of that country, that when
you come to travel in it, you may do it with greater safety.

From all this you will of yourself draw this obvious conclusion: That you
are in truth but now going to the great and important school, the world;
to which Westminster and Leipsig were only the little preparatory
schools, as Marylebone, Windsor, etc., are to them. What you have already
acquired will only place you in the second form of this new school,
instead of the first. But if you intend, as I suppose you do, to get into
the shell, you have very different things to learn from Latin and Greek:
and which require much more sagacity and attention than those two dead
languages; the language of pure and simple nature; the language of nature
variously modified and corrupted by passions, prejudices, and habits; the
language of simulation and dissimulation: very hard, but very necessary
to decipher. Homer has not half so many, nor so difficult dialects, as
the great book of the school you are now going to. Observe, therefore,
progressively, and with the greatest attention, what the best scholars in
the form immediately above you do, and so on, until you get into the
shell yourself. Adieu.

Pray tell Mr. Harte that I have received his letter of the 27th May, N.
S., and that I advise him never to take the English newswriters
literally, who never yet inserted any one thing quite right. I have both
his patent and his mandamus, in both which he is Walter, let the
newspapers call him what they please.

LETTER CXVII

LONDON, July 9, O. S. 1750.

MY DEAR FRIEND: I should not deserve that appellation in return from you,
if I did not freely and explicitly inform you of every corrigible defect
which I may either hear of, suspect, or at any time discover in you.
Those who, in the common course of the world, will call themselves your
friends; or whom, according to the common notions of friendship, you may
possibly think such, will never tell you of your faults, still less of
your weaknesses. But, on the contrary, more desirous to make you their
friend, than to prove themselves yours, they will flatter both, and, in
truth, not be sorry for either. Interiorly, most people enjoy the
inferiority of their best friends. The useful and essential part of
friendship, to you, is reserved singly for Mr. Harte and myself: our
relations to you stand pure and unsuspected of all private views. In
whatever we say to you, we can have no interest but yours