FRIENDSHIP
YOUNG persons have commonly an unguarded frankness
about them, which makes them the easy prey and bubbles of the artful and
experienced: they look upon every knave or fool who tells them that he is their
friend, to be really so; and pay that profession of simulated friendship with
an indiscreet and unbounded confidence, always to their loss, often to their
ruin. Beware of these preferred friendships. Receive them with great civility,
but with great incredibility too; and pay them with compliments, but not with
confidence. Do not suppose that people become friends at first sight, or even
upon a short acquaintance. Real friendship is a slow grower; and never thrives,
unless engrafted upon a stock of known and reciprocal merit.
There is another kind of nominal friendship
among young people, which is warm for the time, but luckily of short duration.
This friendship is hastily produced by their being accidentally thrown
together, and pursuing the same course of riot and debauchery. A fine
friendship, truly! and well cemented by drunkenness and lewdness! It should
rather be called a conspiracy against morals and good manners, and be punished
as such by the civil magistrate. However, they have the imprudence and the
folly to call this confederacy “a friendship.” They lend one another money for
bad purposes; they engage in quarrels, offensive and defensive, for their
accomplices; they tell one another all they know, and often more too; when, on
a sudden, some accident disperses them, and they think no more of each other, unless
it be to betray and laugh at their imprudent confidence.
When a man uses strong protestations or
oaths to make you believe a thing, which is of itself so probable that the bare
saying of it would be sufficient, depend upon it he deceives you, and is highly
interested in making you believe it, or else he would not take so much pains.
Remember to make a great difference
between companions and friends; for a very complaisant and agreeable companion
may, and often does, prove a very improper and a very dangerous friend. People
will, in a great degree, form their opinion of you, upon that which they have
of your friends; and there is a Spanish proverb, which says, very justly, “Tell
me with whom you live, and I will tell you who you are.” One may fairly suppose,
that a man who makes a knave or a fool his friend, has something very bad to do
or to conceal. But at the same time that you carefully decline the friendship
of knaves and fools, if it can be called “friendship,” there is no occasion to make
either of them your enemies, wantonly and unprovoked; for they are numerous
bodies; and I would rather choose a secure neutrality than alliance or war with
either of them. You may be a declared enemy to their vices and follies, without
being marked out by them as a personal one. Their enmity is the next dangerous
thing to their friendship. Have a real reserve with almost everybody; and have
a seeming reserve with almost nobody; for it is very disagreeable to seem
reserved, and very dangerous not to be so. Few people find the true medium:
many are ridiculously mysterious and reserved upon trifles; and many
imprudently communicative of all they know.
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