“I have often check’d my inclination to write to you while you were at Eton for fear of calling you off from your school exercises; but as you are now in a situation, where there is a vacancy of business and pleasure, I do not feel the same scruples, may write you long letters, and expect full answers to them. However, I will be so far reasonable, that if you send me a card, to signify that you are engaged for the week, or month, to Cicero or Livy, it will be a more valid excuse to me than if, on inviting you to dinner, you told me you were engaged to a beauty or a Duchess. My love for you, my hope of you, my wishes for you, and my expectations from you, unite in giving me a respect for your time, and a deep concern for your employment of it. The morning of life, like the morning of the day, should be dedicated to business. On the proper use of that ‘sweet hour of prime’ will depend the glory of your noon of life, and serenity of the evening. Give it, therefore, dear Mr. Lyttelton, to the strenuous exertion and labour of the mind, before the indolence of the meridian hour, or the unabated fervour of the exhausted day renders you unfit for severe application. I hope you will not (like many young men who have been reckoned good scholars at Eton and Westminster) take leave of it there, and fall into the study of _les belles lettres_, as we call our modern books. I suppose from the same courtesy the weakest part of the rational species is styled the fair sex, though it can boast of few perfect beauties, and perhaps the utmost grace and dignity of the human form is never found in it. As you have got a key to the sacred shades of Parnassus, do not lose your time in sauntering in the homely orchards or diminutive pleasure gardens of the latter times. If the ancient inhabitants of Parnassus were to look down from their immortal bowers on our labyrinths, whose greatest boast is a fanciful intricacy, our narrow paths where genius cannot take his bounding steps, and all the pert ornaments in our parterres of wit, they would call them the modern’s folly; a name the wise farmer often gives to some spot from whence the Squire has banished the golden harvest, to trim it up for pleasure with paltry ornaments and quaint conceits. I should be sorry to see you quit Thucydides for Voltaire, Livy for Vertot, Xenophon for the bragging Memoirs of French Marshals, and the universal Tully and deep Tacitus for speculative politicians, modern orators, and the dreamers in Universities or convents. I will own that in Natural Philosophy and some of the lesser branches of learning the Moderns excel; but it would not be right for a person of your situation to strike into any private paths of Science. The study of History will best fit you for active life. From history you will acquire a knowledge of mankind, and a true judgment in politics; in moral, as well as physical enquiries, we should have recourse to experiments.