lin; and I take it for granted, that if anything is yet wanting to
complete your knowledge of the state of that electorate, you will not
fail to procure it before you go away. I do not mean, as you will easily
believe, the number of churches, parishes, or towns; but I mean the
constitution, the revenues, the troops, and the trade of that electorate.
A few questions, sensibly asked, of sensible people, will produce you the
necessary informations; which I desire you will enter in your little
book, Berlin will be entirely a new scene to you, and I look upon it, in
a manner, as your first step into the great world; take care that step be
not a false one, and that you do not stumble at the threshold. You will
there be in more company than you have yet been; manners and attentions
will therefore be more necessary. Pleasing in company is the only way of
being pleased in it yourself. Sense and knowledge are the first and
necessary foundations for pleasing in company; but they will by no means
do alone, and they will never be perfectly welcome if they are not
accompanied with manners and attentions. You will best acquire these by
frequenting the companies of people of fashion; but then you must resolve
to acquire them, in those companies, by proper care and observation; for
I have known people, who, though they have frequented good company all
their lifetime, have done it in so inattentive and unobserving a manner,
as to be never the better for it, and to remain as disagreeable, as
awkward, and as vulgar, as if they had never seen any person of fashion.
When you go into good company (by good company is meant the people of the
first fashion of the place) observe carefully their turn, their manners,
their address; and conform your own to them. But this is not all neither;
go deeper still; observe their characters, and pray, as far as you can,
into both their hearts and their heads. Seek for their particular merit,
their predominant passion, or their prevailing weakness; and you will
then know what to bait your hook with to catch them. Man is a composition
of so many, and such various ingredients, that it requires both time and
care to analyze him: for though we have all the same ingredients in our
general composition, as reason, will, passions, and appetites; yet the
different proportions and combinations of them in each individual,
produce that infinite variety of characters, which, in some particular or
other, distinguishes every i