58. The generality of mankind pay less attention to arguments urged against their opinion, than to such as may engage the disputant to adopt their own. 59. In times of faction and intrigue, whatever appears inert is reckoned mysterious by those who are not accustomed to affairs of moment. 60. It is never allowable in an inferior to equal himself in words to a superior, although he may rival him in actions. 61. Every man whom chance alone has, by some accident, made a public character, hardly ever fails of becoming, in a short time, a ridiculous private one. 62. The greatest imperfection of men is the complacency with which they are willing to think others not free from faults, of which they are themselves conscious. 63. Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with them hereafter. 64. In the management of important business, all turn to raillery must be more carefully avoided than in any other. 65. In momentous transactions, words cannot be sufficiently weighed. 66. The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune. 67. Whoever assembles the multitude will raise commotions. LORD CHESTERFIELD’S REMARKS UPON THE FOREGOING MAXIMS. I have taken the trouble of extracting and collecting, for your use, the foregoing Political Maxims of the Cardinal de Retz, in his Memoirs. They are not aphorisms of his invention, but the true and just observations of his own experience, in the course of great business. My own experience attests the truth of them all. Read them over with attention as here above, and then read with the same attention, and _tout de suite_, the Memoirs, where you will find the facts and characters from whence those observations are drawn, or to which they are applied; and they will reciprocally help to fix each other in your mind. I hardly know any book so necessary for a young man to read and remember. You will there find how great business is really carried on; very differently from what people, who have never been concerned in it, imagine. You will there see what courts and courtiers really are, and observe that they are neither so good as they should be, nor so bad as they are thought by most people. The court poet, and the sullen, cloistered pedant, are equally mistaken in their notions, or at least in the accounts they give us of them. You will observe the coolness in general, the perfidy in some cases, and the truth in a very few, of court friendships. This will teach you the prudence of a general distrust, and the imprudence of making no exception to that rule, upon good and tried grounds. You will see the utility of good breeding toward one’s greatest enemies, and the high imprudence and folly of either insulting or injurious expressions. FOOTNOTES