It seems to be a moral law of our species that new friends, however gratefully they accept one’s services, so long as they are needed, have a disposition to drop off when they can no longer profit by them. Such friendships are like a fever which runs its course; a fever sometimes affecting a whole family, and then not leaving a symptom behind.
Nevertheless, a good acquaintance is a very pleasant thing, even though its benefits on both sides may balance and explain each other.
There are some who practice friendship quite naturally, others who are only skilled in it as a game. It would prove amusing to make a good classification of one’s friends, as is done of the animal kingdom, by dividing them into warm-blooded, (hæmatotherma) and cold-blooded friends (hæmatocrya). We are all too fond of forming friendships. I have often observed that nothing is more fatiguing than what is generally called a night’s rest, unless it be the dream and its final result, that we have made friends! Dreams are as laborious and realistic as realities; the nervous powers are put through walks and conversings with strangers, as well as acquaintances, some dead long ago. One has introductions, dialogues as with the living; but what is so amusing and ludicrous, many dream that they have made new friends, to find it was in their sleep!
Regarding friendship, how often it is only theoretic; intimacy without intercourse; instead of active only passive sympathy, the philosophical equivalent of cement, such as isinglass or glue! When friends have a common interest, how they stick to each other! There is still another kind of friendship of an agueish type, which one might call intermittent. It has some foundation in a community of nature, but is unable to sustain itself continuously, showing itself in fits. It is the most aggravating of all social alliances, and would be better extinct.
At Brighton I enjoyed the inestimable friendship of Sir David Scott, a leading magistrate there, of very high social rank—in fact, the most important personage of the place at a time when it needed men of influence to direct it towards its present unrivalled position.
As a young man, Sir David Scott succeeded to the baronetcy of Sir James Sibbald, of Sillwood Park, and he bore the addition of K.H.G., an order that was extinguished with the severance of Hanover from our ruling sovereigns, on the accession of Victoria. This order, the use of which has been very much replaced by that of the Bath, was conferred on Sir David by George the Fourth, whose life he probably saved by having a madman arrested at Brighton, who was provided with pistols to shoot the king. Sir David, a true gentleman without being a courtier, and therefore at home in all that related to good breeding, once gave me an amusing account of his interview with the “first gentleman in Europe,” telling with much gusto an anecdote of the king’s studied elegance even in taking a pinch of snuff. “I perceive, Sir David,” he said, “that you take snuff; allow me to offer you a pinch from my box.” This Sir David took, shaking his thumb and finger over the box, as one ordinarily does, not to waste any of the precious powder on withdrawing the hand.