enemy to your peace, every whispering suggestion
that but insinuates there may be a mistake--reflect seriously upon the
many lesser instances which you had begun to perceive, in proof of
your friend's disaffection towards you. None of them singly was much
to the purpose, but the aggregate weight is positive; and you have
this last affront to clench them. Thus far the process is any thing
but agreeable. But now to your relief comes in the comparative
faculty. You conjure up all the kind feelings you have had for your
friend; what you have been to him, and what you would have been to
him, if he would have suffered you; how you defended him in this
or that place; and his good name--his literary reputation, and so
forth, was always dearer to you than your own! Your heart, spite of
itself, yearns towards him. You could weep tears of blood but for a
restraining pride. How say you? do you not yet begin to apprehend a
comfort? some allay of sweetness in the bitter waters? Stop not here,
nor penuriously cheat yourself of your reversions. You are on vantage
ground. Enlarge your speculations, and take in the rest of your
friends, as a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them, who
has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as water? Begin to think
that the relation itself is inconsistent with mortality. That the very
idea of friendship, with its component parts, as honour, fidelity,
steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. Image yourself to
yourself, as the only possible friend in a world incapable of that
communion. Now the gloom thickens. The little star of self-love
twinkles, that is to encourage you through deeper glooms than this.
You are not yet at the half point of your elevation. You are not yet,
believe me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the world in general, (as
these circles in the mind will spread to infinity) reflect with what
strange injustice you have been treated in quarters where, (setting
gratitude and the expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras,)
you pretended no claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think
the very idea of right and fit fled from the earth, or your breast
the solitary receptacle of it, till you have swelled yourself into at
least one hemisphere; the other being the vast Arabia Stony of your
friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every moment in your
own conceit, and the world to lessen: to deify yourself at the expense
of your species; to judge the w