From that state of struggle many a victor emerges with honourable scars, but deep. Famous and significant is the story of the physiognomist who detected in the features of Socrates the traces of that fiery temper which for the most part he kept in severe control, but which, when it did break loose, is described by those who witnessed it as absolutely terrible, overleaping both in act and language every barrier of the ordinary decorum of Grecian manners. Le Clerc’s _éloge_ of John Locke includes the remark that if he had any defect, it was the being somewhat passionate; “but he had got the better of it by reason, and it was very seldom that it did him or any one else any harm.” Of Rudolf of Hapsburg we are told that he was by nature warm and choleric, but that as he advanced in years he corrected this defect. To some of his friends, expressing their wonder that since his elevation to the imperial dignity he had restrained the vehemence of his temper, the founder of the House of Austria replied, “I have often repented of being passionate, never of being mild and humane.” One of Cromwell’s biographers reports his “temper exceeding fiery; but the flame of it kept down for the most part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had.” The admirable Frederick Borromeo was admired for a placability, a sweetness of manner nearly imperturbable, which, however, as Manzoni reminds us, was not natural to the devout prelate, but was the effect of continual combat against a quick and hasty disposition. Lord Clarendon more than once in his autobiography, plumes himself on having mastered and “suppressed that heat and passion he was naturally inclined to be transported with.” “They who knew the great infirmity of his whole family, which abounded in passion, used to say he had much extinguished the unruliness of that fire.” Lord Macaulay turns to the advantage of his favourite chancellor the assertion of his detractors, that the disposition of the great Somers was very far from being so gentle as the world believed, that he was really prone to the angry passions, and that sometimes, while his voice was soft, and his words kind and courteous, his delicate frame was almost convulsed by suppressed emotion. His brilliant advocate is fain to accept this reproach as the highest of all eulogies. Again: Sir Archibald Alison assures us of Sir Robert Peel, that he was by nature afflicted with a most violent temper, and that so extreme were his paroxysms of anger, when a young man, that he used, while they were coming on, to shut himself up alone till the dark fit was over. “By degrees, however, he obtained the mastery of this infirmity, and this at length so effectually that he passed with the world, at a distance, as a man of a singularly cold and phlegmatic temperament.” Lady Holland reports her distinguished father to have been naturally choleric,—prefacing the statement by a reflection, that, although it is not the part of a daughter to reveal