“What passions our friendships were!” said Thackeray to FitzGerald, speaking of University days.  There is a shadow of melancholy in the saying, because it implies that for Thackeray at all events that kind of glow had faded out of life.  Perhaps—­who knows?—­he had accustomed himself, with those luminous, observant, humorous eyes, to look too deep into the heart of man, to study too closely and too laughingly the seamy side, the strange contrast between man’s hopes and his performances, his dreams and his deeds.  Ought one to be ashamed if that kind of generous enthusiasm, that intensity of admiration, that vividness of sympathy die out of one’s heart?  Is it possible to keep alive the warmth, the colour of youth, suffusing all the objects near it with a lively and rosy glow?  Some few people seem to find it possible, and can add to it a kind of rich tolerance, a lavish affectionateness, which pierces even deeper, and sees even more clearly, than the old partial idealisation.  Such a large-hearted affection is found as a rule most often in people whose lives have brought them into intimate connection with their fellow-creatures—­in priests, doctors, teachers, who see others not in their guarded and superficial moments, but in hours of sharp and poignant emotion.  In many cases the bounds of sympathy narrow themselves into the family and the home—­because there only are men brought into an intimate connection with human emotion; because to many people, and to the Anglo-Saxon race in particular, emotional situations are a strain, and only professional duty, which is a strongly rooted instinct in the Anglo-Saxon temperament, keeps the emotional muscles agile and responsive.

Another thing which tends to extinguish friendships is that many of the people who desire to form them, and who do form them, wish to have the pleasures of friendship without the responsibilities.  In the self-abandonment of friendship we become aware of qualities and strains in the friend which we do not wholly like.  One of the most difficult things to tolerate in a friend are faults which are similar without being quite the same.  A common quality, for instance, in the Anglo-Saxon race, is a touch of vulgarity, which is indeed the quality that makes them practically successful.  A great many Anglo-Saxon people have a certain snobbishness, to give it a hard name; it is probably the poison of the feudal system lurking in our veins.  We admire success unduly; we like to be respected, to have a definite label, to know the right people.

I remember once seeing a friendship of a rather promising kind forming between two people, one of whom had a touch of what I may call “county” vulgarity, by which I mean an undue recognition of “the glories of our birth and state.”  It was a deep-seated fault, and emerged in a form which is not uncommon among people of that type—­namely, a tendency to make friends with people of rank, coupled with a constant desire to detect snobbishness in other