...and grieve in all my sorrows, and whose sympathy should be incapable of being changed by absence into smiles, while my head continued bent to the earth...Pythias is said to have borne for Damon, or Theseus for Pirithous, many a married pair have borne for each other.1 The difference of sex powerfully assists...

...as friends. By 1805, Fleetwood is portraying sexual difference as central to heterosexual intimacy: "I had not been aware that nature has provided a substitute...marriage-tie for this romantic, if not impossible friendship [between men]. . . . The difference of sex powerfully assists the intimacy; similarity of character...