the social bond is a matter of instinct, not of
calculation; not a cold commercial contract of profit and loss, of giving
and receiving, but the fulfilment of one of the yearnings of our nature.
Here he is in full accordance with the teaching of Aristotle, who, of
all the various kinds of friendship to which he allows the common name,
pronounces that which is founded merely upon interest--upon mutual
interchange, by tacit agreement, of certain benefits--to be the least
worthy of such a designation. Friendship is defined by Cicero to be "the
perfect accord upon all questions, religious and social, together with
mutual goodwill and affection". This "perfect accord", it must be
confessed, is a very large requirement. He follows his Greek masters again
in holding that true friendship can exist only amongst the good; that, in
fact, all friendship must assume that there is something good and lovable
in the person towards whom the feeling is entertained it may occasionally
be a mistaken assumption; the good quality we think we see in our friend
may have no existence save in our own partial imagination; but the
existence of the counterfeit is an incontestable evidence of the true
original. And the greatest attraction, and therefore the truest
friendships, will always be of the good towards the good.

He admits, however, the notorious fact, that good persons are sometimes
disagreeable; and he confesses that we have a right to seek in our
friends amiability as well as moral excellence. "Sweetness", he
says--anticipating, as all these ancients so provokingly do, some of our
most modern popular philosophers--"sweetness, both in language and in
manner, is a very powerful attraction in the formation of friendships". He
is by no means of the same opinion as Sisyphus in Lord Lytton's 'Tale of
Miletus'--

"Now, then, I know thou really art my friend,--
None but true friends choose such unpleasant words".

He admits that it is the office of a friend to tell unpleasant truths
sometimes; but there should be a certain amount of this indispensable
"sweetness" to temper the bitterness of the advice. There are some friends
who are continually reminding you of what they have done for you--"a
disgusting set of people verily they are", says our author. And there are
others who are always thinking themselves slighted; "in which case there
is generally something of which they are conscious in themselves, as
laying them open to contemptuous t