ery just.

Since you turn your thoughts a little toward trade and commerce, which I
am very glad you do, I will recommend a French book to you, which you
will easily get at Paris, and which I take to be the best book in the
world of that kind: I mean the 'Dictionnaire de Commerce de Savory', in
three volumes in folio; where you will find every one thing that relates
to trade, commerce, specie, exchange, etc., most clearly stated; and not
only relative to France, but to the whole world. You will easily suppose,
that I do not advise you to read such a book 'tout de suite'; but I only
mean that you should have it at hand, to have recourse to occasionally.

With this great stock of both useful and ornamental knowledge, which you
have already acquired, and which, by your application and industry, you
are daily increasing, you will lay such a solid foundation of future
figure and fortune, that if you complete it by all the accomplishments of
manners, graces, etc., I know nothing which you may not aim at, and in
time hope for. Your great point at present at Paris, to which all other
considerations must give way, is to become entirely a man of fashion: to
be well-bred without ceremony, easy without negligence, steady and
intrepid with modesty, genteel without affectation, insinuating without
meanness, cheerful without being noisy, frank without indiscretion, and
secret without mysteriousness; to know the proper time and place for
whatever you say or do, and to do it with an air of condition all this is
not so soon nor so easily learned as people imagine, but requires
observation and time. The world is an immense folio, which demands a
great deal of time and attention to be read and understood as it ought to
be; you have not yet read above four or five pages of it; and you will
have but barely time to dip now and then in other less important books.

Lord Albemarle has, I know, wrote {It is a pleasure for an ordinary
mortal to find Lord Chesterfield in gramatical error--and he did it again
in the last sentence of this paragraph--but this was 1751? D.W.} to a
friend of his here, that you do not frequent him so much as he expected
and desired; that he fears somebody or other has given you wrong
impressions of him; and that I may possibly think, from your being seldom
at his house, that he has been wanting in his attentions to you. I told
the person who told me this, that, on the contrary, you seemed, by your
letters to me, to be e