of all the various kinds of friendship to which he allows the common name, pronounces that which is founded merely upon interest—­upon mutual interchange, by tacit agreement, of certain benefits—­to be the least worthy of such a designation.  Friendship is defined by Cicero to be “the perfect accord upon all questions, religious and social, together with mutual goodwill and affection”.  This “perfect accord”, it must be confessed, is a very large requirement.  He follows his Greek masters again in holding that true friendship can exist only amongst the good; that, in fact, all friendship must assume that there is something good and lovable in the person towards whom the feeling is entertained it may occasionally be a mistaken assumption; the good quality we think we see in our friend may have no existence save in our own partial imagination; but the existence of the counterfeit is an incontestable evidence of the true original.  And the greatest attraction, and therefore the truest friendships, will always be of the good towards the good.

He admits, however, the notorious fact, that good persons are sometimes disagreeable; and he confesses that we have a right to seek in our friends amiability as well as moral excellence.  “Sweetness”, he says—­anticipating, as all these ancients so provokingly do, some of our most modern popular philosophers—­“sweetness, both in language and in manner, is a very powerful attraction in the formation of friendships”.  He is by no means of the same opinion as Sisyphus in Lord Lytton’s ’Tale of Miletus’—­

  “Now, then, I know thou really art my friend,—­
  None but true friends choose such unpleasant words”.

He admits that it is the office of a friend to tell unpleasant truths sometimes; but there should be a certain amount of this indispensable “sweetness” to temper the bitterness of the advice.  There are some friends who are continually reminding you of what they have done for you—­“a disgusting set of people verily they are”, says our author.  And there are others who are always thinking themselves slighted; “in which case there is generally something of which they are conscious in themselves, as laying them open to contemptuous treatment”.

Cicero’s own character displays itself in this short treatise.  Here, as everywhere, he is the politician.  He shows a true appreciation of the duties and the qualifications of a true friend; but his own thoughts are running upon political friendships.  Just as when, in many of his letters, he talks about “all honest men”, he means “our party”; so here, when he talks of friends, he cannot help showing that it was of the essence of friendship, in his view, to hold the same political opinions, and that one great use of friends was that a man should not be isolated, as he had sometimes feared he was, in his political course.  When he puts forward the old instances of Coriolanus and Gracchus, and discusses the question whether their “friends” were