vident that people
of this temperament are particularly apt for what may be called the
executive department of the leadership of mankind. They are the
material of great orators, great preachers, impressive diffusers of
moral influences. Their constitution might be deemed less favourable
to the qualities required from a statesman in the cabinet, or from a
judge. It would be so, if the consequence necessarily followed that
because people are excitable they must always be in a state of
excitement. But this is wholly a question of training. Strong feeling
is the instrument and element of strong self-control: but it requires
to be cultivated in that direction. When it is, it forms not the
heroes of impulse only, but those also of self-conquest. History and
experience prove that the most passionate characters are the most
fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their passion has
been trained to act in that direction. The judge who gives a just
decision in a case where his feelings are intensely interested on the
other side, derives from that same strength of feeling the determined
sense of the obligation of justice, which enables him to achieve this
victory over himself. The capability of that lofty enthusiasm which
takes the human being out of his every-day character, reacts upon the
daily character itself. His aspirations and powers when he is in this
exceptional state, become the type with which he compares, and by
which he estimates, his sentiments and proceedings at other times:
and his habitual purposes assume a character moulded by and
assimilated to the moments of lofty excitement, although those, from
the physical nature of a human being, can only be transient.
Experience of races, as well as of individuals, does not show those
of excitable temperament to be less fit, on the average, either for
speculation or practice, than the more unexcitable. The French, and
the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitable than
the Teutonic races, and, compared at least with the English, they
have a much greater habitual and daily emotional life: but have they
been less great in science, in public business, in legal and judicial
eminence, or in war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks were
of old, as their descendants and successors still are, one of the
most excitable of the races of mankind. It is superfluous to ask,
what among the achievements of men they did not excel in. The Romans,
probably,