best companies. I have stuck to them all my lifetime, and I advise
you to do so too.

You will have received in my three or four last letters my directions for
your further motions to another capital, where I propose that your stay
shall be pretty considerable. The expense, I am well aware, will be so
too; but that, as I told you before, will have no weight when your
improvement and advantage are in the other scale. I do not care a groat
what it is, if neither vice nor folly are the objects of it, and if Mr.
Harte gives his sanction.

I am very well pleased with your account of Carniola; those are the kind
of objects worthy of your inquiries and knowledge. The produce, the
taxes, the trade, the manufactures, the strength, the weakness, the
government of the several countries which a man of sense travels through,
are the material points to which he attends; and leaves the steeples, the
market-places, and the signs, to the laborious and curious researches of
Dutch and German travelers.

Mr. Harte tells me, that he intends to give you, by means of Signor
Vicentini, a general notion of civil and military architecture; with
which I am very well pleased. They are frequent subjects of conversation;
and it is very right that you should have some idea of the latter, and a
good taste of the former; and you may very soon learn as much as you need
know of either. If you read about one-third of Palladio's book of
architecture with some skillful person, and then, with that person,
examine the best buildings by those rules, you will know the different
proportions of the different orders; the several diameters of their
columns; their intercolumniations, their several uses, etc. The
Corinthian Order is chiefly used in magnificent buildings, where ornament
and decoration are the principal objects; the Doric is calculated for
strength, and the Ionic partakes of the Doric strength, and of the
Corinthian ornaments. The Composite and the Tuscan orders are more
modern, and were unknown to the Greeks; the one is too light, the other
too clumsy. You may soon be acquainted with the considerable parts of
civil architecture; and for the minute and mechanical parts of it, leave
them to masons, bricklayers, and Lord Burlington, who has, to a certain
extent, lessened himself by knowing them too well. Observe the same
method as to military architecture; understand the terms, know the
general rules, and then see them in execution with some skillful