My dear Boy:

As you know, I was your father's closest friend for many years, and I have watched with interest, but I confess not without anxiety, your first attempts in a career of which he was in my young days the most brilliant exemplar.

You will not take it ill in a man of my years and in one as devoted to your family as I am and have proved myself to be, if I tender you a word of advice.

The profession upon which you have engaged is one of the most difficult in the world. It does not offer the great prizes which attend the best forms of cheating, bullying, and blackmail, and at the same time it is highly limited, and offers opportunities to only a handful of the finer souls.

[Pg 336]

Nevertheless, I am not writing this to dissuade you for one moment from its pursuit. There is something in the fine arts difficult to define, but very deeply felt by every one, which makes them of themselves a sort of compensation for their economic limitations. The artist, the poet, and the actor expect to live, and hope to live well, but each one knows how few are the prizes, and each in his heart expects something more than a mere money compensation. So should it be in that great profession which you have undertaken in the light of your father's example.

In connection with that, I think it my duty to point out to you that even the greatest success in this special calling is only modest compared with successes obtained at the Bar, in commerce, or even in politics. You will never become a wealthy man. I do not desire it for you. It should be yours, if you succeed, to enjoy wealth without its responsibility, and to consume the good things our civilisation presents to the wealthy without avarice, without[Pg 337] the memory of preceding poverty, and, above all, without the torturing necessity of considering the less fortunate of your kind.

You must not expect, my dear young man, to leave even a modest competence; therefore you must not expect to marry and provide for children. The parasite must be celibate. I have never known the rule to fail, at least in our sex. You will tell me, perhaps, that in the course of your career, continually inhabiting the houses of the rich, studying their manners, and supplying their wants, you cannot fail to meet some heiress; that you do not see why, this being the case, you should not marry her, to your lasting advantage.

Let me beg you, with all the earnestness in my power, to put such thoughts from you altogether. They are as fatal to a parasite's success as early commercial bargaining to that of a painter. You must in the first ten years of your exercises devote yourself wholly to your great calling. By the time you have done that you will have unlearned or forgotten all that[Pg 338] goes with a wealthy marriage; its heavy responsibilities will be odious to you, its sense of dependence intolerable. Moreover (though you may think it a little cynical of me to say so), I must assure you that no one, even a man with your exalted ideal, can make a success of married life unless he enters it with some considerable respect for his partner. Now, it is easy for the man who lays himself out for a rich marriage (and that is a business quite different from your own, and one, therefore, on which I will not enter) to respect his wife. Such men are commonly possessed, or soon become possessed, of a simple and profound religion, which is the worship of money, and when they have found their inevitable choice, her substance, or that of her father, surrounds her with a halo that does not fade. You could hope for no such illusions. The very first year of your vocation (if you pursue it industriously and honestly) will destroy in you the possibility of any form of worship whatsoever. No, it will be yours to take up with dignity, and I trust in[Pg 339] some permanent fashion, that position of parasite which is a proper and necessary adjunct in every wealthy family, and which, when it is once well and industriously occupied, I have never known to fail in promoting the happiness of its incumbent.

Let me turn from all this and give you a few rough rules which should guide you in the earlier part of your way. You will not, I am sure, reject them lightly, coming as they do from a friend of my standing and experience. Young men c............