and without taste, into them all, and is finally destroyed. I am not stoically advising, nor parsonically preaching to you to be a Stoic at your age; far from it:  I am pointing out to you the paths to pleasures, and am endeavoring only to quicken and heighten them for you.  Enjoy pleasures, but let them be your own, and then you will taste them; but adopt none; trust to nature for genuine ones.  The pleasures that you would feel you must earn; the man who gives himself up to all, feels none sensibly.  Sardanapalus, I am convinced, never felt any in his life.  Those only who join serious occupations with pleasures, feel either as they should do.  Alcibiades, though addicted to the most shameful excesses, gave some time to philosophy, and some to business.  Julius Caesar joined business with pleasure so properly, that they mutually assisted each other; and though he was the husband of all the wives at Rome, he found time to be one of the best scholars, almost the best orator, and absolutely the best general there.  An uninterrupted life of pleasures is as insipid as contemptible.  Some hours given every day to serious business must whet both the mind and the senses, to enjoy those of pleasure.  A surfeited glutton, an emaciated sot, and an enervated rotten whoremaster, never enjoy the pleasures to which they devote themselves; but they are only so many human sacrifices to false gods.  The pleasures of low life are all of this mistaken, merely sensual, and disgraceful nature; whereas, those of high life, and in good company (though possibly in themselves not more moral) are more delicate, more refined, less dangerous, and less disgraceful; and, in the common course of things, not reckoned disgraceful at all.  In short, pleasure must not, nay, cannot, be the business of a man of sense and character; but it may be, and is, his relief, his reward.  It is particularly so with regard to the women; who have the utmost contempt for those men, that, having no character nor consideration with their own sex, frivolously pass their whole time in ‘ruelles’ and at ‘toilettes’.  They look upon them as their lumber, and remove them whenever they can get better furniture.  Women choose their favorites more by the ear than by any other of their senses or even their understandings.  The man whom they hear the most commended by the men, will always be the best received by them.  Such a conquest flatters their vanity, and vanity is their universal, if not their strongest passion.  A distinguished shining character is irresistible with them; they crowd to, nay, they even quarrel for the danger in hopes of the triumph.  Though, by the way (to use a vulgar expression), she who conquers only catches a Tartar, and becomes the slave of her captive.  ‘Mais c’est la leur affaire’.  Divide your time between useful occupations and elegant pleasures.  The morning seems to belong to study, business, or serious conversations with men of learning and figure; not that I exclude an occasional hour