consider life in that light, will not idly
lavish one moment. The present moments are the only ones we are sure of,
and as such the most valuable; but yours are doubly so at your age; for
the credit, the dignity, the comfort, and the pleasure of all your future
moments, depend upon the use you make of your present ones.

I am extremely satisfied with your present manner of employing your time;
but will you always employ it as well? I am far from meaning always in
the same way; but I mean as well in proportion, in the variation of age
and circumstances. You now, study five hours every morning; I neither
suppose that you will, nor desire that you should do so for the rest of
your life. Both business and pleasure will justly and equally break in
upon those hours. But then, will you always employ the leisure they leave
you in useful studies? If you have but an hour, will you improve that
hour, instead of idling it away? While you have such a friend and monitor
with you as Mr. Harte, I am sure you will. But suppose that business and
situations should, in six or seen months, call Mr. Harte away from you;
tell me truly, what may I expect and depend upon from you, when left to
yourself? May I be sure that you will employ some part of every day, in
adding something to that stock of knowledge which he will have left you?
May I hope that you will allot one hour in the week to the care of your
own affairs, to keep them in that order and method which every prudent
man does? But, above all, may I be convinced that your pleasures,
whatever they may be, will be confined within the circle of good company,
and people of fashion? Those pleasures I recommend to you; I will promote
them I will pay for them; but I will neither pay for, nor suffer, the
unbecoming, disgraceful, and degrading pleasures (they should not be
called pleasures), of low and profligate company. I confess the pleasures
of high life are not always strictly philosophical; and I believe a Stoic
would blame, my indulgence; but I am yet no Stoic, though turned of
five-and-fifty; and I am apt to think that you are rather less so, at
eighteen. The pleasures of the table, among people of the first fashion,
may indeed sometimes, by accident, run into excesses: but they will never
sink into a continued course of gluttony and drunkenness. The gallantry
of high life, though not strictly justifiable, carries, at least, no
external marks of infamy about it. Neither the heart nor the c