There was one of his countrymen indeed there (so far as a Scotchman may be called so) with whom he formed an acquaintance that might have ripened into intimacy, if their lots had fallen near to each other in after life. This was Thomas Dickson, a native of Dumfries; they attended the same lectures, and consorted on terms of friendly familiarity. But when their University course is completed men separate, like stage-coach travellers at the end of a journey, or fellow passengers in a ship when they reach their port. While Dove “pursued the noiseless tenor of his way” at Doncaster, Dickson tried his fortune in the metropolis, where he became Physician to the London Hospital, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died in the year 1784, and is said in his epitaph to have been “a man of singular probity, loyalty and humanity; kind to his relations, beloved by all who knew him, learned and skilful in his profession. Unfeed by the poor, he lived to do good, and died a christian believer.” For awhile some intercourse between him and the Doctor had been kept up by letters; but the intervals in their correspondence became longer and longer as each grew more engaged in business; and new connections gradually effaced an impression which had not been made early, nor had ever been very deep. The friendship that with no intercourse to nourish it, keeps itself alive for years, must have strong roots in a good soil. Cowper regarded these early connections in an unfavourable and melancholy mood. “For my own part,” says he, “I found such friendships, though warm enough in their commencement, surprisingly liable to extinction; and of seven or eight whom I had selected for intimates out of about three hundred, in ten years time not one was left me. The truth is that there may be, and often is, an attachment of one boy to another, that looks very like a friendship; and while they are in circumstances that enable them mutually to oblige and to assist each other, promises well and bids fair to be lasting. But they are no sooner separated from each other, by entering into the world at large, than other connexions and new employments in which they no longer share together, efface the remembrance of what passed in earlier days, and they become strangers to each other for ever. Add to this the _man_ frequently differs so much from the _boy_,—his principles, manners, temper, and conduct, undergo so great an alteration,—that we no longer recognize in him our old play-fellow, but find him utterly unworthy and unfit for the place he once held in our affections.” These sentiments he has also expressed in verse.—