regard as being in so many instances false, should operate with such potency in dissolving the tenderest ties of early life. Yet I appeal to experience, and observation too, when I ask, whether the ranks of society are not thronged with individuals closely assimilated in their habits and ways of thinking, mutually in want of the consolations of friendship, and adapted to promote each other's happiness, of whom it may be said with melancholy truth,
"Alas! they had been friends in youth, |
What then is the part which friendship ought to act in a case where rumour is strong against a friend? The part of true friendship is always a straightforward and decided one. First ask whether the charge brought against your friend be wholly at variance with the principles you know to regulate her conduct in general, wholly at variance with the sentiments uniformly expressed in her confidential intercourse with you, and wholly at variance with the tenor of her previous life. If such be the case, reject it with a noble indignation: for even if in one instance your friend has actually departed from the general principles of her conduct, her habitual sentiments, and her accustomed mode of action—and if in the end you find that the world has all the while been right, while you have been mistaken—it is better a thousand times to have felt this generous, though misplaced confidence, than to have been hastily drawn in to entertain an injurious suspicion of a friend.
Still, where the evidence is strong against a friend, where it increases and becomes confirmed, it would be blindness and folly to continue to disregard it. But before you yield even to such accumulating evidence, more especially before you act upon it, or suffer one syllable to pass your lips in support of the charge, or even of other charges of a similar
