ld, which is not soon learned; and only to be
learned by frequenting good and various companies.

Consider, therefore, how precious every moment of time is to you now. The
more you apply to your business, the more you will taste your pleasures.
The exercise of the mind in the morning whets the appetite for the
pleasures of the evening, as much as the exercise of the body whets the
appetite for dinner. Business and pleasure, rightly understood, mutually
assist each other, instead of being enemies, as silly or dull people
often think them. No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them
by previous business, and few people do business well, who do nothing
else. Remember that when I speak of pleasures, I always mean the elegant
pleasures of a rational being, and, not the brutal ones of a swine. I
mean 'la bonne Chere', short of gluttony; wine, infinitely short of
drunkenness; play, without the least gaming; and gallantry without
debauchery. There is a line in all these things which men of sense, for
greater security, take care to keep a good deal on the right side of; for
sickness, pain, contempt and infamy, lie immediately on the other side of
it. Men of sense and merit, in all other respects, may have had some of
these failings; but then those few examples, instead of inviting us to
imitation, should only put us the more upon our guard against such
weaknesses: and whoever thinks them fashionable, will not be so himself;
I have often known a fashionable man have some one vice; but I never in
my life knew a vicious man a fashionable man. Vice is as degrading as it
is criminal. God bless you, my dear child!

LETTER LXXVIII

LONDON, August 20, O. S. 1749.

DEAR BOY: Let us resume our reflections upon men, their characters, their
manners, in a word, our reflections upon the world. They may help you to
form yourself, and to know others; a knowledge very useful at all ages,
very rare at yours. It seems as if it were nobody's business to
communicate it to young men. Their masters teach them, singly, the
languages or the sciences of their several departments; and are indeed
generally incapable of teaching them the world: their parents are often
so too, or at least neglect doing it, either from avocations,
indifference, or from an opinion that throwing them into the world (as
they call it) is the best way of teaching it them. This last notion is in
a great degree true; that is, the world can doubtless never be well