Every great novelist is a professor of character depiction. Witness Scrooge, Pecksniff, Mark Tapley, Pickwick, Sam Weller and his father, created by Dickens; the four musketeers, especially D'Artagnon, of Dumas; Amelia and Rebecca Sharp, George, and the Major of Thackeray; Jane Austen's heroines and George Eliot's men and women; the narrators in the famous Canterbury Inn, the soldiers of Kipling, the Shylocks, Macbeths, Rosalinds and Falstaffs of the greatest dramatist; the thousand and one fictitious and yet real figures of literature. The temperament studies by the psychologists and philosophers have been too broad and too classical to be of practical value. Sanguine and choleric temperament, the bilious, the nervous and the phlegmatic, the quick and the slow, all these are broad divisions, and no man really exemplifies them. What I propose to do is less ambitious, but perhaps more practical. I shall take a few of the qualities with which the previous pages have concerned themselves and show how they work out in individuals mainly sketched from life. It will seem that perhaps a disproportionate number are pathological, but I wish to insist that there is no sharp line between the "normal" and "pathological" in character. In fact, normality is an abstract conception, an ideal never reached or seen, and each of us only approaches that ideal in greater or lesser degree. Moreover, certain deviations from the normal are useful, as the assemblage of qualities that make the genius or the reformer of certain types. Others are not useful, or at least not useful in the environment and age in which the deviated person finds himself. Undoubtedly the abnormal have helped found religions, for one who "hears" God and "sees" him as do many of the insane, if intelligent and eloquent at the same time, easily convinces others; but if such a person occurs in a group with well-established belief and resistant to the new, the insane hospital soon lodges the new apostle. I shall not attempt to consider all the varied shades of harmony and disharmony, the extraordinary variety of types. There are as many varieties of persons as there are people, and the mathematical possibilities exceed computation. Those depicted are some of the outstanding types, in whom qualities and combinations of qualities can easily be seen at work. CHAPTER XVII. SOME CHARACTER TYPES There is one kind of energy discharger that we may call the hyperkinetic, controlled practical type. This group is characterized by great and constant activity, well controlled by purpose, with eagerness and enthusiasm manifested in each act but not excessively.