display, by rides in a curricle,[302] and dinners at the best taverns.
The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that
can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is
for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and
death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country
rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty,
and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the
trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs
and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and
unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but
should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was
drudgery.

14. Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each
so well-tempered, and so happily adapted, and withal so
circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands
that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very
seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of
those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more
than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have
never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination
more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each
other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this
law of _one to one_,[303] peremptory for conversation, which is the
practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much.
The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and
cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all
three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty
word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a
conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company