In former times when people invited their friends, there was some trouble in welcoming each, and saying something kind to each, about their peculiar concerns. The modern method has changed all that. You send cards to your acquaintances, who come as to a theatre, with this difference, that they rely upon a better provided refreshment room, and nothing to pay. They jostle you about with a delightful freedom and indifference, not knowing you from your own man out of livery, or perhaps mistaking that respectabte personage for yourself, while you are set down as rather an awkward guest from the country. But what matters that? your acquaintances are too guarded to say anything but what is civil, and your heart dilates with joy as you see them criticising and eating what won't cost you more than four or five hundred pounds. How absolutely unselfish this is! Of course whether it be published in the newspapers that you gave this entertainment, and that two or three hundred fashionables did you the honour to eat, drink, yawn, laugh, talk, and listen thereat, or be not so published, never troubles your head. You seek only the disinterested satisfaction of having helped your acquaintances to pass what you and they know very well was a hot, expensive, tedious sort of an evening. Perhaps one-third or so of your acquaintances you may know by head-mark, and two-thirds of that one-third may perhaps know you. In this case the intercourse becomes perhaps less ethereal in its refined abstract delights, but the pleasure of such intercourse is more palpable. If these acquaintances be men, you say to them at the club, "How do you do?" without waiting for an answer; or perhaps, going further into the delights of intimacy, you may inquire "what's the news?" just as you are drawing a newspaper to yourself, to find out what you would not trust them to tell you. If women be in the case, you exhibit your sympathy of soul by raising your hat very deliberately off your head as you ride by in the Park, or if you have had a conversation last night at the Opera, your tender recollections are made known by a certain fluttering of the fingers which none but those who have well studied the connection between mental affections and digitology, can fully and satisfactorily explain. Such are some of the principal features of that acquaintanceship out of love and respect to which so many costly establishments are kept up in London. The fastidious may object that there is little common sense or encouragement to the play of genuine feeling in this mode of intercourse. Perhaps not; but what then? Do not the Indians of the South Seas tattoo their bodies, and do not the Hottentots ornament themselves with the viscera of the animals they have slain? What common sense or utility is there in either of these practices? Captain Harris tells us that having brought to a great African King, Moselekatse by name, a splendid present of a duffel great coat, lined with scarlet shaloon, that potent monarch, upon an occasion of more than common grandeur of state, invested himself with the same, placed a red nightcap on his head, commanded two wax candles to be lighted and placed before him, and, seating ing himself upon an inverted calabash, the contents of which he had previously swallowed, he became totally absorbed in the contemplation of his surpassing importance. The exceedingly numerous court and thronging subjects of Moselekatse saw no absurdity in this; and, as we too have our customs, let us bear with patience the exhibition of the finery of rich people for the entertainment of acquaintances whom they don't know, and the bestowal of their especial attentions upon such as would care most particularly little, if they were hanged, shot, or drowned the next morning. FRIENDS. To those who are yet of a mood really to look for friends, much may be said in the way of advice. The attainment of a friend was once considered to be a sort of object in a man's life, and there is no lack of scattered philosophy upon the subject. Shakespeare makes the philosophic Hamlet speak of his friend Horatio as though the main qualification in a friend were steadiness and coolness of judgment: "Dost thou hear? Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, Hast ta'en with equal thanks: and bless'd are those Whether we should attribute this view of the especial requisites of a friend, to the particular character of Hamlet-himself so much wanting in calm steadiness of purpose-or, take it as a piece of general philosophy, it is perhaps not very easy to determine. Certainly in a friend from whom we mean habitually to ask advice, a calm judgment is very valuable; but in the intercourse of close friendship, sympathy is perhaps even more looked for than advice, and under the influence of this natural craving for sympathy, there are other qualities which one would seek for with even more eagerness than that calm temperament which takes fortune's buffets and rewards with equal thanks. Cowper, in his shrewd and witty little poem called "Friendship," gives us indeed a warning against the passionate; but he puts this fault only as one in the catalogue, and does not seem to consider it as preeminently a bar to friendship: "A fretful temper will divide The closest knot that may be tied, By ceaseless sharp corrosion; But the whole matter is so well, and at the same time so familiarly, discussed by Cowper, that a table-talker can hardly do better than follow in his track, beguiling the way with his musical philosophy. He begins with the error of youth, which is apt to jump as it were at friendship, and to take every profession for an indication of some genuine feeling : "Candid and generous and just, An error soon corrected For who but learns in riper years, But they are apt then-especially very sensitive or very sharp people—to run into equal errors on the other side, and suppose that no such thing as sincere friendship can be found. It may be called an equal error, for though he will be much oftener right who suspects universal insincerity than he who receives as trust |