riousness, I would add: 'Mais d'ailleurs c'est que je ne desavoue
jamais mes connoissances, a cause de leur etat ou de leur figure. Il faut
avoir bien peu de sentimens pour le faire'. This would at once put an end
to that momentary pleasantry, and give them all a better opinion of me
than they had before. Suppose another case, and that some of the finest
ladies 'du bon ton' should come into a room, and find you sitting by, and
talking politely to 'la vieille' Marquise de Bellefonds, the joke would,
for a moment, turn upon that 'tete-a-tete': He bien! avez vous a la fin
fixd la belle Marquise? La partie est-elle faite pour la petite maison?
Le souper sera galant sans doute: Mais ne faistu donc point scrupule de
seduire une jeune et aimable persone comme celle-la'? To this I should
answer: 'La partie n'etoit pas encore tout-a fait liee, vous nous avez
interrompu; mais avec le tems que fait-on? D'ailleurs moquezvous de mes
amours tant qu'il vous plaira, je vous dirai que je respecte tant les
jeunes dames, que je respecte meme les vieilles, pour l'avoir ete. Apre
cela il y a souvent des liaisons entre les vieilles et les jeunes'. This
would at once turn the pleasantry into an esteem for your good sense and
your good-breeding. Pursue steadily, and without fear or shame, whatever
your reason tells you is right, and what you see is practiced by people
of more experience than yourself, and of established characters of good
sense and good-breeding.

After all this, perhaps you will say, that it is impossible to please
everybody. I grant it; but it does not follow that one should not
therefore endeavor to please as many as one can. Nay, I will go further,
and admit that it is impossible for any man not to have some enemies. But
this truth from long experience I assert, that he who has the most
friends and the fewest enemies, is the strongest; will rise the highest
with the least envy; and fall, if he does fall, the gentlest, and the
most pitied. This is surely an object worth pursuing. Pursue it according
to the rules I have here given you. I will add one observation more, and
two examples to enforce it; and then, as the parsons say, conclude.

There is no one creature so obscure, so low, or so poor, who may not, by
the strange and unaccountable changes and vicissitudes of human affairs,
somehow or other, and some time or other, become an useful friend or a
trouble-some enemy, to the greatest and the richest. The late Duke of
Orm