OF SEEMING WISE 63 



sufficiency. Seeming wise men may make shift to get 

 opinion ; but let no man choose them for employment ; 

 for certainly you were better take for business a man 

 somewhat absurd than over-formal. 



XXVII 

 OF FRIENDSHIP 



IT had been hard for him that spake it to have put more 

 truth and untruth together in few words, than in that 

 speech, * Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild 

 beast or a god.' For it is most true that a natural and 

 secret hatred and aversation towards society in any man, 

 hath somewhat of the savage beast ; but it is most untrue 

 that it should have any character at all of the divine 

 nature ; except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, 

 but out of a love and desire to sequester a man's self for a 

 higher conversation : such as is found to have been falsely 

 and feignedly in some of the heathen ; as Epimenides the 

 Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and 

 Apollonius of Tyana ; and truly and really in divers of the 

 ancient hermits and holy fathers of the church. But little 

 do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. 

 For a crowd is not company ; and faces are but a gallery 

 of pictures ; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is 

 no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little : Magna 

 civitas, magna solitudo ; because in a great town friends are 

 scattered ; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most 

 part, which is in less neighbourhoods. But we may go 

 further, and affirm most truly that it is a mere and miser- 

 able solitude to want true friends ; without which the 

 world is but a wilderness ; and even in this sense also of 

 solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affec- 

 tions is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and 

 not from humanity. 



A priji^i^l^fniit__ofjfr]endship is the ease and discharge 

 of {heTulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of 



