I have often boasted of your friendship, when your literary and
political eminence were my only mode of communicating with you,
unknown to yourself, and when I had but very faint hopes of your
remembering me. You may, therefore, well believe that the renewal
of that friendship has been one of the greatest pleasures I have ever
experienced.
Your old and ever
Devoted and attached friend,
B.CONSTANT.^30This does not have the ring of a well-turned but hollow compliment. To a
young man of 16, Mackintosh, this integer vitae scelerisque purus, two
years his senior and with all the virtues, can only have reinforced
Constant’s dissatisfaction with his own character and uncertainties and
with the lack of purpose of his own disordered life until then. Mackintosh
became a friend, but a distant one no doubt, and remained an ideal model.
This impression may have been emphasized by the very brevity of their
time together, four months (from December 1784 to April 1785), and by
Constant’s enforced departure in highly unbecoming circumstances. They
had a common interest in the history of religion (which was to develop
during Mackintosh’s stay in India), and Mackintosh’s Memoirs record one
conversation between them, which took place on 15 February 1785:
My first essay [in the Speculative Society] was on the religion of
Ossian. I maintained, that a belief in the separate existence of
heroes must always have prevailed for some time before hero-
worship; that the greatest men must be long dead, believed to exist
in another region, and considered as objects of reverence before
they are raised to the rank of deities; that Ossian wrote at this stage
in the progress of superstition; and that if Christianity had not been
so soon introduced, his Trenmor and Fingal might have grown into
the Saturn and Jupiter of the Caledonians. Constant complimented
me for the ingenuity of the hypothesis, but said, that he believed
Macpherson to have been afraid of inventing a religion for his
Ossian.^31The controversy about the authenticity of James Macpherson’s Works of
Ossian (1765) continued to divide the literary world, and this exchange
reveals, as one might expect, Constant’s total scepticism on the subject. It
is a measure of how his Edinburgh education was increasing his capacity
to ask questions and to doubt that earlier, on 2 December 1783 when he
The charms of friendship 49