The _Friends in Council_ purports to be edited by a clergyman named Dunsford, who was so obliging and laborious as to set down the conversations in which he, Ellesmere (the great lawyer), and Milverton (the author), had engaged on various occasions, when the last read to his companions a number of short essays which he was writing. We have a page or two of introduction, informing us of this circumstance, and of a few other particulars needful to be mentioned; and then, after a little talk among the friends, an essay is read, followed by the interlocutors' comments, and a discussion of its merits. These conversations form a very agreeable portion of the work, and exhibit a fine mastery of dialogue. They are exactly like the discourse of intelligent and accomplished men, and therefore very much unlike the ordinary run of book-reported talk. A few sentences may be not unfitly quoted, by way of exhibiting their quality. We take the following, on so common a matter as friendship; not because it is the best we might select, but because it seems one of the passages which is most readily extractable:--
'_Ellesmere._ I suppose all of us have, at one time or other, had a huge longing after friendship. If one could get it, it would be much safer than that other thing.
'_Milverton._ Well, I wonder whether love--for I imagine you mean love--was ever so described before, "that other thing!"
'_Elles._ When the world was younger, perhaps there was more of this friendship. David and Jonathan!--How does their friendship begin? I know it is very beautiful; but I have forgotten the words. Dunsford will tell us.
'_Dunsford._ "And Saul said to him, Whose son art thou, thou young man? And David answered, I am the son of thy servant Jesse the Bethlehemite. And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul."
'_Elles._ Now that men are more complex, they would require so much. For instance, if I were to have a friend, he must be an uncommunicative man: that limits me to about thirteen or fourteen people in the world. It is only with a man of perfect reticence that you can speak completely without reserve. We talk together far more openly than most people; but there is a skilful fencing even in our talk. We are not inclined to say the whole of what we think.