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 an age when you should study to improve and divert your faculties; you should now lay in a fund of knowledge, which, ripened by time and experience, may make you a worthy member of the commonwealth. Do you apprehend you have nothing to learn, either as to your business, or as to the forming of your mind? Would it not be much better to choose the silent, the sober conversation of books, than such companions as never read or think? When I was your age, pecuniary advantages were laid out in the purchase of instructive friends—I mean books. You would pass many economical and pleasant hours in reading such useful volumes as Mason on Self-Knowledge; Essays on Rhetoric; Tomkin’s Beauties of English Poetry, &c. By applying yourself to books, instead of such vain company, you will in time be qualified for the best sort of society, and be respected by all ranks of men This will keep you out of all unnecessary expences, will employ all your leisure time, will exclude a world of temptations, and open and enlarge your notions of men and things, and finally set you above that wretched company, with which you now seem so much delighted. One thing let me recommend to you, and that is, to keep a list of those young men whom you at present consider as your companions, or of whom you have any knowledge; and, during the next seven years. observe what fate will attend them. See if those who follow not the course you so lately enterred into, will not appear in a very different light from those who do; and from the industry and prosperity of the one, and the decay or failure of the other, (if their vain ways do not destroy them before or as soon as they