you will; but let me know what you
resolve: That King and that country have, and
will have, so great a share in the affairs of Europe,
that they are well worth being thoroughly known.
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 VII
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 châsses
brillantés et nombreuses des operas
où les acteurs se surpassent les
jours des Saints de L. L. A. A. E. E. sérénissimes
célèbres; 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.
Schannat’s “History of
the Palatinate” was, I find, written originally
in German, in which language I suppose it is that
you have read it; but, as I must humbly content myself
with the French translation, Vaillant has sent for
it for me from Holland, so that I have not yet read
it. While you are in the Palatinate, you do very
well to read everything relative to it; you will do
still better if you make that reading the foundation
of your inquiries into the more minute circumstances
and anecdotes of that country, whenever you are in
company with informed and knowing people.
The Ministers here, intimidated on
the absurd and groundless clamors of the mob, have,
very weakly in my mind, repealed, this session, the
bill which they had passed in the last for rendering
Jews capable of being naturalized by subsequent acts
of parliament. The clamorers triumph, and will
doubtless make further demands, which, if not granted,
this piece of complaisance will soon be forgotten.
Nothing is truer in politics, than this reflection
of the Cardinal de Retz, ’Que lé peuple
craint toujours quand on ne lé
craint pas’; and consequently they grow unreasonable
and insolent, when they find that they are feared.
Wise and honest governors will never, if they can
help it, give the people just cause to complain; but
then, on the other hand, they will firmly withstand
groundless clamor. Besides that this noise against
the Jew bill proceeds from that narrow mobspirit of
INTOLERATION in religious, and inhospitality in civil
matters; both which all wise governments should oppose.
The confusion in France increases
daily, as, no doubt, you are informed where you are.
There is an answer of the clergy to the remonstrances
of the parliament, lately published, which was sent
me by the last post from France, and which I would
have sent you, inclosed in this, were it not too bulky.
Very probably you may see it at Manheim, from the French
Minister: it is very well worth your reading,
being most artfully and plausibly written, though
founded upon false principles; the ’jus
divinum’ of the clergy, and consequently
their supremacy in all matters of faith and doctrine
are asserted; both which I absolutely deny. Were
those two points allowed the clergy of any country
whatsoever, they must necessarily govern that country
absolutely; everything being, directly or indirectly,
relative to faith or doctrine; and whoever is supposed
to have the power of saving and damning souls to all
eternity (which power the clergy pretend to), will
be much more considered, and better obeyed, than any
civil power that forms no pretensions beyond this world.
Whereas, in truth, the clergy in every country are,
like all other subjects, dependent upon the supreme
legislative power, and are appointed by that power
under whatever restrictions and limitations it pleases,
to keep up decency and decorum in the church, just
as constables are to keep peace in the parish.
This Fra Paolo has clearly proved, even upon
their own principles of the Old and New Testament,
in his book ‘de Beneficiis’, which I recommend
to you to read with attention; it is short. Adieu.
LETTER VIII
London, December 25, 1753
My dear friend:
Yesterday again I received two letters at once from
you, the one of the 7th, the other of the 15th, from
Manheim.
You never had in your life so good
a reason for not writing, either to me or to anybody
else, as your sore finger lately furnished you.
I believe it was painful, and I am glad it is cured;
but a sore finger, however painful, is a much less
evil than laziness, of either body or mind, and attended
by fewer ill consequences.
I am very glad to hear that you were
distinguished at the court of Manheim from the rest
of your countrymen and fellow-travelers: it is
a sign that you had better manners and address than
they; for take it for granted, the best-bred people
will always be the best received wherever they go.
Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie
is of commercial life; returns are equally expected
for both; and people will no more advance their civility
to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt. I
really both hope and believe, that the German courts
will do you a great deal of good; their ceremony and
restraint being the proper correctives and antidotes
for your negligence and inattention. I believe
they would not greatly relish your weltering in your
own laziness, and an easy chair; nor take it very
kindly, if, when they spoke to you or you to them,
you looked another way, as much as to say, kiss my
b h. As they give, so they
require attention; and, by the way, take this maxim
for an undoubted truth, That no young man can possibly
improve in any company, for which he has not respect
enough to be under some degree of restraint.
I dare not trust to Meyssonier’s
report of his Rhenish, his Burgundy not having answered
either his account or my expectations. I doubt,
as a wine merchant, he is the ‘perfidus
caupo’, whatever he may be as a banker.
I shall therefore venture upon none of his wine; but
delay making my provision of Old Hock, till I go abroad
myself next spring: as I told you in the utmost
secrecy, in my last, that I intend to do; and then
probably I may taste some that I like, and go upon
sure ground. There is commonly very good, both
at Aix-la-Chapelle and Liege, where I formerly got
some excellent, which I carried with me to Spa, where
I drank no other wine.
As my letters to you frequently miscarry,
I will repeat in this that part of my last which related
to your future motions. Whenever you shall be
tired of Berlin, go to Dresden; where Sir Charles Williams
will be, who will receive you with open arms.
He dined with me to-day, and sets out for Dresden
in about six weeks. He spoke of you with great
kindness and impatience to see you again. He
will trust and employ you in business (and he is now
in the whole secret of importance) till we fix our
place to meet in: which probably will be Spa.
Wherever you are, inform yourself minutely of, and
attend particularly to the affairs of France; they
grow serious, and in my opinion will grow more and
more so every day. The King is despised and I
do not wonder at it; but he has brought it about to
be hated at the same time, which seldom happens to
the same man. His ministers are known to be as
disunited as incapable; he hesitates between the Church
and the parliaments, like the ass in the fable, that
starved between two hampers of hay: too much
in love with his mistress to part with her, and too
much afraid of his soul to enjoy her; jealous of the
parliaments, who would support his authority; and a
devoted bigot to the Church, that would destroy it.
The people are poor, consequently discontented; those
who have religion, are divided in their notions of
it; which is saying that they hate one another.
The clergy never do forgive; much less will they forgive
the parliament; the parliament never will forgive
them. The army must, without doubt, take, in their
own minds at last, different parts in all these disputes,
which upon occasion would break out. Armies,
though always the supporters and tools of absolute
power for the time being, are always the destroyers
of it, too, by frequently changing the hands in which
they think proper to lodge it. This was the case
of the Praetorian bands, who deposed and murdered the
monsters they had raised to oppress mankind. The
Janissaries in turkey, and the regiments of guards
in Russia, do the same now. The French nation
reasons freely, which they never did before, upon matters
of religion and government, and begin to be ‘sprejiudicati’;
the officers do so too; in short, all the symptoms,
which I have ever met with in history previous to
great changes and revolutions in government, now exist,
and daily increase, in France. I am glad of it;
the rest of Europe will be the quieter, and have time
to recover. England, I am sure, wants rest, for
it wants men and money; the Republic of the United
Provinces wants both still more; the other Powers
cannot well dance, when neither France, nor the maritime
powers, can, as they used to do, pay the piper.
The first squabble in Europe, that I foresee, will
be about the Crown of Poland, should the present King
die: and therefore I wish his Majesty a long life
and a merry Christmas. So much for foreign politics;
but ‘a propos’ of them, pray take care,
while you are in those parts of Germany, to inform
yourself correctly of all the details, discussions,
and agreements, which the several wars, confiscations,
bans, and treaties, occasioned between the Bavarian
and Palatine Electorates; they are interesting and
curious.
I shall not, upon the occasion of
the approaching new year, repeat to you the wishes
which I continue to form for you; you know them all
already, and you know that it is absolutely in your
power to satisfy most of them. Among many other
wishes, this is my most earnest one: That you
would open the new year with a most solemn and devout
sacrifice to the Graces; who never reject those that
supplicate them with fervor; without them, let me
tell you, that your friend Dame Fortune will stand
you in little stead; may they all be your friends!
Adieu.
LETTER IX
London, January 15, 1754
My dear friend:
I have this moment received your letter of the 26th
past from Munich. Since you are got so well out
of the distress and dangers of your journey from Manheim,
I am glad that you were in them:
“Condisce
i diletti
Memorie
di pêne,
Ne
sa che sia bene
Chi
mal non soffrí.”
They were but little samples of the
much greater distress and dangers which you must expect
to meet within your great, and I hope, long journey
through life. In some parts of it, flowers are
scattered, with profusion, the road is smooth, and
the prospect pleasant: but in others (and I fear
the greater number) the road is rugged, beset with
thorns and briars, and cut by torrents. Gather
the flowers in your way; but, at the same time, guard
against the briars that are either mixed with them,
or that most certainly succeed them.
I thank you for your wild boar; who,
now he is dead, I assure him, ’se laissera
bien manger malgré qu’il
en ait’; though I am not so sure that
I should have had that personal valor which so successfully
distinguished you in single combat with him, which
made him bite the dust like Homer’s heroes,
and, to conclude my period sublimely, put him into
that Pickle, from which I propose eating him.
At the same time that I applaud your valor, I must
do justice to your modesty; which candidly admits that
you were not overmatched, and that your adversary
was about your own age and size. A Maracassin,
being under a year old, would have been below your
indignation. ‘Bête de compagne’,
being under two years old, was still, in my opinion,
below your glory; but I guess that your enemy was ‘un
Ragot’, that is, from two to three years
old; an age and size which, between man and boar,
answer pretty well to yours.
If accidents of bad roads or waters
do not detain you at Munich, I do not fancy that pleasures
will: and I rather believe you will seek for,
and find them, at the Carnival at Berlin; in which
supposition, I eventually direct this letter to your
banker there. While you are at Berlin (I earnestly
recommend it to you again and again) pray care
to see, hear, know, and mind, everything there.
The ablest prince in Europe
is surely an object that deserves attention; and the
least thing that he does, like the smallest sketches
of the greatest painters, has its value, and a considerable
one too.
Read with care the Code Frederick,
and inform yourself of the good effects of it in those
parts of, his dominions where it has taken place,
and where it has banished the former chicanes, quirks,
and quibbles of the old law. Do not think any
detail too minute or trifling for your inquiry and
observation. I wish that you could find one hour’s
leisure every day, to read some good Italian author,
and to converse in that language with our worthy friend
Signor Angelo Cori; it would both refresh and improve
your Italian, which, of the many languages you know,
I take to be that in which you are the least perfect;
but of which, too, you already know enough to make
yourself master of, with very little trouble, whenever
you please.
Live, dwell, and grow at the several
courts there; use them so much to your face, that
they may not look upon you as a stranger. Observe,
and take their ‘ton’, even to their affectations
and follies; for such there are, and perhaps should
be, at all courts. Stay, in all events, at Berlin,
till I inform you of Sir Charles Williams’s arrival
at Dresden; where I suppose you would not care to
be before him, and where you may go as soon after
him as ever you please. Your time there will neither
be unprofitably nor disagreeably spent; he will introduce
you into all the best company, though he can introduce
you to none so good as his own. He has of late
applied himself very seriously to foreign affairs,
especially those of Saxony and Poland; he knows them
perfectly well, and will tell you what he knows.
He always expresses, and I have good reason to believe
very sincerely, great kindness and affection for you.
The works of the late Lord Bolingbroke
are just published, and have plunged me into philosophical
studies; which hitherto I have not been much used
to, or delighted with; convinced of the futility of
those researches; but I have read his “Philosophical
Essay” upon the extent of human knowledge, which,
by the way, makes two large quartos and a half.
He there shows very clearly, and with most splendid
eloquence, what the human mind can and cannot do;
that our understandings are wisely calculated for
our place in this planet, and for the link which we
form in the universal chain of things; but that they
are by no means capable of that degree of knowledge,
which our curiosity makes us search after, and which
our vanity makes us often believe we arrive at.
I shall not recommend to you the reading of that work;
but, when you return hither, I shall recommend to
your frequent and diligent perusal all his tracts that
are relative to our history and constitution; upon
which he throws lights, and scatters graces, which
no other writer has ever done.
Reading, which was always a pleasure
to me, in the time even of my greatest dissipation,
is now become my only refuge; and, I fear, I indulge
it too much at the expense of my eyes. But what
can I do? I must do something; I cannot bear
absolute idleness; my ears grow every day more useless
to me, my eyes consequently more necessary; I will
not hoard them like a miser, but will rather risk
the loss, than not enjoy the use of them.
Pray let me know all the particulars,
not only of your reception at Munich, but also at
Berlin; at the latter, I believe, it will be a good
one; for his Prussian Majesty knows, that I have long
been an admirer and respecter
of his great and various talents.
Adieu.
LETTER X
London, February 1, 1754
My dear friend:
I received, yesterday, yours of the 12th, from Munich;
in consequence of which, I direct this to you there,
though I directed my three last to Berlin, where I
suppose you will find them at your arrival. Since
you are not only domesticated, but ‘niche’
at Munich, you are much in the right to stay there.
It is not by seeing places that one knows them, but
by familiar and daily conversations with the people
of fashion. I would not care to be in the place
of that prodigy of beauty, whom you are to drive
‘dans la course de Traineaux’;
and I am apt to think you are much more likely to
break her bones, than she is, though ever so cruel,
to break your heart. Nay, I am not sure but that,
according to all the rules of gallantry, you are obliged
to overturn her on purpose; in the first place, for
the chance of seeing her backside; in the next, for
the sake of the contrition and concern which it would
give you an opportunity of showing; and, lastly, upon
account of all the ’gentillesses et
épigrammes’, which it would naturally suggest.
Voiture has made several stanzas upon an accident
of that kind, which happened to a lady of his acquaintance.
There is a great deal of wit in them, rather too much;
for, according to the taste of those times, they are
full of what the Italians call ‘concetti
spiritosissimi’; the Spaniards ‘agudeze’;
and we, affectation and quaintness. I hope you
have endeavored to suit your ‘Traîneau’
to the character of the fair-one whom it is to contain.
If she is of an irascible, impetuous disposition (as
fine women can sometimes be), you will doubtless place
her in the body of a lion, a tiger, a dragon, or some
tremendous beast of prey and fury; if she is a sublime
and stately beauty, which I think more probable (for
unquestionably she is ’hogh gebohrne’),
you will, I suppose, provide a magnificent swan or
proud peacock for her reception; but if she is all
tenderness and softness, you have, to be sure, taken
care amorous doves and wanton sparrows should seem
to flutter round her. Proper mottos, I take it
for granted, that you have eventually prepared; but
if not, you may find a great many ready-made ones
in ’Les Entretiens d’Ariste et
d’Eugène, sur les Devises’, written by
Pere Bouhours, and worth your reading at any time.
I will not say to you, upon this occasion, like the
father in Ovid,
“Parce, puer,
stimulis, et fortius utere loris.”
On the contrary, drive on briskly;
it is not the chariot of the sun that you drive, but
you carry the sun in your chariot; consequently, the
faster it goes, the less it will be likely to scorch
or consume. This is Spanish enough, I am sure.
If this finds you still at Munich,
pray make many compliments from me to Mr. Burrish,
to whom I am very much obliged for all his kindness
to you; it is true, that while I had power I endeavored
to serve him; but it is as true too, that I served
many others more, who have neither returned nor remembered
those services.
I have been very ill this last fortnight,
of your old Carniolian complaint, the ‘arthritis
vaga’; luckily, it did not fall upon my
breast, but seized on my right arm; there it fixed
its seat of empire; but, as in all tyrannical governments,
the remotest parts felt their share of its severity.
Last post I was not able to hold a pen long enough
to write to you, and therefore desired Mr. Grevenkop
to do it for me; but that letter was directed to Berlin.
My pain is now much abated, though I have still some
fine remains of it in my shoulder, where I fear it
will tease me a great while. I must be careful
to take Horace’s advice, and consider well,
‘Quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent’.
Lady Chesterfield bids me make you
her compliments, and assure you that the music will
be much more welcome to her with you, than without
you.
In some of my last letters, which
were directed to, and will, I suppose, wait for you
at Berlin, I complimented you, and with justice, upon
your great improvement of late in the epistolary way,
both with regard to the style and the turn of your
letters; your four or five last to me have been very
good ones, and one that you wrote to Mr. Harte, upon
the new year, was so pretty a one, and he was so much
and so justly pleased with it, that he sent it me
from Windsor the instant he had read it. This
talent (and a most necessary one it is in the course
of life) is to be acquired by resolving, and taking
pains to acquire it; and, indeed, so is every talent
except poetry, which is undoubtedly a gift. Think,
therefore, night and day, of the turn, the purity,
the correctness, the perspicuity, and the elegance
of whatever you speak or write; take my word for it,
your labor will not be in vain, but greatly rewarded
by the harvest of praise and success which it will
bring you. Delicacy of turn, and elegance of
style, are ornaments as necessary to common sense,
as attentions, address, and fashionable manners, are
to common civility; both may subsist without them,
but then, without being of the least use to the owner.
The figure of a man is exactly the same in dirty rags,
or in the finest and best chosen clothes; but in which
of the two he is the most likely to please, and to
be received in good company, I leave to you to determine.
Both my arm and my paper hint to me,
to bid you good-night.
LETTER XI
London, February 12, 1754.
My dear friend:
I take my aim, and let off this letter at you at Berlin;
I should be sorry it missed you, because I believe
you will read it with as much pleasure as I write
it. It is to inform you, that, after some difficulties
and dangers, your seat in the new parliament is at
last absolutely secured, and that without opposition,
or the least necessity of your personal trouble or
appearance. This success, I must further inform
you, is in a great degree owing to Mr. Eliot’s
friendship to us both; for he brings you in with himself
at his surest borough. As it was impossible to
act with more zeal and friendship than Mr. Eliot has
acted in this whole affair, I desire that you will,
by the very next post, write him a letter of thanks,
warm and young thanks, not old and cold ones.
You may inclose it in yours to me, and, I will send
it to him, for he is now in Cornwall.
Thus, sure of being a senator, I dare
say you do not propose to be one of the ’pedarii
senatores, et pedibus ire in sententiam; for, as the
House of Commons is the theatre where you must make
your fortune and figure in the world, you must resolve
to be an actor, and not a ‘persona muta’,
which is just equivalent to a candle snuffer upon other
theatres. Whoever does not shine there, is obscure,
insignificant and contemptible; and you cannot conceive
how easy it is for a man of half your sense and knowledge
to shine there if he pleases. The receipt to make
a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and
easy. Take of common sense ’quantum
sufcit’, add a little application to the rules
and orders of the House, throw obvious thoughts in
a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity
of purity, correctness, and elegance of style.
Take it for granted, that by far the greatest part
of mankind do neither analyze nor search to the bottom;
they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the
surface. All have senses to be gratified, very
few have reason to be applied to. Graceful utterance
and action please their eyes, elegant diction tickles
their ears; but strong reason would be thrown away
upon them. I am not only persuaded by theory,
but convinced by my experience, that (supposing a
certain degree of common sense) what is called a good
speaker is as much a mechanic as a good shoemaker;
and that the two trades are equally to be learned
by the same degree of application. Therefore,
for God’s sake, let this trade be the principal
object of your thoughts; never lose sight of it.
Attend minutely to your style, whatever language you
speak or write in; seek for the best words, and think
of the best turns. Whenever you doubt of the
propriety or elegance of any word, search the dictionary
or some good author for it, or inquire of somebody,
who is master of that language; and, in a little time,
propriety and elegance of diction will become so habitual
to you, that they will cost you no more trouble.
As I have laid this down to be mechanical and attainable
by whoever will take the necessary pains, there will
be no great vanity in my saying, that I saw the importance
of the object so early, and attended to it so young,
that it would now cost me more trouble to speak or
write ungrammatically, vulgarly, and inelegantly,
than ever it did to avoid doing so. The late Lord
Bolingbroke, without the least trouble, talked all
day long, full as elegantly as he wrote. Why?
Not by a peculiar gift from heaven; but, as he has
often told me himself, by an early and constant attention
to his style. The present Solicitor-General,
Murray, [Created Lord Mansfield in the year
1756.] has less law than many lawyers, but
has more practice than any; merely upon account of
his eloquence, of which he has a never-failing stream.
I remember so long ago as when I was at Cambridge,
whenever I read pieces of eloquence (and indeed they
were my chief study) whether ancient or modern, I
used to write down the shining passages, and then
translate them, as well and as elegantly as ever I
could; if Latin or French, into English; if English,
into French. This, which I practiced for some
years, not only improved and formed my style, but imprinted
in my mind and memory the best thoughts of the best
authors. The trouble was little, but the advantage
I have experienced was great. While you are abroad,
you can neither have time nor opportunity to read pieces
of English or parliamentary eloquence, as I hope you
will carefully do when you return; but, in the meantime,
whenever pieces of French eloquence come in your way,
such as the speeches of persons received into the
Academy, ‘orasions funèbres’, representations
of the several parliaments to the King, etc.,
read them in that view, in that spirit; observe the
harmony, the turn and elegance of the style; examine
in what you think it might have been better; and consider
in what, had you written it yourself; you might have
done worse. Compare the different manners of
expressing the same thoughts in different authors;
and observe how differently the same things appear
in different dresses. Vulgar, coarse, and ill-chosen
words, will deform and degrade the best thoughts as
much as rags and dirt will the best figure. In
short, you now know your object; pursue it steadily,
and have no digressions that are not relative to,
and connected with, the main action. Your success
in parliament will effectually remove all other
objections; either a foreign or a domestic destination
will no longer be refused you, if you make your way
to it through Westminster.
I think I may now say, that I am quite
recovered from my late illness, strength and spirits
excepted, which are not yet restored. Aix-la-Chapelle
and Spa will, I believe, answer all my purposes.
I long to hear an account of your
reception at Berlin, which I fancy will be a most
gracious one. Adieu.
LETTER XII
London, February 15, 1754
My dear friend:
I can now with great truth apply your own motto to
you, ‘Nullum numen abest, si sit Prudentia’.
You are sure of being, as early as your age will permit,
a member of that House; which is the only road to
figure and fortune in this country. Those, indeed,
who are bred up to, and distinguish themselves in
particular professions, as the army, the navy, and
the law, may, by their own merit, raise themselves
to a certain degree; but you may observe too, that
they never get to the top, without the assistance
of parliamentary talents and influence. The means
of distinguishing yourself in parliament are, as I
told you in my last, much more easily attained than
I believe you imagine. Close attendance to the
business of the House will soon give you the parliamentary
routine; and strict attention to your style will soon
make you, not only a speaker, but a good one.
The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine
speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and
endowed with some peculiar gift of heaven; they stare
at him, if he walks in the Park, and cry, that
is he. You will, I am sure, view him
in a juster light, and ‘nulla formidine’.
You will consider him only as a man of good sense,
who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution,
and the elegance of style. The miracle will then
cease; and you will be convinced, that with the same
application, and attention to the same objects, you
may most certainly equal, and perhaps surpass, this
prodigy. Sir W----Y-------, with not a quarter
of your parts, and not a thousandth part of your knowledge,
has, by a glibness of tongue simply, raised him successively
to the best employments of the kingdom; he has been
Lord of the Admiralty, Lord of the Treasury, Secretary
at War, and is now Vice-Treasurer of Ireland; and
all this with a most sullied, not to say blasted character.
Represent the thing to yourself, as it really is,
easily attainable, and you will find it so. Have
but ambition enough passionately to desire the object,
and spirit enough to use the means, and I will be
answerable for your success. When I was younger
than you are, I resolved within myself that I would
in all events be a speaker in parliament, and a good
one too, if I could. I consequently never lost
sight of that object, and never neglected any of the
means that I thought led to it. I succeeded to
a certain degree; and, I assure you, with great ease,
and without superior talents. Young people are
very apt to overrate both men and things, from not
being enough acquainted with them. In proportion
as you come to know them better, you will value them
less. You will find that reason, which always
ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions
and weaknesses commonly usurp its seat, and rule in
its stead. You will find that the ablest have
their weak sides too, and are only comparatively able,
with regard to the still weaker herd: having
fewer weaknesses themselves, they are able to avail
themselves of the innumerable ones of the generality
of mankind: being more masters of themselves,
they become more easily masters of others. They
address themselves to their weaknesses, their senses,
their passions; never to their reason; and consequently
seldom fail of success. But then analyze those
great, those governing, and, as the vulgar imagine,
those perfect characters, and you will find the great
Brutus a thief in Macedonia, the great Cardinal Richelieu
a jealous poetaster, and the great Duke of Marlborough
a miser. Till you come to know mankind by your
own experience, I know no thing, nor no man, that
can in the meantime bring you so well acquainted with
them as lé Duc de la Rochefoucault:
his little book of “Maxims,” which I would
advise you to look into, for some moments at least,
every day of your life, is, I fear, too like, and too
exact a picture of human nature.
I own, it seems to degrade it; but
yet my experience does not convince me that it degrades
it unjustly.
Now, to bring all this home to my
first point. All these considerations should
not only invite you to attempt to make a figure in
parliament, but encourage you to hope that you shall
succeed. To govern mankind, one must not overrate
them: and to please an audience, as a speaker,
one must not overvalue it. When I first came
into the House of Commons, I respected that assembly
as a venerable one; and felt a certain awe upon me,
but, upon better acquaintance, that awe soon vanished;
and I discovered, that, of the five hundred and sixty,
not above thirty could understand reason, and that
all the rest were ‘peuple’; that those
thirty only required plain common sense, dressed up
in good language; and that all the others only required
flowing and harmonious periods, whether they conveyed
any meaning or not; having ears to hear, but not sense
enough to judge. These considerations made me
speak with little concern the first time, with less
the second, and with none at all the third. I
gave myself no further trouble about anything, except
my elocution, and my style; presuming, without much
vanity, that I had common sense sufficient not to talk
nonsense. Fix these three truths strongly in your
mind: First, that it is absolutely necessary
for you to speak in parliament; secondly, that it
only requires a little human attention, and no supernatural
gifts; and, thirdly, that you have all the reason
in the world to think that you shall speak well.
When we meet, this shall be the principal subject of
our conversations; and, if you will follow my advice,
I will answer for your success.
Now from great things to little ones;
the transition is to me easy, because nothing seems
little to me that can be of any use to you. I
hope you take great care of your mouth and teeth,
and that you clean them well every morning with a
sponge and tepid water, with a few drops of arquebusade
water dropped into it; besides washing your mouth carefully
after every meal, I do insist upon your never using
those sticks, or any hard substance whatsoever, which
always rub away the gums, and destroy the varnish
of the teeth. I speak this from woeful experience;
for my negligence of my teeth, when I was younger
than you are, made them bad; and afterward, my desire
to have them look better, made me use sticks, irons,
etc., which totally destroyed them; so that I
have not now above six or seven left. I lost
one this morning, which suggested this advice to you.
I have received the tremendous wild
boar, which your still more tremendous arm slew in
the immense deserts of the Palatinate; but have not
yet tasted of it, as it is hitherto above my low regimen.
The late King of Prussia, whenever he killed any number
of wild boars, used to oblige the Jews to buy them,
at a high price, though they could eat none of them;
so they defrayed the expense of his hunting. His
son has juster rules of government, as the Code Frederick
plainly shows.
I hope, that, by this time, you are
as well ‘ancre’ at Berlin as you was
at Munich; but, if not, you are sure of being so at
Dresden. Adieu.
LETTER XIII
London, February 26, 1754.
My dear friend:
I have received your letters of the 4th, from Munich,
and of the 11th from Ratisbon; but I have not received
that of the 31st January, to which you refer in the
former. It is to this negligence and uncertainty
of the post, that you owe your accidents between Munich
and Ratisbon: for, had you received my letters
regularly, you would have received one from me before
you left Munich, in which I advised you to stay, since
you were so well there. But, at all events, you
were in the wrong to set out from Munich in such weather
and such roads; since you could never imagine that
I had set my heart so much upon your going to Berlin,
as to venture your being buried in the snow for it.
Upon the whole, considering all you are very well
off. You do very well, in my mind, to return
to Munich, or at least to keep within the circle of
Munich, Ratisbon, and Manheim, till the weather and
the roads are good: stay at each or any of those
places as long as ever you please; for I am extremely
indifferent about your going to Berlin.
As to our meeting, I will tell you
my plan, and you may form your own accordingly.
I propose setting out from hence the last week in April,
then drinking the Aix-la-Chapelle waters for a week,
and from thence being at Spa about the 15th of May,
where I shall stay two months at most, and then return
straight to England. As I both hope and believe
that there will be no mortal at Spa during my residence
there, the fashionable season not beginning till the
middle of July, I would by no means have you come
there at first, to be locked up with me and some few
Capucins, for two months, in that miserable hole; but
I would advise you to stay where you like best, till
about the first week in July, and then to come and
pick me up at Spa, or meet me upon the road at Liege
or Brussels. As for the intermediate time, should
you be weary of Manheim and Munich, you may, if you
please, go to Dresden, to Sir Charles Williams, who
will be there before that time; or you may come for
a month or six weeks to The Hague; or, in short, go
or stay wherever you like best. So much for your
motions.
As you have sent for all the letters
directed to you at Berlin, you will receive from thence
volumes of mine, among which you will easily perceive
that some were calculated for a supposed perusal previous
to your opening them. I will not repeat anything
contained in them, excepting that I desire you will
send me a warm and cordial letter of thanks for Mr.
Eliot; who has, in the most friendly manner imaginable,
fixed you at his own borough of Liskeard, where you
will be elected jointly with him, without the least
opposition or difficulty. I will forward that
letter to him into Cornwall, where he now is.
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
not only be good, but quick, in business; and the business
of a Lord-lieutenant of Ireland (if he will do it himself)
requires both those senses in the highest perfection.
It was the Duke of Dorset’s not doing the business
himself, but giving it up to favorites, that has occasioned
all this confusion in Ireland; and it was my doing
the whole myself, without either Favorite, Minister,
or Mistress, that made my administration so smooth
and quiet. I remember, when I named the late Mr.
Liddel for my Secretary, everybody was much surprised
at it; and some of my friends represented to me, that
he was no man of business, but only a very genteel,
pretty young fellow; I assured them, and with truth,
that that was the very reason why I chose him; for
that I was resolved to do all the business myself,
and without even the suspicion of having a minister;
which the Lord-lieutenant’s Secretary, if he
is a man of business, is always supposed, and commonly
with reason, to be. Moreover, I look upon myself
now to be emeritus in business, in which I have been
near forty years together; I give it up to you:
apply yourself to it, as I have done, for forty years,
and then I consent to your leaving it for a philosophical
retirement among your friends and your books.
Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of
the gradations of their decay; and, too often sanguinely
hoping to shine on in their meridian, often set with
contempt and ridicule. I retired in time, ‘uti
conviva satur’; or, as Pope says still
better, Ere tittering youth shall
Shove you from the Stage.
My only remaining ambition is to be the counsellor
and minister of your rising ambition. Let me
see my own youth revived in you; let me be your Mentor,
and, with your parts and knowledge, I promise you,
you shall go far. You must bring, on your part,
activity and attention; and I will point out to you
the proper objects for them. I own I fear but
one thing for you, and that is what one has generally
the least reason to fear from one of your age; I mean
your laziness; which, if you indulge, will make you
stagnate in a contemptible obscurity all your life.
It will hinder you from doing anything that will deserve
to be written, or from writing anything that may deserve
to be read; and yet one or other of those two objects
should be at least aimed at by every rational being.
I look upon indolence as a sort of
suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed,
though the appetites of the brute may survive.
Business by no means forbids pleasures; on the contrary,
they reciprocally season each other; and I will venture
to affirm, that no man enjoys either in perfection,
that does not join both. They whet the desire
for each other. Use yourself, therefore, in time
to be alert and diligent in your little concerns;
never procrastinate, never put off till to-morrow what
you can do to-day; and never do two things at a time;
pursue your object, be it what it will, steadily and
indefatigably; and let any difficulties (if surmountable)
rather animate than slacken your endeavors. Perseverance
has surprising effects.
I wish you would use yourself to translate,
every day, only three or four lines, from any book,
in any language, into the correctest and most elegant
English that you can think of; you cannot imagine how
it will insensibly form your style, and give you an
habitual elegance; it would not take you up a quarter
of an hour in a day. This letter is so long,
that it will hardly leave you that quarter of an hour,
the day you receive it. So good-night.
LETTER XIV
London, March 8, 1754
My dear friend:
A great and unexpected event has lately happened in
our ministerial world. Mr. Pelham died last Monday
of a fever and mortification, occasioned by a general
corruption of his whole mass of blood, which had broke
out into sores in his back. I regret him as an
old acquaintance, a pretty near relation, and a private
man, with whom I have lived many years in a social
and friendly way. He meant well to the public;
and was incorrupt in a post where corruption is commonly
contagious. If he was no shining, enterprising
minister, he was a safe one, which I like better.
Very shining ministers, like the sun, are apt to scorch
when they shine the brightest: in our constitution,
I prefer the milder light of a less glaring minister.
His successor is not yet, at least publicly, ‘designatus’.
You will easily suppose that many are very willing,
and very few able, to fill that post. Various
persons are talked of, by different people, for it,
according as their interest prompts them to wish,
or their ignorance to conjecture. Mr. Fox is the
most talked of; he is strongly supported by the Duke
of Cumberland. Mr. Legge, the Solicitor-General,
and Dr. Lee, are likewise all spoken of, upon the foot
of the Duke of Newcastle’s, and the Chancellor’s
interest. Should it be any one of the last three,
I think no great alterations will ensue; but should
Mr. Fox prevail, it would, in my opinion, soon produce
changes by no means favorable to the Duke of Newcastle.
In the meantime, the wild conjectures of volunteer
politicians, and the ridiculous importance which,
upon these occasions, blockheads always endeavor to
give themselves, by grave looks, significant shrugs,
and insignificant whispers, are very entertaining
to a bystander, as, thank God, I now am. One
knows something, but is not yet at liberty
to tell it; another has heard something from a very
good hand; a third congratulates himself upon a certain
degree of intimacy, which he has long had with everyone
of the candidates, though perhaps he has never spoken
twice to anyone of them. In short, in these sort
of intervals, vanity, interest, and absurdity, always
display themselves in the most ridiculous light.
One who has been so long behind the scenes as I have
is much more diverted with the entertainment, than
those can be who only see it from the pit and boxes.
I know the whole machinery of the interior, and can
laugh the better at the silly wonder and wild conjectures
of the uninformed spectators. This accident,
I think, cannot in the least affect your election,
which is finally settled with your friend Mr. Eliot.
For, let who will prevail, I presume, he will consider
me enough, not to overturn an arrangement of that
sort, in which he cannot possibly be personally interested.
So pray go on with your parliamentary preparations.
Have that object always in your view, and pursue it
with attention.
I take it for granted that your late
residence in Germany has made you as perfect and correct
in German, as you were before in French, at least it
is worth your while to be so; because it is worth every
man’s while to be perfectly master of whatever
language he may ever have occasion to speak.
A man is not himself, in a language which he does not
thoroughly possess; his thoughts are degraded, when
inelegantly or imperfectly expressed; he is cramped
and confined, and consequently can never appear to
advantage. Examine and analyze those thoughts
that strike you the most, either in conversation or
in books; and you will find that they owe at least
half their merit to the turn and expression of them.
There is nothing truer than that old saying, ‘Nihil
dictum quod non prins dictum’. It is only
the manner of saying or writing it that makes it appear
new. Convince yourself that manner is almost
everything, in everything; and study it accordingly.
I am this moment informed, and I believe
truly, that Mr. Fox [Henry Fox, created
Lord Holland, Baron of Foxley, in the year 1763] is
to succeed Mr. Pelham as First Commissioner of the
Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer; and your
friend, Mr. Yorke, of The Hague, to succeed Mr. Fox
as Secretary at War. I am not sorry for this promotion
of Mr. Fox, as I have always been upon civil terms
with him, and found him ready to do me any little
services. He is frank and gentleman-like in his
manner: and, to a certain degree, I really believe
will be your friend upon my account; if you can afterward
make him yours, upon your own, ‘tan mieux’.
I have nothing more to say now but Adieu.
LETTER XV
London, March 15, 1754
My dear friend:
We are here in the midst of a second winter; the cold
is more severe, and the snow deeper, than they were
in the first. I presume, your weather in Germany
is not much more gentle and, therefore, I hope that
you are quietly and warmly fixed at some good town:
and will not risk a second burial in the snow, after
your late fortunate resurrection out of it. Your
letters, I suppose, have not been able to make their
way through the ice; for I have received none from
you since that of the 12th of February, from Ratisbon.
I am the more uneasy at this state of ignorance, because
I fear that you may have found some subsequent inconveniences
from your overturn, which you might not be aware of
at first.
The curtain of the political theatre
was partly drawn up the day before yesterday, and
exhibited a scene which the public in general did not
expect; the Duke of Newcastle was declared First Lord
Commissioner of the Treasury, Mr. Fox Secretary of
State in his room, and Mr. Henry Legge Chancellor
of the Exchequer: The employments of Treasurer
of the Navy, and Secretary at War, supposed to be
vacant by the promotion of Mr. Fox and Mr. Legge,
were to be kept ‘in petto’ till the
dissolution of this parliament, which will probably
be next week, to avoid the expense and trouble of
unnecessary re-elections; but it was generally supposed
that Colonel Yorke, of The Hague, was to succeed Mr.
Fox; and George Greenville, Mr. Legge. This scheme,
had it taken place, you are, I believe aware, was
more a temporary expedient, for securing the elections
of the new parliament, and forming it, at its first
meeting, to the interests and the inclinations of
the Duke of Newcastle and the Chancellor, than a plan
of administration either intended or wished to be
permanent. This scheme was disturbed yesterday:
Mr. Fox, who had sullenly accepted the seals the day
before, more sullenly refused them yesterday.
His object was to be First Commissioner of the Treasury,
and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and consequently
to have a share in the election of the new parliament,
and a much greater in the management of it when chosen.
This necessary consequence of his view defeated it;
and the Duke of Newcastle and the Chancellor chose
to kick him upstairs into the Secretaryship of State,
rather than trust him with either the election or
the management of the new parliament. In this,
considering their respective situations, they certainly
acted wisely; but whether Mr. Fox has done so, or
not, in refusing the seals, is a point which I cannot
determine. If he is, as I presume he is, animated
with revenge, and I believe would not be over scrupulous
in the means of gratifying it, I should have thought
he could have done it better, as Secretary of State,
with constant admission into the closet, than as a
private man at the head of an opposition. But
I see all these things at too great a distance to
be able to judge soundly of them. The true springs
and motives of political measures are confined within
a very narrow circle, and known to a very few; the
good reasons alleged are seldom the true ones:
The public commonly judges, or rather guesses, wrong,
and I am now one of that public. I therefore
recommend to you a prudent Pyrrhonism in all matters
of state, until you become one of the wheels of them
yourself, and consequently acquainted with the general
motion, at least, of the others; for as to all the
minute and secret springs, that contribute more or
less to the whole machine, no man living ever knows
them all, not even he who has the principal direction
of it. As in the human body, there are innumerable
little vessels and glands that have a good deal to
do, and yet escape the knowledge of the most skillful
anatomist; he will know more, indeed, than those who
only see the exterior of our bodies, but he will never
know all. This bustle, and these changes at court,
far from having disturbed the quiet and security of
your election, have, if possible, rather confirmed
them; for the Duke of Newcastle (I must do him justice)
has, in, the kindest manner imaginable to you, wrote
a letter to Mr. Eliot, to recommend to him the utmost
care of your election.
Though the plan of administration
is thus unsettled, mine, for my travels this summer,
is finally settled; and I now communicate it to you
that you may form your own upon it. I propose
being at Spa on the 10th or 12th of May, and staying
there till the 10th of July. As there will be
no mortal there during my stay, it would be both unpleasant
and unprofitable to you to be shut up tete-a-fête
with me the whole time; I should therefore think it
best for you not to come to me there till the last
week in June. In the meantime, I suppose, that
by the middle of April, you will think that you have
had enough of Manheim, Munich, or Ratisbon, and that
district. Where would you choose to go then?
For I leave you absolutely your choice. Would
you go to Dresden for a month or six weeks? That
is a good deal out of your way, and I am not sure
that Sir Charles will be there by that time.
Or would you rather take Bonn in your way, and pass
the time till we meet at The Hague? From Manheim
you may have a great many good letters of recommendation
to the court of Bonn; which court, and it’s
Elector, in one light or another, are worth your seeing.
From thence, your journey to The Hague
will be but a short one; and you would arrive there
at that season of the year when The Hague is, in my
mind, the most agreeable, smiling scene in Europe;
and from The Hague you would have but three very easy
days journey to me at Spa. Do as you like; for,
as I told you before, ‘Ella e assolutamente
padrone’. But lest you should answer that
you desire to be determined by me, I will eventually
tell you my opinion. I am rather inclined to the
latter plan; I mean that of your coming to Bonn, staying
there according as you like it, and then passing the
remainder of your time, that is May and June, at The
Hague. Our connection and transactions with the
Republic of the United Provinces are such, that you
cannot be too well acquainted with that constitution,
and with those people. You have established good
acquaintances there, and you have been ‘fetoie’
round by the foreign ministers; so that you will be
there ‘en pais connu’. Moreover,
you have not seen the Stadtholder, the ‘Gouvernante’,
nor the court there, which ‘a bon compte’
should be seen. Upon the whole, then, you cannot,
in my opinion, pass the months of May and June more
agreeably, or more usefully, than at The Hague.
But, however, if you have any other, plan that you
like better, pursue it: Only let me know what
you intend to do, and I shall most cheerfully agree
to it.
The parliament will be dissolved in
about ten days, and the writs for the election of
the new one issued out immediately afterward; so that,
by the end of next month, you may depend upon being
’Membre de la chambre basse’;
a title that sounds high in foreign countries, and
perhaps higher than it deserves. I hope you will
add a better title to it in your own, I mean that
of a good speaker in parliament: you have, I am
sure, all, the materials necessary for it, if you
will but put them together and adorn them. I
spoke in parliament the first month I was in it, and
a month before I was of age; and from the day I was
elected, till the day that I spoke. I am sure
I thought nor dreamed of nothing but speaking.
The first time, to say the truth, I spoke very indifferently
as to the matter; but it passed tolerably, in favor
of the spirit with which I uttered it, and the words
in which I had dressed it. I improved by degrees,
till at last it did tolerably well. The House,
it must be owned, is always extremely indulgent to
the two or three first attempts of a young speaker;
and if they find any degree of common sense in what
he says, they make great allowances for his inexperience,
and for the concern which they suppose him to be under.
I experienced that indulgence; for had I not been a
young member, I should certainly have been, as I own
I deserved, reprimanded by the House for some strong
and indiscreet things that I said. Adieu!
It is indeed high time.
LETTER XVI
London, March 26, 1754
My dear friend:
Yesterday I received your letter of the 15th from
Manheim, where I find you have been received in the
usual gracious manner; which I hope you return in
a graceful one. As this is a season of great
devotion and solemnity in all Catholic countries, pray
inform yourself of, and constantly attend to, all
their silly and pompous church ceremonies; one ought
to know them. I am very glad that you wrote the
letter to Lord------, which, in every different case
that can possibly be supposed, was, I am sure, both
a decent and a prudent step. You will find it
very difficult, whenever we meet, to convince me that
you could have any good reasons for not doing it;
for I will, for argument’s sake, suppose, what
I cannot in reality believe, that he has both said
and done the worst he could, of and by you; What then?
How will you help yourself? Are you in a situation
to hurt him? Certainly not; but he certainly is
in a situation to hurt you. Would you show a
sullen, pouting, impotent resentment? I hope
not; leave that silly, unavailing sort of resentment
to women, and men like them, who are always guided
by humor, never by reason and prudence. That
pettish, pouting conduct is a great deal too young,
and implies too little knowledge of the world, for
one who has seen so much of it as you have. Let
this be one invariable rule of your conduct, Never
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 honnête 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 ’Abrège 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 ’lé
style lé 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 a necessary evil, and preventive of greater
dangers. As to the latter, consider, how far places
may bias and warp the conduct of men, from the service
of their country, into an unwarrantable complaisance
to the court; and, on the other hand, consider whether
they can be supposed to have that effect upon the
conduct of people of probity and property, who are
more solidly interested in the permanent good of their
country, than they can be in an uncertain and precarious
employment. Seek for, and answer in your own mind,
all the arguments that can be urged on either side,
and write them down in an elegant style. This
will prepare you for debating, and give you an habitual
eloquence; for I would not give a farthing for a mere
holiday eloquence, displayed once or twice in a session,
in a set declamation, but I want an every-day, ready,
and habitual eloquence, to adorn extempore and debating
speeches; to make business not only clear but agreeable,
and to please even those whom you cannot inform, and
who do not desire to be informed. All this you
may acquire, and make habitual to you, with as little
trouble as it cost you to dance a minuet as well as
you do. You now dance it mechanically and well
without thinking of it.
I am surprised that you found but
one letter for me at Manheim, for you ought to have
found four or five; there are as many lying for you
at your banker’s at Berlin, which I wish you
had, because I always endeavored to put something
into them, which, I hope, may be of use to you.
When we meet at Spa, next July, we
must have a great many serious conversations; in which
I will pour out all my experience of the world, and
which, I hope, you will trust to, more than to your
own young notions of men and things. You will,
in time, discover most of them to have been erroneous;
and, if you follow them long, you will perceive your
error too late; but if you will be led by a guide,
who, you are sure, does not mean to mislead you, you
will unite two things, seldom united, in the same
person; the vivacity and spirit of youth, with the
caution and experience of age.
Last Saturday, Sir Thomas Robinson,
who had been the King’s Minister at Vienna,
was declared Secretary of State for the southern department,
Lord Holderness having taken the northern. Sir
Thomas accepted it unwillingly, and, as I hear, with
a promise that he shall not keep it long. Both
his health and spirits are bad, two very disqualifying
circumstances for that employment; yours, I hope,
will enable you, some time or other, to go through
with it. In all events, aim at it, and if you
fail or fall, let it at least be said of you, ‘Magnis
tamen excidit ausis’. Adieu.
LETTER XVII
London, April 5, 1754
My dear friend:
I received yesterday your letter of the 20th March,
from Manheim, with the inclosed for Mr. Eliot; it
was a very proper one, and I have forwarded it to
him by Mr. Harte, who sets out for Cornwall tomorrow
morning.
I am very glad that you use yourself
to translations; and I do not care of what, provided
you study the correctness and elegance of your style.
The “Life of Sextus Quintus”
is the best book of the innumerable books written
by Gregorio Leti, whom the Italians, very justly, call
’Leti caca libro’. But
I would rather that you chose some pieces of oratory
for your translations, whether ancient or modern,
Latin or French, which would give you a more oratorical
train of thoughts and turn of expression. In
your letter to me you make use of two words, which
though true and correct English, are, however, from
long disuse, become inelegant, and seem now to be
stiff, formal, and in some degree scriptural; the first
is the word namely, which you introduce thus,
you inform me of A very agreeable
piece of NEWS, namely, that my
election is secured. Instead of namely,
I would always use which is, or that
is, that my-election is secured. The other
word is, mine own inclinations:
this is certainly correct before a subsequent word
that begins with a vowel; but it is too correct, and
is now disused as too formal, notwithstanding the hiatus
occasioned by my own. Every language
has its peculiarities; they are established by usage,
and whether right or wrong, they must be complied
with. I could instance many very absurd ones in
different languages; but so authorized by the ‘jus
et norma loquendi’, that they must
be submitted to. Namely, and to wit,
are very good words in themselves, and contribute
to clearness more than the relatives which we now substitute
in their room; but, however, they cannot be used,
except in a sermon or some very grave and formal compositions.
It is with language as with manners they are both
established by the usage of people of fashion; it must
be imitated, it must be complied with. Singularity
is only pardonable in old age and retirement; I may
now be as singular as I please, but you may not.
We will, when we meet, discuss these and many other
points, provided you will give me attention and credit;
without both which it is to no purpose to advise either
you or anybody else.
I want to know your determination,
where you intend to (if I may use that expression)
while away your time till the last week in June,
when we are to meet at Spa; I continue rather in the
opinion which I mentioned to you formerly, in favor
of The Hague; but however, I have not the least objection
to Dresden, or to any other place that you may like
better. If you prefer the Dutch scheme, you take
Treves and Coblentz in your way, as also Dusseldorp:
all which places I think you have not yet seen.
At Manheim you may certainly get good letters of recommendation
to the courts of the two Electors of Treves and Cologne,
whom you are yet unacquainted with; and I should wish
you to know them all; for, as I have often told you,
‘olim haec meminisse juvabit’.
There is an utility in having seen what other people
have seen, and there is a justifiable pride in having
seen what others have not seen. In the former
case, you are equal to others; in the latter, superior.
As your stay abroad will not now be very long, pray,
while it lasts, see everything and everybody you can,
and see them well, with care and attention. It
is not to be conceived of what advantage it is to
anybody to have seen more things, people, and countries,
than other people in general have; it gives them a
credit, makes them referred to, and they become the
objects of the attention of the company. They
are not out in any part of polite conversation; they
are acquainted with all the places, customs, courts,
and families that are likely to be mentioned; they
are, as Monsieur de Maupertuis justly observes, ’de
tous les pays, comme les savans,
sont de tous les tems’.
You have, fortunately, both those advantages:
the only remaining point is ‘de savoir
les faire valoir’, for without
that one may as well not have them. Remember
that very true maxim of La Bruyere’s, ‘Qu’on
ne vaut dans se monde que
ce qu’on veut valoir’.
The knowledge of the world will teach you to what
degree you ought to show ’que vous
valez’. One must by no means, on one hand,
be indifferent about it; as, on the other, one must
not display it with affectation, and in an overbearing
manner, but, of the two, it is better to show too much
than too little. Adieu.
LETTER XVIII
Bath, November 27, 1754
My dear friend:
I heartily congratulate you upon the loss of your
political maidenhead, of which I have received from
others a very good account. I hear that you were
stopped for some time in your career; but recovered
breath, and finished it very well. I am not surprised,
nor indeed concerned, at your accident; for I remember
the dreadful feeling of that situation in myself;
and as it must require a most uncommon share of impudence
to be unconcerned upon such an occasion, I am not sure
that I am not rather glad you stopped. You must
therefore now think of hardening yourself by degrees,
by using yourself insensibly to the sound of your
own voice, and to the act (trifling as it seems) of
rising up and sitting down. Nothing will contribute
so much to this as committee work of elections at
night, and of private bills in the morning. There,
asking short questions, moving for witnesses to be
called in, and all that kind of small ware, will soon
fit you to set up for yourself. I am told that
you are much mortified at your accident, but without
reason; pray, let it rather be a spur than a curb
to you. Persevere, and, depend upon it, it will
do well at last. When I say persevere, I do not
mean that you should speak every day, nor in every
debate. Moreover, I would not advise you to speak
again upon public matters for some time, perhaps a
month or two; but I mean, never lose view of that
great object; pursue it with discretion, but pursue
it always. ‘Pelotez en attendant partie’.
You know I have always told you that speaking in public
was but a knack, which those who apply to the most
will succeed in the best. Two old members, very
good judges, have sent me compliments upon this occasion;
and have assured me that they plainly find it will
do; though they perceived, from that natural confusion
you were in, that you neither said all, nor perhaps
what you intended. Upon the whole, you have set
out very well, and have sufficient encouragement to
go on. Attend; therefore, assiduously, and observe
carefully all that passes in the House; for it is
only knowledge and experience that can make a debater.
But if you still want comfort, Mrs.-------I hope,
will administer it to you; for, in my opinion she
may, if she will, be very comfortable; and with women,
as with speaking in parliament, perseverance will
most certainly prevail sooner or later.
What little I have played for here,
I have won; but that is very far from the considerable
sum which you heard of. I play every evening,
from seven till ten, at a crown whist party, merely
to save my eyes from reading or writing for three
hours by candle-light. I propose being in town
the week after next, and hope to carry back with me
much more health than I brought down here. Good-night.