Good night.




LETTER XX

LONDON, November 24, O. S. 1747

DEAR BOY: As often as I write to you (and that you know is pretty often),
so often I am in doubt whether it is to any purpose, and whether it is
not labor and paper lost. This entirely depends upon the degree of reason
and reflection which you are master of, or think proper to exert. If you
give yourself time to think, and have sense enough to think right, two
reflections must necessarily occur to you; the one is, that I have a
great deal of experience, and that you have none: the other is, that I am
the only man living who cannot have, directly or indirectly, any interest
concerning you, but your own. From which two undeniable principles, the
obvious and necessary conclusion is, that you ought, for your own sake,
to attend to and follow my advice.

If, by the application which I recommend to you, you acquire great
knowledge, you alone are the gainer; I pay for it. If you should deserve
either a good or a bad character, mine will be exactly what it is now,
and will neither be the better in the first case, nor worse in the
latter. You alone will be the gainer or the loser.

Whatever your pleasures may be, I neither can nor shall envy you them, as
old people are sometimes suspected by young people to do; and I shall