s; you will make an advantageous treaty, baffle those who
counteract you, and gain the court you are sent to. Make this use of all
the company you keep, and your very pleasures will make you a successful
negotiator. Please all who are worth pleasing; offend none. Keep your own
secret, and get out other people's. Keep your own temper and artfully
warm other people's. Counterwork your rivals, with diligence and
dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to
them; and be firm without heat. Messieurs d'Avaux and Servien did no more
than this. I must make one observation, in confirmation of this
assertion; which is, that the most eminent negotiators have allways been
the politest and bestbred men in company; even what the women call the
PRETTIEST MEN. For God's sake, never lose view of these two your capital
objects: bend everything to them, try everything by their rules, and
calculate everything for their purposes. What is peculiar to these two
objects, is, that they require nothing, but what one's own vanity,
interest, and pleasure, would make one do independently of them. If a man
were never to be in business, and always to lead a private life, would he
not desire to please and to persuade? So that, in your two destinations,
your fortune and figure luckily conspire with your vanity and your
pleasures. Nay more; a foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be
a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too.
Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures; his views are
carried on, and perhaps best and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers,
assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and
connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of
amusement.

These objects now draw very near you, and you have no time to lose in
preparing yourself to meet them. You will be in parliament almost as soon
as your age will allow, and I believe you will have a foreign department
still sooner, and that will be earlier than ever any other body had one.
If you set out well at one-and-twenty, what may you not reasonably hope
to be at one-and-forty? All that I could wish you! Adieu.

LETTER CLXXIX

LONDON, September 29, 1752.

MY DEAR FRIEND: There is nothing so necessary, but at the same time there
is nothing more difficult (I know it by experience) for you young
fellows, than to know how to behave yourselves prudently toward those
whom you do no