"I wold lend but I ne dare,
I have lent and I will beware
When I lant I had a frynd,
When I hym asked he was unkynd.
Thus of my frynd I made my foo,
Therefore darre I lend no moo."
The writer was evidently a kindly man, desiring to do the best he could, and he touchingly appeals to us not to judge him harshly:
"I pray yo of your gentilnesse
Report for no unkyndnesse."
Some one has very wisely remarked that many of the disappointments of life arise from our mistaking acquaintances for friends, and then when some little testing incident arises they break under the strain. "Prosperity makes friends, adversity proves them." One sarcastic adage hath it that "Friends are like fiddle-strings: they must not be screwed too tight"; but the Scotch say, and justly, that "He that's no my friend at a pinch is no my friend ava." Some centuries ago, human nature being then evidently very similar to what it is to-day, a wise man wrote: "If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first, and be not hasty to credit him. For some man is a friend for his own occasion, and will not abide in the day of thy trouble; and there is a friend who, being turned to enmity and strife, will discover thy reproach; again, some friend is a companion at the table, and will not continue in the day of thy affliction."
In Chaucer's "Romaunt of the Rose," we find the poet using the expression, "Farewel fieldfare," a valediction on summer friends that, like the wild and migratory fieldfare, take to themselves wings and depart. An old rhyming adage declares that "In time of prosperity friends will be plenty, in time of adversity not one in twenty"; or, to quote Tusser:
"Where welthines floweth, no friendship can lack,
Whom pouertie pincheth, hath friendship as slack";
while Goldsmith, it will be remembered, bitterly sums all up in,
"What is friendship but a name,
A charm that lulls to sleep,
A shade that follows wealth and fame,
But leaves the wretch to weep."
Another adage declares that "Compliments cost nothing but may be dearly bought," while another candidly warns, "I cannot be your friend and your flatterer too." The flatterer has ordinarily "an axe to grind,"
"His fetch is to flatter, to get what he can,
His purpose once gotten, a fig for thee then."