"This is why temper is significant. It is not in what it is that its significance lies, but in what it reveals. But for this it were not worth notice. It is the intermittent fever which tells of un-intermittent disease; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface, betraying the rottenness underneath; a hastily prepared specimen of the hidden products of the soul, dropped involuntarily when you are off your guard. In one word, it is the lightning-form of a dozen hideous and unchristian sins." _The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND. "Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit." EPICTETUS. Temper APRIL 13 "Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order of character can co-exist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception, conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds--for a human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in its windings--but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not perfectly, obeyed. If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the less ugly because they are ascribed to 'temper.' Especially I object to the assumption that his having a fundamentally good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for his bad behaviour." GEORGE ELIOT. Temper APRIL 14 "Consider how much more often you suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved." MARCUS AURELIUS. "The _difficult_ part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humour of others." EMPSON. "Do we not know that the storm of feeling can be checked, if only we can prevent the first word from being spoken, the first gesture from being made. And is it not matter of common observation that persons who begin by being Stoics in demeanour end by becoming Stoics in reality?" _The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN. Temper APRIL 15