very tender and real concern for the misfortune of my friend, and yet at
the same time feel a pleasing consciousness at having discharged my duty
to him, by comforting and assisting him to the utmost of my power in that
misfortune? Give me but virtuous actions, and I will not quibble and
chicane about the motives. And I will give anybody their choice of these
two truths, which amount to the same thing: He who loves himself best is
the honestest man; or, The honestest man loves himself best.

The characters of La Bruyere are pictures from the life; most of them
finely drawn, and highly colored. Furnish your mind with them first, and
when you meet with their likeness, as you will every day, they will
strike you the more. You will compare every feature with the original;
and both will reciprocally help you to discover the beauties and the
blemishes.

As women are a considerable, or, at least a pretty numerous part of
company; and as their suffrages go a great way toward establishing a
man's character in the fashionable part of the world (which is of great
importance to the fortune and figure he proposes to make in it), it is
necessary to please them. I will therefore, upon this subject, let you
into certain Arcana that will be very useful for you to know, but which
you must, with the utmost care, conceal and never seem to know. Women,
then, are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining
tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid reasoning, good sense, I never
knew in my life one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequentially
for four-and-twenty hours together. Some little passion or humor always
breaks upon their best resolutions. Their beauty neglected or
controverted, their age increased, or their supposed understandings
depreciated, instantly kindles their little passions, and overturns any
system of consequential conduct, that in their most reasonable moments
they might have been capable of forming. A man of sense only trifles with
them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a
sprightly forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts
them with serious matters; though he often makes them believe that he
does both; which is the thing in the world that they are proud of; for
they love mightily to be dabbling in business (which by the way they
always spoil); and being justly distrustful that men in general look upon
them in a trifling light, they almost adore that ma