'_Mil._. What I should need in a friend would be a certain breadth of nature: I have no sympathy with people who can disturb themselves about small things; who crave the world's good opinion; are anxious to prove themselves always in the right; can be immersed in personal talk or devoted to self-advancement; who seem to have grown up entirely from the _earth_, whereas even the plants draw most of their sustenance from the air of heaven.
'_Elles._ That is a high flight. I am not prepared to say all that. I do not object to a little earthiness. What I should fear in friendship is the comment, and interference, and talebearing, I often see connected with it.
'_Mil._ That does not particularly belong to friendship, but comes under the general head of injudicious comment on the part of those who live with us. Divines often remind us, that in forming our ideas of the government of Providence, we should recollect that we see only a fragment. The same observation, in its degree, is true too as regards human conduct. We see a little bit here and there, and assume the nature of the whole. Even a very silly man's actions are often more to the purpose than his friend's comments upon them.
'_Elles._ True! Then I should not like to have a man for a friend who would bind me down to be consistent, who would form a minute theory of me which was not to be contradicted.
'_Mil._ If he loved you as his own soul, and his soul were knit with yours--to use the words of Scripture--he would not demand this consistency, because each man must know and feel his own immeasurable vacillation and inconsistency; and if he had complete sympathy with another, he would not be greatly surprised or vexed at that other's inconsistencies.
'_Duns._ There always seems to me a want of tenderness in what are called friendships in the present day. Now, for instance, I don't understand a man ridiculing his friend. The joking of intimates often appears to me coarse and harsh. You will laugh at this in me, and think it rather effeminate, I am afraid.
'_Mil._ No; I do not. I think a great deal of jocose raillery may pass between intimates without the requisite tenderness being infringed upon. If any friend had been in a painful and ludicrous position (such as when Cardinal Balue in full dress is run away with on horseback, which Scott comments upon as one of a class of situations combining "pain, peril, and absurdity"), I would not remind him of it. Why should I bring back a disagreeable impression to his mind? Besides, it would be more painful than ludicrous to me. I should enter into his feelings rather than into those of the ordinary spectator.