If care and application are necessary to the acquiring of those qualifications,without which you can never be considerable,nor make a figure in the world,they are not less necessary with regard to the lesser accomplishments,which are requisite to make you agreeable and pleasing in society.In truth,whatever is worth doing at all,is worth doing well;and nothing can be done well without attention:I therefore carry the necessity of attention down to the lowest things,even to dancing and dress.Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man;therefore mind it while you learn it that you may learn to do it well,and not be ridiculous,though in a ridiculous act.Dress is of the same nature;you must dress;therefore attend to it;not in order to rival or to excel a fop in it,but in order to avoid singularity,and consequently ridicule.Take great care always to be dressed like the reasonable people of your own age,in the place where you are;whose dress is never spoken of one way or another,as either too negligent or too much studied.
What is commonly called an absent man,is commonly either a very weak,or a very affected man;but be he which he will,he is,I am sure,a very disagreeable man in company.He fails in all the common offices of civility;he seems not to know those people to-day,whom yesterday he appeared to live in intimacy with.He takes no part in the general conversation;but,on the contrary,breaks into it from time to time,with some start of his own,as if he waked from a dream.This (as I said before)is a sure indication,either of a mind so weak that it is not able to bear above one object at a time;or so affected,that it would be supposed to be wholly engrossed by,and directed to,some very great and important objects.Sir Isaac Newton,Mr.Locke,and (it may be)five or six more,since the creation of the world,may have had a right to absence,from that intense thought which the things they were investigating required.But if a young man,and a man of the world,who has no such avocations to plead,will claim and exercise that right of absence in company,his pretended right should,in my mind,be turned into an involuntary absence,by his perpetual exclusion out of company.
However frivolous a company may be,still,while you are among them,do not show them,by your inattention,that you think them so;but rather take their tone,and conform in some degree to their weakness,instead of manifesting your contempt for them.There is nothing that people bear more impatiently,or forgive less,than contempt;and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.If,therefore,you would rather please than offend,rather be well than ill spoken of,rather be loved than hated;remember to have that constant attention about you which flatters every man's little vanity;and the want of which,by mortifying his pride,never fails to excite his resentment,or at least his ill will.
For instance,most people (I might say all people)have their weaknesses;they have their aversions and their likings,to such or such things;so that,if you were to laugh at a man for his aversion to a cat,or cheese (which are common antipathies),or,by inattention and negligence,to let them come in his way,where you could prevent it,he would,in the first case,think himself insulted,and,in the second,slighted,and would remember both.Whereas your care to procure for him what he likes,and to remove from him what he hates,shows him that he is at least an object of your attention;flatters his vanity,and makes him possibly more your friend,than a more important service would have done.With regard to women,attentions still below these are necessary,and,by the custom of the world,in some measure due,according to the laws of good-breeding.
My long and frequent letters,which I send you,in great doubt of their success,put me in mind of certain papers,which you have very lately,and I formerly,sent up to kites,along the string,which we called messengers;some of them the wind used to blow away,others were torn by the string,and but few of them got up and stuck to the kite.But I will content myself now,as I did then,if some of my present messengers do but stick to you.Adieu!
