The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 5 | Page 4

friendship the most spiritual

of the affections, because even one's kindred, in partaking of our flesh
and blood, become, in a manner, mixed up with our entire being. Not
that I would disparage any other form of affection, worshiping, as I do,
all forms of it, love in particular, which, in its highest state, is
friendship and something more. But if ever I tasted a disembodied
transport on earth, it was in those friendships which I entertained at
school, before I dreamt of any maturer feeling. I shall never forget the
impression it first made on me. I loved my friend for his gentleness, his
candor, his truth, his good repute, his freedom even from my own
livelier manner, his calm and reasonable kindness. It was not any
particular talent that attracted me to him or anything striking
whatsoever. I should say in one word, it was his goodness. I doubt
whether he ever had a conception of a tithe of the regard and respect I
entertained for him; and I smile to think of the perplexity (though he
never showed it) which he probably felt sometimes at my enthusiastic
expressions; for I thought him a kind of angel. It is no exaggeration to
say, that, take away the unspiritual part of it--the genius and the
knowledge--and there is no height of conceit indulged in by the most
romantic character in Shakspeare, which surpassed what I felt toward
the merits I ascribed to him, and the delight which I took in his society.
With the other boys I played antics, and rioted in fantastic jests; but in
his society, or whenever I thought of him, I fell into a kind of Sabbath
state of bliss; and I am sure I could have died for him.
* * * * *
ANECDOTE OF MATHEWS.--One morning, after stopping all night
at this pleasant house, I was getting up to breakfast, when I heard the
noise of a little boy having his face washed. Our host was a merry
bachelor, and to the rosiness of a priest might, for aught I knew, have
added the paternity; but I had never heard of it, and still less expected
to find a child in his house. More obvious and obstreperous proofs,
however, of the existence of a boy with a dirty face, could not have
been met with. You heard the child crying and objecting; then the
woman remonstrating; then the cries of the child snubbed and
swallowed up in the hard towel; and at intervals out came his voice
bubbling and deploring, and was again swallowed up. At breakfast, the

child being pitied, I ventured to speak about it, and was laughing and
sympathizing in perfect good faith, when Mathews came in, and I
found that the little urchin was he.
* * * * *
SHELLEY'S GENEROSITY.--As an instance of Shelley's
extraordinary generosity, a friend of his, a man of letters, enjoyed from
him at that period a pension of a hundred a year, though he had but a
thousand of his own; and he continued to enjoy it till fortune rendered
it superfluous. But the princeliness of his disposition was seen most in
his behavior to another friend, the writer of this memoir, who is proud
to relate that, with money raised with an effort, Shelley once made him
a present of fourteen hundred pounds, to extricate him from debt. I was
not extricated, for I had not yet learned to be careful; but the shame of
not being so, after such generosity, and the pain which my friend
afterward underwent when I was in trouble and he was helpless, were
the first causes of my thinking of money matters to any purpose. His
last sixpence was ever at my service, had I chosen to share it. In a
poetical epistle written some years after, and published in the volume
of "Posthumous Poems," Shelley, in alluding to his friend's
circumstances, which for the second time were then straitened, only
made an affectionate lamentation that he himself was poor; never once
hinting that he had himself drained his purse for his friend.
* * * * *
MRS. JORDAN.--Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the
consequences of too much restraint in ill-educated country girls, in
romps, in hoydens, and in wards on whom the mercenary have designs.
She wore a bib and tucker, and pinafore, with a bouncing propriety, fit
to make the boldest spectator alarmed at the idea of bringing such a
household responsibility on his shoulders. To see her when thus attired,
shed blubbering tears for some disappointment, and eat all the while a
great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping, and moaning, and
munching, and eyeing at very bite the part she meant to bite next, was a
lesson against will