CHAPTER LXXXV.
THE DOCTOR'S CONTEMPORARIES AT LEYDEN. EARLY FRIENDSHIP. COWPER'S MELANCHOLY OBSERVATION THAT GOOD DISPOSITIONS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE CORRUPTED THAN EVIL ONES TO BE CORRECTED. YOUTHFUL CONNECTIONS LOOSENED IN THE COMMON COURSE OF THINGS. A FINE FRAGMENT BY WALTER LANDOR.
Lass mich den Stunde gedenken, und jedes kleineren umstands.
Ach, wer ruft nicht so gern unwiederbringliches an!
Jenes süsse Gedränge der leichtesten irdischen Tage,
Ach, wer schätzt ihn genug, diesen vereilenden Werth!
Klein erscheinet es nun, doch ach! nicht kleinlich dem Herzen;
Macht die Liebe, die Kunst, jegliches kleine doch gross.
GOETHE.
The circumstances of my friend's boyhood and early youth, though singularly favourable to his peculiar cast of mind, in many or indeed most respects, were in this point disadvantageous, that they afforded him little or no opportunity of forming those early friendships, which, when they are well formed, contribute so largely to our future happiness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of public education, as compared with private, is, that it presents more such opportunities than are ever met with in any subsequent stage of human life. And yet even then in friendship, as afterwards in love, we are for the most part less directed by choice than by what is called chance.
Daniel Dove never associated with so many persons of his own age at any other time as during his studies at Leyden. But he was a foreigner there, and this is almost as great an obstacle to friendship as to matrimony; and there were few English students among whom to choose. Dr. Brocklesby took his degree, and left the University the year before he entered it; Brocklesby was a person in whose society he might have delighted; but he was a cruel experimentalist, and the dispathy which this must have excited in our friend, whose love of science, ardent as it was, never overcame the sense of humanity, would have counteracted the attraction of any intellectual powers however brilliant. Akenside, with whom in many respects he would have felt himself in unison, and by whose society he might have profited, graduated also there just before his time.
He had a contemporary more remarkable than either in his countryman John Wilkes, who was pursuing his studies there, not without some diligence, under the superintendence of a private tutor; and who obtained much notice for those lively and agreeable talents which were afterwards so flagrantly abused. But the strict and conscientious frugality which Dove observed rendered it unfit for him to associate with one who had a liberal allowance, and expended it lavishly: and there was also a stronger impediment to any intimacy between them; for no talents however companionable, no qualities however engaging, could have induced him to associate with a man whose irreligion was of the worst kind, and who delighted in licentious conversation.
There was one of his countrymen indeed there (so far as a Scotchman may be called so) with whom he formed an acquaintance that might have ripened into intimacy, if their lots had fallen near to each other in after life. This was Thomas Dickson, a native of Dumfries; they attended the same lectures, and consorted on terms of friendly familiarity. But when their University course is completed men separate, like stage-coach travellers at the end of a journey, or fellow passengers in a ship when they reach their port. While Dove “pursued the noiseless tenor of his way” at Doncaster, Dickson tried his fortune in the metropolis, where he became Physician to the London Hospital, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died in the year 1784, and is said in his epitaph to have been “a man of singular probity, loyalty and humanity; kind to his relations, beloved by all who knew him, learned and skilful in his profession. Unfeed by the poor, he lived to do good, and died a christian believer.” For awhile some intercourse between him and the Doctor had been kept up by letters; but the intervals in their correspondence became longer and longer as each grew more engaged in business; and new connections gradually effaced an impression which had not been made early, nor had ever been very deep. The friendship that with no intercourse to nourish it, keeps itself alive for years, must have strong roots in a good soil.
Cowper regarded these early connections in an unfavourable and melancholy mood. “For my own part,” says he, “I found such friendships, though warm enough in their commencement, surprisingly liable to extinction; and of seven or eight whom I had selected for intimates out of about three hundred, in ten years time not one was left me. The truth is that there may be, and often is, an attachment of one boy to another, that looks very like a friendship; and while they are in circumstances that enable them mutually to oblige and to assist each other, promises well and bids fair to be lasting. But they are no sooner separated from each other, by entering into the world at large, than other connexions and new employments in which they no longer share together, efface the remembrance of what passed in earlier days, and they become strangers to each other for ever. Add to this the man frequently differs so much from the boy,—his principles, manners, temper, and conduct, undergo so great an alteration,—that we no longer recognize in him our old play-fellow, but find him utterly unworthy and unfit for the place he once held in our affections.” These sentiments he has also expressed in verse.—