DEAR BOY: As often as I write to you (and that you know is pretty often),
so often I am in doubt whether it is to any purpose, and whether it is
not labor and paper lost. This entirely depends upon the degree of reason
and reflection which you are master of, or think proper to exert. If you
give yourself time to think, and have sense enough to think right, two
reflections must necessarily occur to you; the one is, that I have a
great deal of experience, and that you have none: the other is, that I am
the only man living who cannot have, directly or indirectly, any interest
concerning you, but your own. From which two undeniable principles, the
obvious and necessary conclusion is, that you ought, for your own sake,
to attend to and follow my advice.
If, by the application which I recommend to you, you acquire great
knowledge, you alone are the gainer; I pay for it. If you should deserve
either a good or a bad character, mine will be exactly what it is now,
and will neither be the better in the first case, nor worse in the
latter. You alone will be the gainer or the loser.
Whatever your pleasures may be, I neither can nor shall envy you them, as
old people are sometimes suspected by young people to do; and I shall
only lament, if they should prove such as are unbecoming a man of honor,
or below a man of sense. But you will be the real sufferer, if they are
such. As therefore, it is plain that I can have no other motive than that
of affection in whatever I say to you, you ought to look upon me as your
best, and, for some years to come, your only friend.
True friendship requires certain proportions of age and manners, and can
never subsist where they are extremely different, except in the relations
of parent and child, where affection on one side, and regard on the
other, make up the difference. The friendship which you may contract with
people of your own age may be sincere, may be warm; but must be, for some
time, reciprocally unprofitable, as there can be no experience on either
side. The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind;
(they will both fall into the ditch.) The only sure guide is, he who has
often gone the road which you want to go. Let me be that guide; who have
gone all roads, and who can consequently point out to you the best. If
you ask me why I went any of the bad roads myself, I will answer you very
truly, That it was for want of a good guide: ill example invited me one
way, and a good guide was wanting to show me a better. But if anybody,
capable of advising me, had taken the same pains with me, which I have
taken, and will continue to take with you, I should have avoided many
follies and inconveniences, which undirected youth run me into. My father
was neither desirous nor able to advise me; which is what, I hope, you
cannot say of yours. You see that I make use, only of the word advice;
because I would much rather have the assent of your reason to my advice,
than the submission of your will to my authority. This, I persuade
myself, will happen, from that degree of sense which I think you have;
and therefore I will go on advising, and with hopes of success.
You are now settled for some time at Leipsig; the principal object of
your stay there is the knowledge of books and sciences; which if you do
not, by attention and application, make yourself master of while you are
there, you will be ignorant of them all the rest of your life; and, take
my word for it, a life of ignorance is not only a very contemptible, but
a very tiresome one. Redouble your attention, then, to Mr. Harte, in your
private studies of the ‘Literae Humaniores,’ especially Greek. State your
difficulties, whenever you have any; and do not suppress them, either
from mistaken shame, lazy indifference, or in order to have done the
sooner. Do the same when you are at lectures with Professor Mascow, or
any other professor; let nothing pass till you are sure that you
understand it thoroughly; and accustom yourself to write down the capital
points of what you learn. When you have thus usefully employed your
mornings, you may, with a safe conscience, divert yourself in the
evenings, and make those evenings very useful too, by passing them in
good company, and, by observation and attention, learning as much of the
world as Leipsig can teach you. You will observe and imitate the manners
of the people of the best fashion there; not that they are (it may be)
the best manners in the world; but because they are the best manners of
the place where you are, to which a man of sense always conforms. The
nature of things (as I have often told you) is always and everywhere the
same; but the modes of them vary more or less, in every country; and an
easy and genteel conformity to them, or rather the assuming of them at
proper times, and in proper places, is what particularly constitutes a
man of the world, and a well-bred man.
Here is advice enough, I think, and too much, it may be, you will think,
for one letter; if you follow it, you will get knowledge, character, and
pleasure by it; if you do not, I only lose ‘operam et oleum,’ which, in
all events, I do not grudge you.
I send you, by a person who sets out this day for Leipsig, a small packet
from your Mamma, containing some valuable things which you left behind,
to which I have added, by way of new-year’s gift, a very pretty
tooth-pick case; and, by the way, pray take great care of your teeth, and
keep them extremely clean. I have likewise sent you the Greek roots,
lately translated into English from the French of the Port Royal. Inform
yourself what the Port Royal is. To conclude with a quibble: I hope you
will not only feed upon these Greek roots, but likewise digest them
perfectly. Adieu.