ch counter, observing the moods and whims of the white-coated
pie-passer, and by the time you have juggled a couple of fried eggs you
will have caught some grasp of his philosophy of life, seen the quick
edge and tang of his humour, memorized the shrewdness of his worldly
insight and been as truly stimulated as if you had spent an evening with
your favourite parson.

If there were no such thing as friendship existing to-day, it would
perhaps be difficult to understand what it is like from those who have
written about it. We have tried, from time to time, to read Emerson's
enigmatic and rather frigid essay. It seems that Emerson must have put
his cronies to a severe test before admitting them to the high-vaulted
and rather draughty halls of his intellect. There are fine passages in
his essay, but it is intellectualized, bloodless, heedless of the
trifling oddities of human intercourse that make friendship so
satisfying. He seems to insist upon a sterile ceremony of mutual
self-improvement, a kind of religious ritual, a profound interchange of
doctrines between soul and soul. His friends (one gathers) are to be
antisepticated, all the poisons and pestilence of their faulty humours
are to be drained away before they may approach the white and icy
operating table of his heart. "Why insist," he says, "on rash personal
relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his wife and
family?" And yet does not the botanist like to study the flower in the
soil where it grows?

Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be an authority on
friendship. The Polonius family must have been a thoroughly dreary one
to live with; we have often thought that poor Ophelia would have gone
mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet. Laertes preaches to
Ophelia; Polonius preaches to Laertes. Laertes escaped by going abroad,
but the girl had to stay at home. Hamlet saw that pithy old Polonius was
a preposterous and orotund ass. Polonius's doctrine of friendship--"The
friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul
with hoops of steel"--was, we trow, a necessary one in his case. It
would need a hoop of steel to keep them near such a dismal old
sawmonger.

Friendships, we think, do not grow up in any such carefully tended and
contemplated fashion as Messrs. Emerson and Polonius suggest. They begin
haphazard. As we look back on the first time we saw our friends we find
that generally our original impression was c