o, were it your footman. Seek always for the best words and the
happiest expressions you can find. Do not content yourself with being
barely understood; but adorn your thoughts, and dress them as you would
your person; which, however well proportioned it might be, it would be
very improper and indecent to exhibit naked, or even worse dressed than
people of your sort are.

I have sent you in a packet which your Leipsig acquaintance, Duval, sends
to his correspondent at Rome, Lord Bolingbroke's book,--["Letters on the
Spirit of Patriotism," on the Idea of a Patriot King which he published
about a year ago.]--I desire that you will read it over and over again,
with particular attention to the style, and to all those beauties of
oratory with which it is adorned. Till I read that book, I confess I did
not know all the extent and powers of the English language. Lord
Bolingbroke has both a tongue and a pen to persuade; his manner of
speaking in private conversation is full as elegant as his writings;
whatever subject he either speaks or writes upon, he adorns with the most
splendid eloquence; not a studied or labored eloquence, but such a
flowing happiness of diction, which (from care perhaps at first) is
become so habitual to him, that even his most familiar conversations, if
taken down in writing, would bear the press, without the least correction
either as to method or style. If his conduct, in the former part of his
life, had been equal to all his natural and acquired talents, he would
most justly have merited the epithet of all-accomplished. He is himself
sensible of his past errors: those violent passions which seduced him in
his youth, have now subsided by age; and take him as he is now, the
character of all-accomplished is more his due than any man's I ever knew
in my life.

But he has been a most mortifying instance of the violence of human
passions and of the weakness of the most exalted human reason. His
virtues and his vices, his reason and his passions, did not blend
themselves by a gradation of tints, but formed a shining and sudden
contrast. Here the darkest, there the most splendid colors; and both
rendered more shining from their proximity. Impetuosity, excess, and
almost extravagance, characterized not only his passions, but even his
senses. His youth was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of
pleasures, in which he most licentiously triumphed, disdaining all
decorum. His fine imagination has often bee