I know well that delicious, dreaming, holiday-life of Italy, so sweet to men of learning and imagination--so sweet, too, to youth--so sweet to pleasure! But, Ernest, do you not feel already how it enervates ?--how the luxurious _far niente_ unfits us for grave exertion?
Men may become too refined and too fastidious for useful purposes; and nowhere can they become so more rapidly than in Italy.

My dear Ernest, I know you well; you are not made to sink down into a virtuoso, with a cabinet full of cameos and a head full of pictures; still less are you made to be an indolent _cicisbeo_ to some fair Italian, with one passion and two ideas: and yet I have known men as clever as you, whom that bewitching Italy has sunk into one or other of these insignificant beings.

Don't run away with the notion that you have plenty of time before you.

You have no such thing.

At your age, and with your fortune (I wish you were not so rich), the holiday of one year becomes the custom of the next.