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 le 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.
