ESS A YS CIVIL AND MORA T 4 1 



allowed, it rcquireth a new work : which false point of wisdom is the 

 bane of business. To conclude, there is no decaying merchant, or 

 inward beggar, hath so many tricks to uphold the credit of their 

 wealth, as these empty persons have to maintain the credit of their 

 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; &quot;Whosoever 

 is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast, or a God.&quot; 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 fcignedly in some of the heathen ; 

 as Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Kmpedocles 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 cxtendeth. 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 ; &quot; Magna civitas, magna solitudo ; &quot; 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 farther, and 

 affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable 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 

 affections is unfit for friendship, he takcth it of the beast, and not 

 from humanity. 



A principal fruit of friendship is the case and discharge of the 

 fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause 

 and induce. \Vc know diseases of stoppings and suffocations arc the 

 most dangerous in the body ; and it is not much otherwise in the 

 mind ; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, 

 flour of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain ; but no receipt 

 openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, 

 joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the 

 heart, to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession. 



It is a strange thing to observe, how high a rate great kings and 

 monarchs do set upon this fruit of friendship, whereof we speak ; so 

 great, as they purchase it many times at the hazard of their own safety 

 and greatness. For princes, in regard of the distance of their fortune 

 from that of their subjects and servants, cannot gather this fruit, ex 

 cept, to make themselves capable thereof, they raise some persons to 

 be as it were companions, and almost equals to themselves, which 



