tell me truly, what may I expect and depend upon from you, when left to
yourself? May I be sure that you will employ some part of every day, in
adding something to that stock of knowledge which he will have left you?
May I hope that you will allot one hour in the week to the care of your
own affairs, to keep them in that order and method which every prudent
man does? But, above all, may I be convinced that your pleasures,
whatever they may be, will be confined within the circle of good company,
and people of fashion? Those pleasures I recommend to you; I will promote
them I will pay for them; but I will neither pay for, nor suffer, the
unbecoming, disgraceful, and degrading pleasures (they should not be
called pleasures), of low and profligate company. I confess the pleasures
of high life are not always strictly philosophical; and I believe a Stoic
would blame, my indulgence; but I am yet no Stoic, though turned of
five-and-fifty; and I am apt to think that you are rather less so, at
eighteen. The pleasures of the table, among people of the first fashion,
may indeed sometimes, by accident, run into excesses: but they will never
sink into a continued course of gluttony and drunkenness. The gallantry
of high life, though not strictly justifiable, carries, at least, no
external marks of infamy about it. Neither the heart nor the constitution
is corrupted by it; neither nose nor character lost by it; manners,
possibly, improved. Play, in good company, is only play, and not gaming;
not deep, and consequently not dangerous nor dishonorable. It is only the
interacts of other amusements.

This, I am sure, is not talking to you like an old man, though it is
talking to you like an old friend; these are not hard conditions to ask
of you. I am certain you have sense enough to know how reasonable they
are on my part, how advantageous they are on yours: but have you
resolution enough to perform them? Can you withstand the examples, and
the invitations, of the profligate, and their infamous missionaries? For