Letters to His Son 1753-54 | Page 8

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