your friends at first sight, or even upon a short acquaintance.  Real friendship is a slow grower and never thrives unless engrafted upon a stock of known and reciprocal merit.  There is another kind of nominal friendship among young people, which is warm for the time, but by good luck, of short duration.  This friendship is hastily produced, by their being accidentally thrown together, and pursuing the course of riot and debauchery.  A fine friendship, truly; and well cemented by drunkenness and lewdness.  It should rather be called a conspiracy against morals and good manners, and be punished as such by the civil magistrate.  However, they have the impudence and folly to call this confederacy a friendship.  They lend one another money, for bad purposes; they engage in quarrels, offensive and defensive for their accomplices; they tell one another all they know, and often more too, when, of a sudden, some accident disperses them, and they think no more of each other, unless it be to betray and laugh, at their imprudent confidence.  Remember to make a great difference between companions and friends; for a very complaisant and agreeable companion may, and often does, prove a very improper and a very dangerous friend.  People will, in a great degree, and not without reason, form their opinion of you, upon that which they have of your friends; and there is a Spanish proverb, which says very justly, tell me who you live with and I will tell you who you are.  One may fairly suppose, that the man who makes a knave or a fool his friend, has something very bad to do or to conceal.  But, at the same time that you carefully decline the friendship of knaves and fools, if it can be called friendship, there is no occasion to make either of them your enemies, wantonly and unprovoked; for they are numerous bodies:  and I, would rather choose a secure neutrality, than alliance, or war with either of them.  You may be a declared enemy to their vices and follies, without being marked out by them as a personal one.  Their enmity is the next dangerous thing to their friendship.  Have a real reserve with almost everybody; and have a seeming reserve with almost nobody; for it is very disagreeable to seem reserved, and very dangerous not to be so.  Few people find the true medium; many are ridiculously mysterious and reserved upon trifles; and many imprudently communicative of all they know.

The next thing to the choice of your friends, is the choice of your company.  Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you:  there you rise, as much as you sink with people below you; for (as I have mentioned before) you are whatever the company you keep is.  Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to, their birth:  that is the least consideration; but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.