Page:Letters, sentences and maxims.djvu/317

 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.]

—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.]