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Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1750 by Earl of Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield
page 21 of 108 (19%)
secures you an hour or two, at least, of reading or reflection before the
common interruptions of the morning begin; and it will save your
constitution, by forcing you to go to bed early, at least one night in
three.

You will say, it may be, as many young people would, that all this order
and method is very troublesome, only fit for dull people, and a
disagreeable restraint upon the noble spirit and fire of youth. I deny
it; and assert, on the contrary, that it will procure you both more time
and more taste for your pleasures; and, so far from being troublesome to
you, that after you have pursued it a month, it would be troublesome to
you to lay it aside. Business whets the appetite, and gives a taste to
pleasure, as exercise does to food; and business can never be done
without method; it raises the spirits for pleasures; and a SPECTACLE, a
ball, an assembly, will much more sensibly affect a man who has employed,
than a man who has lost, the preceding part of the day; nay, I will
venture to say, that a fine lady will seem to have more charms to a man
of study or business, than to a saunterer. The same listlessness runs
through his whole conduct, and he is as insipid in his pleasures, as
inefficient in everything else.

I hope you earn your pleasures, and consequently taste them; for, by the
way, I know a great many men, who call themselves men of pleasure, but
who, in truth, have none. They adopt other people's indiscriminately, but
without any taste of their own. I have known them often inflict excesses
upon themselves because they thought them genteel; though they sat as
awkwardly upon them as other people's clothes would have done. Have no
pleasures but your own, and then you will shine in them. What are yours?
Give me a short history of them. 'Tenez-vous votre coin a table, et dans
les bonnes compagnies? y brillez-vous du cote de la politesse, de
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