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.

LETTER CLXXXVIII

Bath, October 3, 1753

My dear friend:  You have set out well at The Hague; you are in love with Madame Munter, which I am very glad of:  you are in the fine company there, and I hope one of it:  for it is not enough, at your age, to be merely in good company; but you should, by your address and attentions, make that good company think you one of them.  There is a tribute due to beauty, even independently of further views; which tribute I hope you paid with alacrity to Madame Munter and Madame Degenfeldt:  depend upon it, they expected it, and were offended in proportion as that tribute seemed either unwillingly or scantily paid.  I believe my friend Kreuningen admits nobody now to his table, for fear of their communicating the plague to him, or at least the bite of a mad dog.