the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and
Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really, in divers of the ancient
hermits and holy fathers of the church. But little do men perceive what
solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and
faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal,
where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: Magna
civitas, magna solitudo; because in a great town friends are scattered;
so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in
less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that
it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which
the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude,
whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for
friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the
fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause
and induce. We know diseases of stoppings, and suffocations, are the
most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind;
you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers
of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt
openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs,
joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the
heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.

It is a strange thing to observe, how high a rate great kings and
monarchs do set upon this fruit of friendship, whereof we speak: so
great, as they purchase it, many times, at the hazard of their own
safety and greatness. For princes, in regard of the distance of their
fortune from that of their subjects and servants, cannot gather this
fruit, except (to make themselves capable thereof) they raise some
persons to be, as it were, companions and almost equals to themselves,
which many times sorteth to inconvenience. The modern languages give
unto such persons the name of favorites, or privadoes; as if it were
matter of grace, or conversation. But the Roman name attaineth the true
use and cause thereof, naming them participes curarum; for it is that
which tieth the knot. And we see plainly that this hath been done, not
by weak and passionate princes only, but by the wisest and most politic
that ever reigned; who have oftentimes joined t