Chapter I: Think That Is Why

the very deepest philosophers grow sad when they touch the question of friendship. The problem is itself the saddest of commentaries upon the weakness of our higher faculties. Separate man from his wife and family and view him in his relations to other persons similarly placed, and the result is not only unsatisfactory, but distressing to a mind anxious to hold to a good opinion of humanity. Put to the right test the quality of human friendship is found to be highly strained--to be liable to curdle in the first thundershower--to sour upon the sensitive stomach. We at once behold mankind forced to flee to God's kind institution of the family and the home to escape a desolation of the heart which follows fruitless efforts to kindle a blaze out of the damp driftwood of life's general associations.

Now, what is possible? Spot friendship is possible, and delightful. "To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day." Man is a social animal. He "gregates," he flocks. Of nothing am I fonder than the sparkle of a friend's eye, and the gabble of half an hour, or three hours. But I ought not to build on any future gabbles, for, to-morrow, lo! my friend may have discovered my ignoble reality, whereas he has heretofore been shaking hands with my noble ideality.

ANOTHER THING

should always be considered: "Kindred weaknesses" says Bovee, "induce friendships as often as kindred virtues." Here is Herder's beautiful view: "As the shadow in early morning, is friendship with the wicked; it dwindles hour by hour. But friendship with the good increases, like the evening shadows, till the sun of life sets." "People young, and raw, and soft-natured," says South, "think it an easy thing to gain love, and reckon their own friendships a sure price of any man's: but when experience shall have shown them the hardness of most hearts, the hollowness of others, and the baseness and ingratitude of almost all, they will then find that

A TRUE FRIEND IS THE GIFT OF GOD,

and that He only who made hearts can unite them." Says the wise Lord Bacon: "It is a good discretion not to make too much of any man at the first; because one cannot hold out that proportion," and that is so, for some of the strongest bonds of friendship ever felt have been woven without thought of pleasure on either side at the commencement.

"Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." "I am distressed for thee, my brother, Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of woman."

"Very few friends," says Sydney Smith, "will bear to be told of their faults; and, if done at all, it must be done with infinite management and delicacy; for if you indulge often in this practice, men think you hate, and avoid you. If the evil is not very alarming, it is better, indeed, to let it alone, and not to turn friendship into a system of lawful and unpunishable impertinence. I am for frank explanations with friends in cases of affront. They sometimes

SAVE A PERISHING FRIENDSHIP,

and even place it on a firmer basis than at first; but secret discontent must always end badly."

Let us love our friends for what they are to-day--not for what they will be when we come to make unreasonable demands on them. The sun is beautiful and delightful. It will not shine for us in the night nor, in the daytime shine for us alone. We were bereft of our minds did we, therefore, enter a cave and forswear all further pleasure in its genial rays.

IT IS EASIER TO RAIL

against friendship than to enact our parts in that drama of life which is to elevate the term. Thus we hear Goldsmith cry--

What is friendship but a name,
A charm that lulls to sleep,
A shade that follows wealth or fame,
And leaves the wretch to weep.

Yet this same Goldsmith was a burden on his friends. He did his duty to posterity, in leaving them beautiful literature and song, but to his own associates he was unsparing in his good-natured demands. It is safe to say that he who tries to ennoble friendship is best worthy of the name of friend, and he who belittles it, has fewer claims to man's humanity. Everytime we deny the existence of a satisfying, friendship, we proclaim aloud our own baseness. Let us avoid it.

ENVY

Envy will merit as its shade pursue,
But, like a shadow, proves the substance true.

Pope.--Essay on Criticism.

No passion has been more universally recognized than envy as the basest of all the traits that undermine the nobility of man; and yet there is no obnoxious quality so universal in men's characters. In the life of the good man it reminds one of the mice, in our houses, which eat their way to our attention and their own destruction; for there are few men who have looked into their own hearts who have not seen the small but odious traces of this gnawing evil. Again, the mind of the bad man, who has given himself entirely up to envy, is

A WOLF'S DEN--

a howling pandemonium, where no quarter is given, and where the merits of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast. The Bible says that envy is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has finally reached the framework of the structure. Society as now organized is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish. When, as in Æsop's fables,

A TAILLESS FOX

is found advocating the disuse of tails, he is at once suspected, and his influence greatly limited. For the world is waking up to the meanness of envy. The world, in its better moments, is rising above it. It is one of our principal duties, on entering the Temple of Life, to search our hearts for the little fox with the sharp tooth. When we find ourselves about to enter upon a course of action, either momentary or long continuous, which will be adverse to another of our fellow-creatures, let us ask: "Is there anything of envy in this act?" If there be, let us refrain from acting--the soul is not yet pure, the body fragrant.

Let us see how ignorant this contemptible quality of envy becomes under the lenses of practical life. "Base envy withers at another's joy." What has caused it? In nine cases out of every ten, it is simply the one-sided view of an ignorant mind, which sees only the bare result of unceasing efforts. Envy sees Fame on the peak. Envy therefore hates Fame, and declares that there are no crags, or rifts, or snows, or storms on the way up--that, the path is an easy one, over which all who ever went that way traveled in preference to all other routes!

I lay upon a boarding-house bed day after day, one summer, sick of a fever. On the one side, a building was going up, and workmen filled the air with mighty din. On the other side, a young man sang

"DO, HOORAY, ME, FAH, SOLE, LAH, SE, DO!"

I thought: "The one will be a grand house, and the other will be a great tenor, but oh the way is long. The feet grow weary!"

It has often seemed to me that this was my first true view of life, and nowadays, when--I am tired, especially,--I do not envy the truly great in any avenue of distinction. The walker has walked, the builder has groaned, the fighter has fought, the scribe has scribbled, the statesman has lied and betrayed. Any one of them will tell you his pay has been sadly inadequate.

TAKE A MAN LIKE THEIRS.

Born in an age still drunk with the glory of Napoleon, but himself infused with ideas of popular liberty; chained to the chariot of circumstances, and made to swell the sawdust-magnificence of unpopular kings and the ridiculous success of Napoleon III., the greatest impostor of all history, this Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers went through a life the bare retrospect of which would actually tire the mind. In his old age this little lover and critic of greatness--this man who could show the weaknesses of Napoleon Bonaparte so clearly that one would feel the critic must be the superior of Napoleon--this squeak-voiced orator, must have felt that whatever greatness might come to him in history was well-earned--that the way had indeed been long!

THE SAME OF GLADSTONE.

Who in his sane mind would be Gladstone living any more than Homer living? Of course, he survives those horrible crises in which public duty has made him the most pitiable object, and in the most dreadful complication of great interests shines forth as Venus fresh-lighted. But I would not have Gladstone's fame for the boon of rest eternal, from fear that his retrospect of inconsistency and apostacy would be its accompaniment, its deeper shadow. Yet who shall blame Gladstone? He was the executor and administrator of the policy of a parvenu Jew, one of the very bad men of the earth. He

REAPED ANOTHER MAN'S WHIRLWINDS.

Forced into geographical relations with the Irish, an unwarlike people with indomitable tongues, England has in the middle ages, naturally done to this unwarlike people just what a warlike people would do in the middle ages--taken everything. With painful volubility the unwarlike people has for centuries sounded its fate over the world, touching the heart of Gladstone and other good Englishmen, and tempting him and them to many struggles. Behold him at the next step, then, in the role of warring upon the unwarlike, of oppressing the oppressed, of answering an Irish clack with a British click! Is it not pitiful? Gladstone fell ill from it. He paid there and then for his illustrious name. And, next, of those brave Boers! God nerved their quick muscles and darted straight their wonderful eye; and when the single hand rose against the hundred hands of British Briarius they were not forsaken. Oh! how clearly that question seemed to an American! No geographical necessity was there--no race hatred, no hotbed to foment conspiracy against the sister country England. The independence of those Boers, if they desired it, ought to have been fought for by England, by Gladstone, willingly, irresistibly--in the very name of England's own love of liberty for herself. And finally Gladstone so saw it.

What a puzzle are those Hibernians!

HOW BITING THE WITTICISM OF CHIN LAN PIN,

the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, that they are able to govern every other country save their own! Behold a statesman like Gladstone, forced to change his policy toward them the moment he has the responsibility of governing them! Oh! what an opportunity for the little foxes! How easily Envy spears him with its jest! How truly Envy shines with the wings of that fly that passes all the sounder parts of a man's body to dwell upon the sores! In this rapid glance across two of the trials of a great man, across the path up to the peak where one clambering must bind himself with strong ropes to his companions, that if one sink into a snow-covered abyss the others may bring him forth--we get, perhaps, a truer view of

THE MEANESS OF ENVY.

Let us look at Gladstone as the great, wise, good, learned man he is, whose wreath of laurel covers a crown of thorns. And if we find an associate making those fatiguing efforts that ever precede the recognition of this cold world, let us glance rather at his efforts than at his fame, that no rust may gather on the brightness of our eye, and no withering cloud shut out the sunlight from our spirits.