conform to, and learn their manners; if you are not attentive to please,
and well bred, with the easiness of a man of fashion. As you must attend
to your manners, so you must not neglect your person; but take care to be
very clean, well dressed, and genteel; to have no disagreeable attitudes,
nor awkward tricks; which many people use themselves to, and then cannot
leave them off. Do you take care to keep your teeth very clean, by
washing them constantly every morning, and after every meal? This is very
necessary, both to preserve your teeth a great while, and to save you a
great deal of pain. Mine have plagued me long, and are now falling out,
merely from want of care when I was your age. Do you dress well, and not
too well? Do you consider your air and manner of presenting yourself
enough, and not too much? Neither negligent nor stiff? All these things
deserve a degree of care, a second-rate attention; they give an
additional lustre to real merit. My Lord Bacon says, that a pleasing
figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation. It is certainly an
agreeable forerunner of merit, and smoothes the way for it.

Remember that I shall see you at Hanover next summer, and shall expect
perfection; which if I do not meet with, or at least something very near
it, you and I shall, not be very well together. I shall dissect and
analyze you with a microscope; so that I shall discover the least speck
or blemish. This is fair warning; therefore take your measures
accordingly. Yours.




LETTER XIII

LONDON, August 21, O. S. 1747.