COMPANY, in a familiar or fashionable sense, is used for an assemblage of persons met for the purpose of conversation, pastime, or festivity.
The love of company and of social pleasures is natural, and attended with some of the sweetest gratifications of human life; but, like every other affection, when it proceeds beyond the bounds of moderation, it ceases to produce its natural effect, and terminates in disgustful satiety. The foundation stone and the pillar on which we build the fabric of our felicity must be laid in our own hearts. Amusement, mirth, agreeable variety, and even improvement, may sometimes be sought in the gaiety of mixed company, and in the usual diversions of the world; but if we found our general happiness on these, we shall do little more than raise castles in the air, or build houses on the sand.
To derive the proper pleasure and improvement from company, it ought to be select, and to consist of persons of character, respectable both for their morals and their understandings. Mixed and indiscriminate society tends only to dissipate our ideas, and to induce a laxity of principles and practice. The pleasure it affords is of a coarse, mixed, noisy, and rude kind. Indeed it commonly ends in weariness and disgust, as they even are ready to confess who nevertheless constantly pursue it, as if their chief good consisted in living in a crowd.