the son of a king whom David cherished with a love surpassing the love of woman.  It was to Plato that Socrates communicated his moral wisdom; it was with cultivated youth that Augustine surrounded himself in the gardens of Como; Caesar walked with Antony, and Cassius with Brutus; it was to Madame de Maintenon that Fenelon poured out the riches of his intellect, and the lofty Saint Cyran opened to Mere Angelique the sorrows of his soul.  We associate Aspasia with Pericles; Cicero with Atticus; Heloise with Abelard; Hildebrand with the Countess Matilda; Michael Angelo with Vittoria Colonna; Cardinal de Retz with the Duchess de Longueville; Dr. Johnson with Hannah More.

Those who have no friends delight most in the plaudits of a plebeian crowd.  A philosopher who associates with the vulgar is neither an oracle nor a guide.  A rich man’s son who fraternizes with hostlers will not long grace a party of ladies and gentlemen.  A politician who shakes hands with the rabble will lose as much in influence as he gains in power.  In spite of envy, poets cling to poets and artists to artists.  Genius, like a magnet, draws only congenial natures to itself.  Had a well-bred and titled fool been admitted into the Turk’s-Head Club, he might have been the butt of good-natured irony; but he would have been endured, since gentlemen must live with gentlemen and scholars with scholars, and the rivalries which alienate are not so destructive as the grossness which repels.  More genial were the festivities of a feudal castle than any banquet between Jews and Samaritans.  Had not Mrs. Thrale been a woman of intellect and sensibility, the hospitalities she extended to Johnson would have been as irksome as the dinners given to Robert Hall by his plebeian parishioners; and had not Mrs. Unwin been as refined as she was sympathetic, she would never have soothed the morbid melancholy of Cowper, while the attentions of a fussy, fidgety, talkative, busy wife of a London shopkeeper would have driven him absolutely mad, even if her disposition had been as kind as that of Dorcas, and her piety as warm as that of Phoebe.  Paula was to Jerome what Arbella Johnson was to John Winthrop, because their tastes, their habits, their associations, and their studies were the same,—­they were equals in rank, in culture, and perhaps in intellect.

But I would not give the impression that congenial tastes and habits and associations formed the basis of the holy friendship between Paula and Jerome.  The fountain and life of it was that love which radiated from the Cross,—­an absorbing desire to extend the religion which saves the world.  Without this foundation, their friendship might have been transient, subject to caprice and circumstances,—­like the gay intercourse between the wits who assembled at the Hotel de Rambouillet, or the sentimental affinities which bind together young men at college or young girls at school, when their vows of undying attachment are so often forgotten in the hard struggles or empty