and act as if personal comfort were the highest thing in their estimation.  Yet, driven thus to the wall, forced to make such uncomfortable confessions, our supposed man does not like his friends one whit the less; nay, more, he is aware that if they were very superior and faultless persons he would not be conscious of so much kindly feeling towards them.  The tide of friendship does not rise high on the bank of perfection.  Amiable weaknesses and shortcomings are the food of love.  It is from the roughnesses and imperfect breaks in a man that you are able to lay hold of him.  If a man be an entire and perfect chrysolite, you slide off him and fall back into ignorance.  My friends are not perfect—­no more am I—­and so we suit each other admirably.  Their weaknesses keep mine in countenance, and so save me from humiliation and shame.  We give and take, bear and forbear; the stupidity they utter to-day salves the recollection of the stupidity I uttered yesterday; in their want of wit I see my own, and so feel satisfied and kindly disposed.  It is one of the charitable dispensations of Providence that perfection is not essential to friendship.  If I had to seek my perfect man, I should wander the world a good while, and when I found him, and was down on my knees before him, he would, to a certainty, turn the cold shoulder on me—­and so life would be an eternal search, broken by the coldness of repulse and loneliness.  Only to the perfect being in an imperfect world, or the imperfect being in a perfect world, is everything irretrievably out of joint.

On a certain shelf in the bookcase which stands in the room in which I am at present sitting—­bookcase surmounted by a white Dante, looking out with blind, majestic eyes—­are collected a number of volumes which look somewhat the worse for wear.  Those of them which originally possessed gilding have had it fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down, and they open of themselves at places wherein I have been happy, and with whose every word I am familiar as with the furniture of the room in which I nightly slumber, each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevant scribbled on their margins.  These favourite volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books have I singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men.  I am on easy terms with them, and feel that they are no higher than my heart.  Milton is not there, neither is Wordsworth; Shakspeare, if he had written comedies only, would have been there to a certainty, but the presence of the five great tragedies,—­Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra—­for this last should be always included among his supreme efforts—­has made me place him on the shelf where the mighty men repose, himself the mightiest of all.  Reading Milton is like dining off gold plate in a company of kings; very splendid, very ceremonious, and not a little appalling.  Him I read but seldom, and