I am glad that you dance so well, as to be reckoned by Marcel among his best scholars; go on, and dance better still.  Dancing well is pleasing ‘pro tanto’, and makes a part of that necessary whole, which is composed of a thousand parts, many of them of ’les infiniment petits quoi qu’infiniment necessaires’.

I shall never have done upon this subject which is indispensably necessary toward your making any figure or fortune in the world; both which I have set my heart upon, and for both which you now absolutely want no one thing but the art of pleasing; and I must not conceal from you that you have still a good way to go before you arrive at it.  You still want a thousand of those little attentions that imply a desire of pleasing:  you want a ‘douceur’ of air and expression that engages:  you want an elegance and delicacy of expression, necessary to adorn the best sense and most solid matter:  in short, you still want a great deal of the ‘brillant’ and the ‘poli’.  Get them at any rate:  sacrifice hecatombs of books to them:  seek for them in company, and renounce your closet till you have got them.  I never received the letter you refer to, if ever you wrote it.  Adieu, et bon soir, Monseigneur.

LETTER CXLV

Greenwich, June 6, O. S. 1751.

My dear friend:  Solicitous and anxious as I have ever been to form your heart, your mind, and your manners, and to bring you as near perfection as the imperfection of our natures will allow, I have exhausted, in the course of our correspondence, all that my own mind could suggest, and have borrowed from others whatever I thought could be useful to you; but this has necessarily been interruptedly and by snatches.  It is now time, and you are of an age to review and to weigh in your own mind all that you have heard, and all that you have read, upon these subjects; and to form your own character, your conduct, and your manners, for the rest of your life; allowing for such improvements as a further knowledge of the world will naturally give you.  In this view I would recommend to you to read, with the greatest attention, such books as treat particularly of those subjects; reflecting seriously upon them, and then comparing the speculation with the practice.

For example, if you read in the morning some of La Rochefoucault’s maxims; consider them, examine them well, and compare them with the real characters you meet with in the evening.  Read La Bruyere in the morning, and see in the evening whether his pictures are like.  Study the heart and the mind of man, and begin with your own.  Meditation and reflection must lay the foundation of that knowledge:  but experience and practice must, and alone can, complete it.  Books, it is true, point out the operations of the mind, the sentiments of the heart, the influence of the passions; and so far they are of previous use:  but without subsequent practice, experience, and observation,