<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"></SPAN></p>
<h2> LETTER XX </h2>
<h3> LONDON, November 24, O. S. 1747 </h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"></SPAN></p>
<h2> LETTER XXI </h2>
<h3> LONDON, December 15, O. S. 1747 </h3>
<p>DEAR Boy: There is nothing which I more wish that you should know, and
which fewer people do know, than the true use and value of time. It is in
everybody's mouth; but in few people's practice. Every fool, who slatterns
away his whole time in nothings, utters, however, some trite commonplace
sentence, of which there are millions, to prove, at once, the value and
the fleetness of time. The sun-dials, likewise all over Europe, have some
ingenious inscription to that effect; so that nobody squanders away their
time, without hearing and seeing, daily, how necessary it is to employ it
well, and how irrecoverable it is if lost. But all these admonitions are
useless, where there is not a fund of good sense and reason to suggest
them, rather than receive them. By the manner in which you now tell me
that you employ your time, I flatter myself that you have that fund; that
is the fund which will make you rich indeed. I do not, therefore, mean to
give you a critical essay upon the use and abuse of time; but I will only
give you some hints with regard to the use of one particular period of
that long time which, I hope, you have before you; I mean, the next two
years. Remember, then, that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the
foundation of before you are eighteen, you will never be the master of
while you breathe. Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and
shelter for us in an advanced age; and if we do not plant it while young,
it will give us no shade when we grow old. I neither require nor expect
from you great application to books, after you are once thrown out into
the great world. I know it is impossible; and it may even, in some cases,
be improper; this, therefore, is your time, and your only time, for
unwearied and uninterrupted application. If you should sometimes think it
a little laborious, consider that labor is the unavoidable fatigue of a
necessary journey. The more hours a day you travel, the sooner you will be
at your journey's end. The sooner you are qualified for your liberty, the
sooner you shall have it; and your manumission will entirely depend upon
the manner in which you employ the intermediate time. I think I offer you
a very good bargain, when I promise you, upon my word, that if you will do
everything that I would have you do, till you are eighteen, I will do
everything that you would have me do ever afterward.</p>
<p>I knew a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would
not even lose that small portion of it, which the calls of nature obliged
him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the
Latin poets, in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of
Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them
with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down
as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained; and I
recommend you to follow his example. It is better than only doing what you
cannot help doing at those moments; and it will made any book, which you
shall read in that manner, very present in your mind. Books of science,
and of a grave sort, must be read with continuity; but there are very
many, and even very useful ones, which may be read with advantage by
snatches, and unconnectedly; such are all the good Latin poets, except
Virgil in his "AEneid": and such are most of the modern poets, in which
you will find many pieces worth reading, that will not take up above seven
or eight minutes. Bayle's, Moreri's, and other dictionaries, are proper
books to take and shut up for the little intervals of (otherwise) idle
time, that everybody has in the course of the day, between either their
studies or their pleasures. Good night.</p>
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