Epictetus gives excellent advice when he dissuades from conversation on the very subjects most commonly chosen, and advises that it should be on "none of the common subjects--not about gladiators, nor horse-races, nor about athletes, nor about eating or drinking, which are the usual subjects; and especially not about men, as blaming them;" but when he adds, "or praising them," the injunction seems to me of doubtful value. Surely Marcus Aurelius more wisely advises that "when thou wishest to delight thyself, think of the virtues of those who live with thee; for instance, the activity of one, and the modesty of another, and the liberality of a third, and some other good quality of a fourth. For nothing delights so much as the examples of the virtues, when they are exhibited in the morals of those who live with us and present themselves in abundance, as far as is possible. Wherefore we must keep them before us." Yet how often we know merely the sight of those we call our friends, or the sound of their voices, but nothing whatever of their mind or soul. We must, moreover, be as careful to keep friends as to make them. If every one knew what one said of the other, Pascal assures us that "there would not be four friends in the world." This I hope and think is too strong, but at any rate try to be one of the four. And when you have made a friend, keep him. Hast thou a friend, says an Eastern proverb, "visit him often, for thorns and brushwood obstruct the road which no one treads." The affections should not be mere "tents of a night." Still less does Friendship confer any privilege to make ourselves disagreeable. Some people never seem to appreciate their friends till they have lost them. Anaxagoras described the Mausoleum as the ghost of wealth turned into stone. "But he who has once stood beside the grave to look back on the companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent _then_ are the wild love and the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust." [1] Death, indeed, cannot sever friendship. "Friends," says Cicero, "though absent, are still present; though in poverty they are rich; though weak, yet in the enjoyment of health; and, what is still more difficult to assert, though dead they are alive." This seems a paradox, yet it there not much truth in his explanation? "To me, indeed, Scipio still lives, and will always live; for I love the virtue of that man, and that worth is not yet extinguished.... Assuredly of all things that either fortune or time has bestowed on me, I have none which I can compare with the friendship of Scipio."