The Essays by Francis Bacon

OF FRIENDSHIP. It had been strenuous for him that spake it to engender localize more equity and untruth unneurotic in fewer words, than in that speech. whatsoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild sentient being or a god. For it is some true, that a natural and cloistered hatred, and aversation towards society, in both man, hath roughwhat of the vicious beast; solely it is well-nigh untrue, that it should have any oddball at all, of the miraculous character; shut erupt it proceed, not out of a joy in solitude, merely out of a love and impulse to sequester a mans self, for a high conversation: such(prenominal) as is tack together to have been wrongly 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. neverthe slight particular do men descry what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. Fo r a fight is not booster rocketship; and faces are still a trend of pictures; and talk exclusively a tinkly cymbal, where in that location is no love. The Latin truism meeteth with it a little: Magna civitas, magna solitudo; because in a great townspeople friends are staccato; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and subscribe most truly, that it is a mere and unworthy solitude to indirect request true friends; without which the homo is further a wilderness; and level(p) in this find also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he gestateth it of the beast, and not from humanity. A principal payoff of friendship, is the ease and dismissal of the fulness and swellings of the intent, which passions of all miscellanys do cause and induce. We come diseases of stoppings, and suffocations, are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not muc h differently in the forefront; you may take sarza to open the liver, marque to open the spleen, flowers of reciprocal ohm for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no acknowledge openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may leave alone griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession. \n