"Since this is my first letter that ever I did write to you, I will not that it be all empty of some advices, which my natural care of you provoketh me to wish you to follow. Let your first action be the lifting up of your mind to Almighty God by hearty prayer; and feelingly digest the words you speak in prayer, with continual meditation and thinking of Him to whom you pray and of the matter for which you pray. And use this as an ordinary act, and at an ordinary hour. Whereby the time itself will put you in remembrance to do that which you are accustomed to do in that time. Apply your study to such hours as your discreet master doth assign you, earnestly; and the time I know he will so limit as shall be both sufficient for your learning and for your health. And mark the sense and the matter of that you read, as well as the words; so shall you both enrich your tongue with words and your wit with matter; and judgment will grow as years grow in you. Be humble and obedient to your master, for unless you frame yourself to obey others, yea, and feel in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be able to teach others how to obey you.... Give yourself to be merry, for you degenerate from your father if you do not find yourself most able in wit and body and to do anything when you be most merry; but let your mirth be ever void of all scurrility and biting words to any man, for a wound given by a word is oftentimes harder to be cured than that which is given with the sword.... Think upon every word that you will speak before you utter it, and remember how Nature hath ramparted up, as it were, the tongue with teeth, lips, yea, and hair without the lips, and all betokening reins or bridles for the loose use of that member. Above all things, tell no untruth; no, not in trifles; the custom of it is naughty. And let it not satisfy you that, for a time, the hearers take it for truth; for after it will be known as it is, to your shame; for there cannot be a greater reproach to a gentleman than to be counted a liar. Study and endeavour yourself to be virtuously occupied; so shall you make such a habit of well-doing in you that you shall not know how to do evil though you would." To this letter the Lady Mary wrote a postscript full of wise and tender sympathy, in which she speaks of her desire that God shall plant in him His grace, and advises him to read over every four or five days the "excellent counsels" of his father.