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: "Magna civitas, magna
solitudo;" because in a great town friends are scattered, so that there
is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less
neighborhoods. But we may go further, 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 taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the
fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do
cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are 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, flower
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,
except (to make themselves capable thereof) they raise some persons to
be as it were companions and almost equals to themselves; which many
times sorteth to inconvenience. The modern languages give unto such
persons the name of favorites, or privadoes; as if it were matter of
grace or conversation. But the Roman name attaineth the true use and
cause thereof, naming them "participes curarum"; for it is that which
tieth the knot. And we see plainly that this hath been done, not by weak
and passionate princes only, but by the wisest and most politic that
ever reigned; who have oftentimes joined to themselves some of their
servants, whom both themselves have called friends, and allowed others
likewise to call them in the same manner, using the word which is
received between private men.

L. Sylla, when he commanded Rome, raised Pompey (after surnam