situation will facilitate your progress; consider then this pleasing prospect as attentively for yourself, as I consider it for you. Labor on your part to realize it, as I will on mine to assist and enable you to do it. Nullum numen abest, si sit prudentia. [Same date.]
A Reference at Court.—I would wish you to
be able to talk upon all these things, better and with
more knowledge than other people; insomuch that,
upon those occasions, you should be applied to, and
that people should say, I dare say Mr. Stanhope can
tell us. Second-rate knowledge, and middling talents,
carry a man farther at courts, and in the busy part
of the world, than superior knowledge and shining
parts. Tacitus very justly accounts for a man's
having always kept in favor, and enjoyed the best
employments, under the tyrannical reigns of three
or four of the very worst emperors, by saying that it
was not propter aliquam eximiam artem, sed quia
par negotiis neque supra erat. Discretion is the
great article; all those things are to be learned and
only learned by keeping a great deal of the best company.
Frequent those good houses where you have
already a footing, and wriggle yourself somehow or
other into every other. Haunt the courts particularly,
in order to get that routine. [June 20, 1751.]
