11 DECEMBER 1920, Page 25

Friendship. By Jeremy Taylor. (Chapman and Hall. 5s. net.)—It must

be long since this "Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship with Rules of Conducting it, in a Letter to the Most Ingenious and Excellent Mrs. Katharine Phillips," was last printed, but the essay is well worth reviving. One passage may be commended to certain writers of reminis- cences. "There are two things which a friend can never pardon, a treacherous blow and the revealing of a secret, because these are against the nature of friendship ; they are the adulteries of it, and dissolve the union ; and in the matters of friendship, which is the marriage of souls, these are the proper causes of divorce ; and therefore I shall add this only, that secrecy is the chastity of friendship, and the publication of it is a prostitution and direct debauchery."