EMPLOYMENT
OF TIME
HOW little do we reflect on the use and value of time!
It is in everybody's mouth, but in few people's practice. Every fool, who
slatterns away his whole time in nothings, frequently utters some trite common-place
sentence to prove, at once, the value and the fleetness of time. The sun-dials,
all over Europe, have some ingenious inscription to that effect; so that nobody
squanders away their time without frequently hearing and seeing how necessary
it is to employ it well, and how irrecoverable it is if lost. Young people are
apt to think they have so much time before them, that they may squander what
they please of it, and yet have enough left; as great fortunes have frequently
seduced people to a ruinous profusion. But all these admonitions are useless,
where there is not a fund of good sense and reason to suggest rather than to
receive them.
IDLENESS
TIME is precious, life short, and consequently not a
single moment should be lost. Sensible men know how to make the most of time,
and put out their whole sum either to interest or pleasure: they are never
idle, but continually employed either in amusements or study. It is an
universal maxim, that idleness is the mother of vice. It is, however, certain,
that laziness is the inheritance of fools; and nothing can be so despicable as
a sluggard. Cato, the censor, a wise and virtuous Roman, used to say, there
were but three actions of his life that he regretted. The first was, the having
revealed a secret to his wife; the second, that he had once gone by sea when he
might have gone by land; and the third, the having passed one day without doing
any thing.
READING
“TAKE care of the pence; for the pounds will take care
of themselves,” was a very just and sensible reflection of old Mr. Lowndes, the
famous secretary of the treasury under William III., Anne, and George I. I
therefore recommend to you to take care of minutes; for hours will take care of
themselves. Be doing something or other all day long; and not neglect half
hours and quarters of hours, which, at the year’s end, amount to a great sum.
For instance, there are many short intervals in the day, between studies and
pleasures: instead of sitting idle and yawning in those intervals, snatch up
some valuable book, and continue the reading of that book till you have got
through it: never burden your mind with more than one thing at a time; and, in
reading this book, do not run it over superficially, but read every passage
twice over, at least: do not pass on to a second, till you thoroughly
understand the first, nor quit the book till you are master of the subject;
for, unless you do this, you may read it through, and not remember the contents
of it for a week. The books I would particularly recommend, amongst others, are
the Marchioness Lambert’s “Advice to her Son and Daughter,” Cardinal Retz’s
“Maxims,” Rochefoucauld’s “Moral Reflections,” Bruyere’s “Characters,”
Fontenelle’s “Plurality of Worlds,” Sir Josiah Child on Trade, Bolingbroke’s
“Works:” for style, his “Remarks on the History of England,” under the name of
Sir John Oldcastle; Puffendorf’s Jus Gentium, and Grotius de jure
Belli et Pacis: the last two are well translated by Barbeyrac. For
occasional half-hours or less, read works of invention, wit, and humour; but
never waste your minutes on trifling authors, either ancient or modern.
Nor are pleasures idleness, or time lost,
provided they are the pleasures of a rational being: on the contrary, a certain
portion of time employed in those pleasures is very usefully employed.
TRANSACTING
BUSINESS
WHATEVER business you have, do it the first moment you
can; never by halves, but finish it without interruption, if possible. Business
must not be sauntered and trifled with; and you must not say to it, as Felix
did to Paul, "At a more convenient season I will speak to thee." The
most convenient season for business is the first; but study and business, in
some measure, point out their own times to a man of sense. Time is much oftener
squandered away in the wrong choice and improper methods of amusement and
pleasures.
METHOD
DISPATCH is the soul of business; and nothing
contributes more to dispatch than method. Lay down a method for everything, and
stick to it inviolably, as far as unexpected incidents may allow. Fix one
certain hour and day in the week for your accounts, and keep them together in
their proper order; by which means they will require very little time, and you
can never be much cheated. Whatever letters and papers you keep, docket and tie
them up in their respective classes, so that you may instantly have recourse to
any one. Lay down a method also for your reading, for which you allot a certain
share of your mornings: let it be in a consistent and consecutive course, and
not in that desultory and immethodical manner, in which many people read scraps
of different authors upon different subjects. Keep a useful and short common-place
book of what you read, to help your memory only, and not for pedantic
quotations. Never read history without having maps, and a chronological book of
tables lying by you, and constantly recurred to; without which history is only
a confused heap of facts.
You will say, it may be, as many young
people would, that all this order and method is very troublesome, only fit for
dull people, and a disagreeable restraint upon the noble spirit and fire of
youth. I deny it; and assert, on the contrary, that it will procure you both
more time and more taste for your pleasures; and so far from being troublesome
to you, that, after you have pursued it a month, it would be troublesome to you
to lay it aside. Business whets the appetite, and gives a taste to pleasures,
as exercise does to food; and business can never be done without method: it
raises the spirits for pleasures; and a spectacle, a ball, an assembly, will
much more sensibly affect a man who has employed, than a man who has lost, the
preceding part of the day; nay, I will venture to say, that a fine lady will
seem to have more charms to a man of study or business than to a saunterer. The
same listlessness runs through his whole conduct, and he is as insipid in his
pleasures, as inefficient in everything else.
I hope you earn your pleasures, and
consequently taste them; for, by the way, I know a great many who call themselves
men of pleasure, but who in truth have none. They adopt other people's
indiscriminately, but without any taste of their own. I have known them often
inflict excesses upon themselves, because they thought them genteel; though
they sat as awkwardly upon them as other people's clothes would have done. Have
no pleasures but your own, and then you will shine in them.
Many people think that they are in
pleasures, provided that they are neither in study nor in business. Nothing
like it: they are doing nothing, and might just as well be asleep. They
contract habitudes from laziness, and they only frequent those places where
they are free from all restraints and attentions. Be upon your guard against
this idle profusion of time; and let every place you go to be either the scene
of quick and lively pleasures, or the school of your own improvements; let
every company you go into either gratify your senses, extend your knowledge, or
refine your manners.
If, by
accident, two or three hours are sometimes wanting for some useful purpose,
borrow them from your sleep. Six, or at most seven hours sleep is, for a
constancy, as much as you or anybody can want; more is only laziness and
dozing; and is both unwholesome and stupefying. If, by chance, your business or
your pleasures should keep you up till four or five o'clock in the morning,
rise exactly at your usual time, that you may not lose the precious morning
hours, and that the want of sleep may force you to go to bed earlier the next
night.
GUARD
AGAINST FRIVOLOUSNESS
ABOVE all things
guard against frivolousness. The frivolous mind is always busied, but to little
purpose: it takes little objects for great ones, and throws away upon trifles
that time and attention which only important things deserve. Knick-knacks,
butterflies, shells, insects, etc., are the subjects of their most serious
researches. They contemplate the dress, not the character, of the company they
keep. They attend more to the decorations of a play than to the sense of it;
and to the ceremonies of a court, more than to its politics. Such an employment
of time is an absolute loss of it.
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