Receipt for Making Friendship.
In Pliny’s Natural History we find a very curious receipt for making Roman friendship, the principal ingredients of which were union of hearts, a flower that grew in several parts of the empire—sincerity, frankness, disinterestedness, pity, and tenderness, of each an equal quantity. These were all made up together, with two rich oils, which they called perpetual kind wishes, and serenity of temper, and the whole was strongly perfumed with the desire of pleasing, which gave it a most grateful smell, and was a sure restorative against vapors of all sorts. The cordial, thus prepared, was of so durable a nature, that no length of time could waste it; but what is more remarkable, says our author, it increased in its weight and value the longer you kept it.