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Advice on the Choice of a Mistressby Benjamin FranklinPhiladelphia, June 25, 1745

My dear Friend:

I know of no medicine fit to diminish the violent natural inclinations you mention; and if I did, Ithink I should not communicate it to you. Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most naturalstate of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness. Yourreasons against entering into it at present, appear to me not well founded. The circumstantial

advantages you have in View by postponing it, are not only uncertain, but they are small incomparison with that of the thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the man and womanunited that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strengthof reason; he, her fitness, sensibility, and acute discernment. Together they are more likely tosucceed in the world. A single man has not nearly the Value he would have in the state of union.He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. If you get a prudenthealthy wife, your industry in your profession, with her good economy, will be a fortune sufficientBut if you will not take this counsel and persist in thinking a commerce with the sex inevitable, then I repeat my former

advice, that in all your amours you shouldprefer old women to young ones. You call this a paradox, and demand my

reasons. They are these:

Because as they have more knowledge of the world and their minds are better stored with observations, their conversation

more improving and more lastingly agreeable.

Because when women cease to be handsome they study to be good. To maintain their influence over men, they supply the

diminution of beauty by an augmentation of utility. They learn to do a thousand services small and great, and are the most

tender and useful of all friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to bfound as an old woman who is not a good woman.

Because there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produc'd may be attended with much inconvenience.

Because through more experience they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an intrigue to prevent suspicion. The

commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the affair should happen

to be known, considerate people might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old woman, who would kindly take care of a young

man, form his manners by her good counsels, and prevent his ruining his health and fortune among mercenary prostitutes.

Because in every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest

Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the neck; then the breast and arms; the lower parts continuing to the lastas plump as ever; so that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of

two women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all cats are gray, the pleasure of corporal enjoyment with

an old woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement.

Because the sin is less. The debauching a virgin may be her ruin, and make her for life unhappy.

Because the compunction is less. The having made a young girl miserable may give you frequent bitter reflection; none of

which can attend the making an old woman happy.

8thly and lastly. They are so grateful!!

Thus much for my paradox. But still I advise you to marry directly; being sincerely

Your affectionate friend,

B. Franklin

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Essays and Essayists

by William Ernest Henley

It is our misfortune that of good essayists there should be but few. Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to

have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity

that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable. There are folk in plenty who have neve

read Montaigne at all; but there are few indeed who have read but a page of him, and that page but once. And the same may be saidofAddisonand Fielding, ofLamband Hazlitt, of Sterne and Baconand Ben Jonson, and all the members of their goodly fellowship. T

sit down with any one of them is to sit down in the company of one of the "mighty wits, our elders and our betters," who have done

much to make literature a good thing, having written books that are eternally readable. If of all them that have tried to write essays and

succeeded after a fashion a twentieth part so much could be said the world would have a conversational literature of inexhaustible

interest. But indeed there is nothing of the sort. Beside the "rare and radiant" masters of the art there are the apprentices, and these aremany and dull.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading

Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function "to speak

with ease and opportunity to all men." He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid an

sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eythat is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable. He should have fancy, or his starveling

propositions will perish for lack ofmetaphorand the tropesand figuresneeded to vitalise a truism. He does well to have humour, for

humour makes men brothers, and is perhaps more influential in an essay than in most places else. He will find a little wit both

serviceable to himself and comfortable to his readers. For wisdom, it is not absolutely necessary that he have it, but in its way it is as

good a property as any: used with judgment, indeed, it does more to keep an essay sweet and fresh than almost any other quality. And

default of wisdom--which, to be sure, it is not given to every man, much less to every essayist, to entertain--he need have no scruples

about using whatever common sense is his; for common sense is a highly respectable commodity, and never fails of a wide and eager

circle of buyers. A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer's best reason of being, and without it he doeswell to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and

hisdiscourse may well become as popular as Montaigne's own.

For the British essayists, they are more talked about than known. It is to be suspected that from the first their reputation has greatly

exceeded their popularity; and of late years, in spite of the declamation ofMacaulayand the very literary enthusiasm of the artist

ofEsmondandThe Virginians[William Makepeace Thackeray], they have fallen further into the background, and are less than ever

studied with regard. In theory the age of Anne is still the Augustan age to us; but in theory only, and only to a certain extent. What

attracts us is its outside. We are in love with its houses and its china and its costumes. We are not enamoured of it as it was but as it

seems to Mr. Caldecott and Mr. Dobson and Miss Kate Greenaway. We care little for its comedy and nothing at all for its tragedy. Itsverse is all that our own is not, and the same may be said of its prose and ours--of the prose of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredit

and the prose of Addison and Swift. Mr. Gladstone is not a bit like Bolingbroke, and between The Times and The Tatler, between The

Spectator(Mr. Addison's), and The Fortnightly Review, there is a difference of close upon two centuries and of a dozen revolutions--

political, social, scientific, and aesthetic. We may babble as we please about the "sweetness" of Steele and the "humour" of Sir Roger d

Coverley, but in our hearts we care for them a great deal less than we ought, and in fact Mr. Mudie's subscribers do not hesitate to prefthe "sweetness" of Mr. Black and the "humour" of Mr. James Payn. Our love is not for the essentials of the time but only its accidents

and oddities; and we express it in pictures and poems and fantasies in architecture, and the canonisation (in figures) of Chippendale an

Sheraton. But it is questionable if we might not with advantage increase our interest, and carry imitation a little deeper. The Essayists,

for instance, are often dull, but they write like scholars and gentlemen. They refrain from personalities; they let scandal alone, nor ever

condescend to eavesdropping; they never go out of their way in search of affectation or prurience or melancholy, but are content to bemerely wise and cheerful and humane. Above all, they do their work as well as they can. They seem to write not for bread nor for a

place in society but for the pleasure of writing, and of writing well. In these hysterical times life is so full, so much is asked and so mu

has to be given, that tranquil writing and careful workmanship are impossible. A certain poet [Austin Dobson] has bewailed the change

in a charming rondeau:

More swiftly now the hours take flight!

What's read at morn is dead at night;

Scant space have we for art's delays,

Whose breathless thought so briefly stays,We may not work--ah! would we might,

With slower pen!

It must be owned that his melancholy is anything but groundless. The trick of amenity and good breeding is lost; the graces of an

excellence that is unobtrusive are graces no more. We write as men paint for the exhibitions: with the consciousness that we must pass

without notice if we do not exceed in colour and subject and tone. The need exists, and the world bows to it. Mr. Austin Dobson's little

sheaf ofEighteenth Century Essays might be regarded as a protest against the necessity and the submission. It proves that 'tis possible t

be eloquent without adjectives and elegant without affectation; that to be brilliant you need not necessarily be extravagant and

conceited; that without being maudlin and sentimental it is not beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic; and that once upon a time a writecould prove himself a humourist without feeling it incumbent upon him to be also a jack-pudding1.

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In this excerpt from his autobiographicalLife on the Mississippi, American humorist Mark Twain considers what may be

lost as well as gained through knowledge and experience.

When you have finished reading Twain's then-and-now comparison, visit ourQuiz on "Two Ways of Seeing a River."

Two Ways of Seeing a River

by Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the greatriver as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I

had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of

the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A

broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which asolitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in

another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was

faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore o

our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled

trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that

glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected

images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily,

enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything

like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the

moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them.

Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commentedupon it, inwardly, in this fashion: "This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that

the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody'ssteamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a

changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is

shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located

himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is

not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old

landmark?"

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amoun

of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors

from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a "break" that ripples above some

deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay?Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome

condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

(1883)

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