ame of pleasures,
rushes indiscriminately, and without taste, into them all, and is finally
DESTROYED. I am not stoically advising, nor parsonically preaching to you
to be a Stoic at your age; far from it: I am pointing out to you the
paths to pleasures, and am endeavoring only to quicken and heighten them
for you. Enjoy pleasures, but let them be your own, and then you will
taste them; but adopt none; trust to nature for genuine ones. The
pleasures that you would feel you must earn; the man who gives himself up
to all, feels none sensibly. Sardanapalus, I am convinced, never felt any
in his life. Those only who join serious occupations with pleasures, feel
either as they should do. Alcibiades, though addicted to the most
shameful excesses, gave some time to philosophy, and some to business.
Julius Caesar joined business with pleasure so properly, that they
mutually assisted each other; and though he was the husband of all the
wives at Rome, he found time to be one of the best scholars, almost the
best orator, and absolutely the best general there. An uninterrupted life
of pleasures is as insipid as contemptible. Some hours given every day to
serious business must whet both the mind and the senses, to enjoy those
of pleasure. A surfeited glutton, an emaciated sot, and an enervated
rotten whoremaster, never enjoy the pleasures to which they devote
themselves; but they are only so many human sacrifices to false gods. The
pleasures of low life are all of this mistaken, merely sensual, and
disgraceful nature; whereas, those of high life, and in good company
(though possibly in themselves not more moral) are more delicate, more
refined, less dangerous, and less disgraceful; and, in the common course
of things, not reckoned disgraceful at all. In short, pleasure must not,
nay, cannot, be the business of a man of sense and character; but it may
be, and is, his relief, his reward. It is particularly so with regard to
the women; who have the utmost contempt for those men, that, having no
character nor consideration with their own sex, frivolously pass their
whole time in 'ruelles' and at 'toilettes'. They look upon them as their
lumber, and remove them whenever they can get better furniture. Women
choose their favorites more by the ear than by any other of their senses
or even their understandings. The man whom they hear the most commended
by the men, will always be the best received by them. Such a conquest
flatters their vanity,