may be restored to its former sweetness and
sprightliness, and again irritate the appetite, and again sparkle in the
cup.

Our time will probably be less tasteless than that of those whom the
authority and avarice of parents unite almost without their consent in
their early years, before they have accumulated any fund of reflection,
or collected materials for mutual entertainment. Such we have often seen
rising in the morning to cards, and retiring in the afternoon to doze,
whose happiness was celebrated by their neighbours, because they
happened to grow rich by parsimony, and to be kept quiet in
insensibility, and agreed to eat and to sleep together.

We have both mingled with the world, and are therefore no strangers to
the faults and virtues, the designs and competitions, the hopes and
fears of our contemporaries. We have both amused our leisure with books,
and can therefore recount the events of former times, or cite the
dictates of ancient wisdom. Every occurrence furnishes us with some hint
which one or the other can improve, and if it should happen that memory
or imagination fail us, we can retire to no idle or unimproving
solitude.

Though our characters, beheld at a distance, exhibit this general
resemblance, yet a nearer inspection discovers such a dissimilitude of
our habitudes and sentiments, as leaves each some peculiar advantages,
and affords that _concordia discors_, that suitable disagreement which
is always necessary to intellectual harmony. There may be a total
diversity of ideas which admits no participation of the same delight,
and there may likewise be such a conformity of notions as leaves neither
any thing to add to the decisions of the other. With such contrariety
there can be no peace, with such similarity there can be no pleasure.
Our reasonings, though often formed upon different views, terminate
generally in the same conclusion. Our thoughts, like rivulets issuing
from distant springs, are each impregnated in its course with various
mixtures, and tinged by infusions unknown to the other, yet, at last,
easily unite into one stream, and purify themselves by the gentle
effervescence of contrary qualities.

These benefits we receive in a greater degree as we converse without
reserve, because we have nothing to conceal. We have no debts to be paid
by imperceptible deductions from avowed expenses, no habits to be
indulged by the private subserviency of a favoured servant, no private
interviews