Friendship.

1. One would think that the larger the company is in which we are engaged, the greater variety of thoughts and subjects would be started in discourse; but instead of this, we find that conversation is never so much straitened and confined as in numerous assemblies.

2. When a multitude meet together upon any subject of discourse, their debates are taken up chiefly with forms; and general positions; nay, if we come into a more contracted assembly of men and women, the talk generally runs upon the weather, fashions, news, and the like public topics.

3. In proportion as conversation gets into clubs and knots of friends, it descends into particulars, and grows more free and communicative; but the most open, instructive, and unreserved discourse, is that which passes between two persons who are familiar and intimate friends.

4. On these occasions, a man gives a loose to every passion, and every thought that is uppermost discovers his most retired opinions of persons and things, tries the beauty and strength of his sentiments, and exposes his whole soul to the examination of his friend.

5. Tully was the first who observed, that friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and dividing of our grief; a thought in which he hath been followed by all the essayers upon friendship, that have written since his time. Sir Francis Bacon has finally described other advantages, or, as he calls them, fruits of friendship; and indeed there is no subject of morality which has been better handled and more exhausted than this.

6. Among the several fine things which have been spoken of, I shall beg leave to quote some out of a very ancient author, whose book would be regarded by our modern wits as one of the most shining tracts of morality that is extant, if it appeared under the name of a Confucius or of any celebrated Grecian philosopher; I mean the little Apocryphal Treatise, entitled the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach.

7. How finely has he described the art of making friends, by an obliging and affable behaviour! And laid down that precept which a late excellent author has delivered as his own, "That we should have many well-wishers, but few friends." Sweet language will multiply friends; and a fair-speaking tongue will increase kind greetings. Be in peace with many, nevertheless have but one counsellor of a thousand.

8. With what prudence does he caution us in the choice of our friends! And with what strokes of nature (I could almost say of humour) has he described the behaviour of a treacherous and self-interested friend—"If thou wouldest get a friend, prove him first, and be not hasty to credit him: for some man is a friend for his own occasion, and will not abide in the day of thy trouble."

9. "And there is a friend, who being turned to enmity and strife, will discover thy reproach." Again, "Some friend is a companion at the table, and will not continue in the day of thy affliction: but in thy prosperity he will be as thyself, and will be bold over thy servants. If thou be brought low, he will be against thee, and hide himself from thy face."

10. What can be more strong and pointed than the following verse? "Separate thyself from thine enemies, and take heed of thy friends." In the next words he particularizes one of those fruits of friendship which is described at length by the two famous authors above mentioned, and falls into a general eulogium of friendship, which is very just as well as very sublime.

11. "A faithful friend is a strong defence; and he that hath found such a one, hath found a treasure. Nothing doth countervail a faithful friend, and his excellence is invaluable. A faithful friend is the medicine of life; and they that fear the Lord, shall find him. Whoso feareth the Lord, shall direct his friendship aright; for as he is, so shall his neighbour (that is, his friend) be also."

12. I do not remember to have met with any saying that has pleased me more than that of a friend's being the medicine of life, to express the efficacy of friendship in healing the pains and anguish which naturally cleave to our existence in this world; and am wonderfully pleased with the turn in the last sentence, That a virtuous man shall, as a blessing, meet with a friend who is as virtuous as himself.

13. There is another saying in the same author, which would have been very much admired in an heathen writer: "Forsake not an old friend, for the new is not comparable to him: a new friend is as new wine; when it is old thou shalt drink it with pleasure."

14. With what strength of allusion, and force of thought, has he described the breaches and violations of friendship! "Whoso casteth a stone at the birds, frayeth them away; and he that upbraideth his friend, breaketh friendship. Though thou drawest a sword at a friend, yet despair not, for there may be a returning to favor; if thou hast opened thy mouth against thy friend, fear not, for there may be a reconciliation; except for upbraiding, or pride, or disclosing of secrets, or a treacherous wound; for, for these things, every friend will depart."

15. We may observe in this and several other precepts in this author, those little familiar instances and illustrations which are so much admired in the moral writings of Horace and Epictetus. There are very beautiful instances of this nature in the following pages, which are likewise written upon the same subject:

16. "Whoso discovereth secrets, loseth his credit, and shall never find a friend to his mind. Love thy friend, and be faithful unto him; but if thou betrayest his secret, follow no more after him; for as a man hath destroyed his enemy, so hast thou lost the love of thy friend; as one that letteth a bird go out of his hand, so hast thou let thy friend go, and shall not get him again: follow after him no more, for he is too far off; he is as a roe escaped out of the snare. As for a wound, it may be bound up, and after reviling, there may be reconciliation; but he that betrayeth secrets, is without hope."

17. Among the several qualifications of a good friend, this wise man has very justly singled out constancy and faithfulness as the principal; to these, others have added virtue, knowledge, discretion, equality in age and fortune, and, as Cicero calls it, morum comitas, a pleasantness of temper.

18. If I were to give my opinion upon such an exhausted subject, I should join to these other qualifications a certain æquibility or evenness of behaviour. A man often contracts a friendship with one whom perhaps he does not find out till after a year's conversation: when, on a sudden, some latent ill-humour breaks out upon him, which he never discovered or suspected at his first entering into an intimacy with him.

19. There are several persons who, in some certain periods of their lives, are inexpressibly agreeable, and in others as odious and detestable. Martial has given us a very pretty picture of one of these species in the following epigram:

20. It is very unlucky for a man to be entangled in a friendship with one, who by these changes and vicissitudes of humour is sometimes amiable, and sometimes odious: and as most men are at some times in an admirable frame and disposition of mind, it should be one of the greatest tasks of wisdom to keep ourselves well when we are so, and never to go out of that which is the agreeable part of our character.

SPECTATOR, Vol. 1. No. 68.

21. "Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another." Though the pleasures and advantages of friendship have been largely celebrated by the best moral writers, and are considered by all as great ingredients of human happiness, we very rarely meet with the practice of this virtue an the world.

22. Every man is ready to give a long catalogue of those virtues and good qualities he expects to find in the person of a friend, but very few of us are careful to cultivate them in ourselves.

Love and esteem are the first principles of friendship, which always is imperfect where either of these two is wanting.

23. As on the one hand, we are soon ashamed of loving a man whom we cannot esteem; so on the other, though we are truly sensible of a man's abilities, we can never raise ourselves to the warmths of friendship, without an affectionate good will towards his person.

24. Friendship immediately banishes envy under all its disguises. A man who can once doubt whether he should rejoice in his friend's being happier than himself, may depend upon it, that he is an utter stranger to this virtue.

25. There is something in friendship so very great and noble, that in those fictitious stories which are invented to the honor of any particular person, the authors have thought it as necessary to make their hero a friend as a lover. Achilles has his Patroclus, and Æneas his Achates.

26. In the first of these instances we may observe, for the reputation of the subject I am treating of, that Greece was almost ruined by the hero's love, but was preserved by his friendship.

27. The character of Achates suggests to us an observation we may often make on the intimacies of great men, who frequently choose their companions rather for the qualities of the heart, than those of the head: and prefer fidelity, in an easy, inoffensive, complying temper, to those endowments which make a much greater figure among mankind.

28. I do not remember that Achates, who is represented as the first favourite, either gives his advice, or strikes a blow through the whole Æneid.

A friendship, which makes the least noise, is very often most useful; for which reason I should prefer a prudent friend to a zealous one.

29. Atticus, one of the best men of ancient Rome, was a very remarkable instance of what I am here speaking.—This extraordinary person, amidst the civil wars of his country, when he saw the designs of all parties equally tended to the subvention of liberty, by constantly preserving the esteem and affection of both the competitors, found means to serve his friends on either side: and while he sent money to young Marius, whose father was declared an enemy of the commonwealth, he was himself one of Sylla's chief favourites, and always near that general.

30. During the war between Cæsar and Pompey, he still maintained the same conduct. After the death of Cæsar, he sent money to Brutus, in his troubles, and did a thousand good offices to Anthony's wife and friends, when the party seemed ruined. Lastly, even in that bloody war between Anthony and Augustus, Atticus still kept his place in both their friendships; insomuch, that the first, says Cornelius Nepos, whenever he was absent from Rome, in any part of the empire, writ punctually to him what he was doing, what he read, and whither he intended to go; and the latter gave him constantly an exact account of all his affairs.

31. A likeness of inclinations in every particular is so far from being requisite to form a benevolence in two minds towards each other, as it is generally imagined, that I believe we shall find some of the firmest friendships to have been contracted between persons of different humours; the mind being often pleased with those perfections which are new to it, and which it does not find among its own accomplishments.

32. Besides that a man in some measure supplies his own defects, and fancies himself at second-hand possessed of those good qualities and endowments, which are in the possession of him who in the eye of the world is looked on as his other self.

33. The most difficult province in friendship is the letting a man see his faults and errors, which should, if possible, be so contrived, that he may perceive our advice is given him not so much to please ourselves, as for his own advantage. The reproaches, therefore, of a friend, should always be strictly just, and not too frequent.

34. The violent desire of pleasing in the person reproved may otherwise change into a despair of doing it, while he finds himself censured for faults he is not conscious of. A mind that is softened and humanized by friendship, cannot bear frequent reproaches: either it must quite sink under the oppression, or abate considerably of the value and esteem it had for him who bestows them.

35. The proper business of friendship is to inspire life and courage; and a soul, thus supported, out-does itself; whereas if it be unexpectedly deprived of those succours, it droops and languishes.

36. We are in some measure more inexcusable if we violate our duties to a friend, than to a relation; since the former arise from a voluntary choice, the latter from a necessity, to which we could not give our own consent.

37. As it has been said on one side, that a man ought not to break with a faulty friend, that he may not expose the weakness of his choice; it will doubtless hold much stronger with respect to a worthy one, that he may never be upbraided for having lost so valuable a treasure which was once in his possession.