sts. That is a silly and effeminate friendship in
which the parties are always thinking of the friendship itself and of
how each stands in the other's eyes; a sentimental fancy of that sort,
in which nothing tangible or ulterior brings people together, is rather
a feeble form of love than properly a friendship. In extreme youth such
a weakness may perhaps indicate capacity for friendship of a nobler
type, because when taste and knowledge have not yet taken shape, the
only way, often, in which ideal interests can herald themselves is in
the guise of some imagined union from which it is vaguely felt they
might be developed, just as in love sexual and social instincts mask
themselves in an unreasoning obsession, or as for mystic devotion every
ideal masks itself in God. All these sentimental feelings are at any
rate mere preludes, but preludes in fortunate cases to more
discriminating and solid interests, which such a tremulous overture may
possibly pitch on a higher key.

[Sidenote: Common interests indispensable.]

The necessity of backing personal attachment with ideal interests is
what makes true friendship so rare. It is found chiefly in youth, for
youth best unites the two requisite conditions--affectionate comradeship
and ardour in pursuing such liberal aims as may be pursued in common.
Life in camp or college is favourable to friendship, for there generous
activities are carried on in unison and yet leave leisure for playful
expansion and opportunity for a choice in friends. The ancients, so long
as they were free, spent their whole life in forum and palaestra, camp,
theatre, and temple, and in consequence could live by friendship even in
their maturer years; but modern life is unfavourable to its continuance.
What with business cares, with political bonds remote and invisible,
with the prior claims of family, and with individualities both of mind
and habit growing daily more erratic, early friends find themselves very
soon parted by unbridgeable chasms. For friendship to flourish personal
life would have to become more public and social life more simple and
humane.

[Sidenote: Friendship between man and wife.]

The tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient
ideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage. In spite of
intellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife are
bound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affection
for children, and, what is of