2 - Delicate Arab Maidens and Liquid Ruby (1770–1772)

Summary

Once Jones was certain of the Spencers' willingness for him to be friends with Althorp, he answered the boy's letter:

I have entirely dropped my connexion with your papa as your tutor, for many reasons which at your age you will not be able to comprehend, but which I will fully explain to you five or six years hence. I am now a member of the Middle Temple, and am studying the Laws of my country: I shall be called to the bar this time three years, where I hope you will come and hear me plead. Till that time I shall live chiefly at Oxford; but after that I shall enter into publick life.

(1:77)

The ending of the tutorship did not end Jones's practice of composing instructional letters. Now they were openly modeled on Cicero's letters to Atticus, in informal adult tutoring that was to continue throughout his life. The relationship was sensitively qualified: “You will be a man as far superior to Atticus, as I shall be inferior to Cicero.” He urged Althorp to read “Middleton's short account of Cicero's studies from the time of his wearing the toga virilis to his first publick magistracy, or rather Cicero's own account of them at the end of his Famous Orators. What on earth can hinder you from pursuing the same course?” Later, on the law circuits, he wrote letters “in the old Ciceronian method upon the road or even at table” (1:152, 191–2; 2:486).