As for the acquaintance which is to be sought in travel:  that which is most of all profitable, is acquaintance with the secretaries and employed men of ambassadors; for so in traveling in one country he shall suck the experience of many.  Let him also see and visit eminent persons in all kinds, which are of great name abroad; that he may be able to tell how the life agreeth with the fame.  For quarrels, they are with care and discretion to be avoided.  They are commonly for mistresses, healths, place, and words.  And let a man beware how he keepeth company with choleric and quarrelsome persons; for they will engage him into their own quarrels.  When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him, but maintain a correspondence by letters with those of his acquaintance which are of most worth.  And let his travel appear rather in his discourse than in his apparel or gesture; and in his discourse let him be rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories; and let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those of foreign parts; but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country.

OF FRIENDSHIP

From the ‘Essays’

It had been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words than in that speech, “Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”  For it is most true that a natural and secret hatred and aversion toward society in any man hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue that it should have any character at all of the divine nature, except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to sequester a man’s self for a higher conversation:  such as is found to have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen, as Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really in divers of the ancient hermits and holy fathers of the Church.  But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth.  For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.  The Latin adage meeteth with it a little:  “Magna civitas, magna solitudo;” because in a great town friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods.  But we may go further, and affirm most truly that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.