wherever you can, establish yourself, with a kind of domestic familiarity, in good houses.  For instance, go 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