Letters to His Son, 1752 [42]
of the place, so as to be received there rather as a friend to the family than as a foreigner. Having these principles constantly in your thoughts, everything you do and everything you say will some way or other tend to your main view; and common conversation will gradually fit you for it. You will get a habit of checking any rising heat; you will be upon your guard against any indiscreet expression; you will by degrees get the command of your countenance, so as not to change it upon any the most sudden accident; and you will, above all things, labor to acquire the great art of pleasing, without which nothing is to be done. Company is, in truth, a constant state of negotiation; and, if you attend to it in that view, will qualify you for any. By the same means that you make a friend, guard against an enemy, or gain a mistress; 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 not like. Your passions are warm, and your heads are light; you hate all those who oppose your views, either of ambition or love; and a rival, in either, is almost a synonymous term for an enemy. Whenever you meet such a man, you are awkwardly cold to him, at best; but often rude, and always desirous to give him some indirect slap. This is unreasonable; for one man has as good a right to pursue an employment, or a mistress, as another; but it is, into the bargain, extremely imprudent; because you commonly defeat your own purpose by it, and while you are contending with each other, a third often prevails. I grant you that the situation is irksome; a man cannot help thinking as he thinks, nor feeling what he feels; and it is a very tender and sore point to be thwarted
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 not like. Your passions are warm, and your heads are light; you hate all those who oppose your views, either of ambition or love; and a rival, in either, is almost a synonymous term for an enemy. Whenever you meet such a man, you are awkwardly cold to him, at best; but often rude, and always desirous to give him some indirect slap. This is unreasonable; for one man has as good a right to pursue an employment, or a mistress, as another; but it is, into the bargain, extremely imprudent; because you commonly defeat your own purpose by it, and while you are contending with each other, a third often prevails. I grant you that the situation is irksome; a man cannot help thinking as he thinks, nor feeling what he feels; and it is a very tender and sore point to be thwarted