to measure swords once in a while with such a one. You like to exert
your power and keep yourself in practice. You do not rejoice so much in
overcoming your enemy as in overcoming. If a marble statue could show
fight you would just as soon fight it; but as it can not, you take
something that can, and something, besides, that has had the temerity to
attack you, and so has made a lawful target of itself. But against your
friend your hands are tied. He has injured you. He has disgusted you. He
has infuriated you. But it was most Christianly done. You can not hurl a
thunderbolt, or pull a trigger, or lisp a syllable against those amiable
monsters who, with tenderest fingers, are sticking pins all over you. So
you shut fast the doors of your lips, and inwardly sigh for a good,
stout, brawny, malignant foe, who, under any and every circumstance,
will design you harm, and on whom you can lavish your lusty blows with a
hearty will and a clear conscience.

Your enemy keeps clear of you. He neither grants nor claims favors. He
awards you your rights,--no more, no less,--and demands the same from
you. Consequently there is no friction. Your friend, on the contrary, is
continually getting himself tangled up with you "because he is your
friend." I have heard that Shelley was never better pleased than when
his associates made free with his coats, boots, and hats for their own
use, and that he appropriated their property in the same way. Shelley
was a poet, and perhaps idealized his friends. He saw them, probably, in
a state of pure intellect. I am not a poet; I look at people in the
concrete. The most obvious thing about my friends is their avoirdupois;
and I prefer that they should wear their own cloaks and suffer me to
wear mine. There is no neck in the world that I want my collar to span
except my own. It is very exasperating to me to go to my bookcase and
miss a book of which I am in immediate and pressing need, because an
intimate friend has carried it off without asking leave, on the score of