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TEMPER.

THERE seems a peculiar tendency in men to change the meaning or to abandon the use of words by which they express the more intimate relations and emotions, the events that happen to us all, or the temperament and disposition that characterises each one of us. It matters not how fit the word is for its work, it must go when its time comes. Men no longer wed but marry; we give up sweetheart to the vulgar without an equivalent; and that fine word humour has so changed its meaning, that when Addison says "No man ought to be tolerated in an habitual humour by any who do not wait on him. for bread "the modern reader has to consider before he apprehends his exact meaning. The vocabulary of one generation does not suit the needs of the next. Sometimes we amplify and sometimes we condense. But however the pen expresses itself, it inscribes at the same time a date to be detected by posterity. Through what a quaint series of archaisms does.

Anthony Wood endeavour to give variety to the announcement of death, as one after another he closes his biographical record; seeking to adapt it to the worth and character of each. The saint surrenders up his pious soul, the player makes his last exit, a clap did usher Davenant to his grave; one concludes his last day, another pays his last debt, another gives up the ghost, another yields to nature. To be born. is to receive his first breath; to die, to surrender up his last, and so on. Modern biographers, seeing that one event happens to all, give up the hope of exciting new reflections in the reader, and resign themselves to the bare record, "he died." "Thus the ingenuities of composition exercise themselves by turns in different fields. We are simple where our prede

cessors were moral and didactic.

But it is in what concerns the inner man that we note more particularly this law of change. The complexities of the subject, the difficulties of analysis, the perversions of satire and irony, all tend to it. The term that satisfies one age fails to say what the next wants to have said. What breadth, nobleness, and benignity, for instance, our ancestors saw in the quality good-nature! but humanity was not amiable. enough to allow of its continuance in this first meaning. It had lost it in Dryden's time, who "would fain bring back good-nature to its original signification of virtue," though the change he notices is rather an adulteration than actual change, an excellence degraded into an easiness of nature. The change in the

word which heads our subject is more fundamental. Temper, familiarly used, may be said to have turned round in its meaning within the last two or three hundred years. It used to be the atmosphere of the soul, applied generally in a favourable sense. "Restore yourselves unto your tempers," writes Ben Jonson. Nowadays when a man is in a temper, if we dare, we bid him come out of it. True, to lose temper is still to lose serenity-"keep your temper" is still familiar counsel: we so far hold to the old turn of phrase; but now to have temper is to be disturbed and disturbing. But here again we condense where our forefathers amplified. By what various epithets they indicated stormy, disordered, irascible natures! They were peevish, froward, sour, petulant, waspish, angry, fuming, shrewd. They had their masculine and feminine adjectives. The men were choleric, the women were curst. The men raged, the women had their glouting humours, fits, and vapours; they were scolds, they were jades, they were shrews and vixens. For all this, whether in man or woman, we substitute, in common parlance, one generic term, temper as a possession, ill temper as its manifestation. The affix " bad" or "ill "—a bad temper, ill-tempered-is so modern, that we should scarcely find it in any book more than a hundred years old; sweet temper occurring earlier than the reverse. We say common parlance, for no doubt it was its introduction into common use which caused the change of meaning. Now, Nature with the vulgar

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has never been much used in a personal sense. them it is the Nature of things or of work, not of man. The countryman understood the nature of all farm-labour; good food loses its nature under adverse condition. The cynicism of would-be wit and no vulgar handling, transposed good-nature in man into a vapid quality. But with temper it is different. So soon as it slipped into conversational use it altered its meaning by a sort of necessity; for the common run of people think of nothing in the abstract, and temper does not come under consideration at all with the vulgar but as a thing disturbed and causing disturbance. "Keep your temper," says mild Mrs Lirriper to her fiery subordinate, applying the term here in its primitive sense. "I'll show them the sort of temper I keep," is the virago's reply. "All of us has our tempers," says the maid of her fellow-servants; "but I think his is the worst." What sort of temper?" asks a lady. "Ma'am, she hasn't one," is the favourable rejoinder. We have all found that, however curious the distinctions between one form of diseased temper and another, the troublesome and vexatious qualities of one and all have a common resemblance. They all make themselves unpleasantly felt, all disturb our peace, all suggest the same precautions, all arouse, though in various degrees, a kindred irritation. Whether the man is sullen or snappish, crabbed or snarling, fretful or furious, it is equally wisdom to let the sleeping dog lie so long as sleep it will.

However, having settled for mutual convenience upon a generic term, we cannot for a moment rest in it. There are infinite varieties of bad temper, as well as shades and degrees of the same. Yet we may first define the three distinctions of temper in its primary meaning, with relation to irascibility. An ordinary temper is quiet and so far good as long as it is not provoked; a bad temper is the aggressor; a sweet temper can agree with a bad one through its own benignity. We should be careful how we call even the aggressive temper a bad one. It may arise from such purely physical causes as to be beyond the power of complete control; but it cannot exist without our being alive to it. It may be so slight an inconvenience as merely to ruffle the surface of social intercourse, and to amuse while it ruffles, or it may disturb social and domestic life to its very depths-it may be food for gentle satire or it may embitter life; but wherever it exists it is perceived, or at least felt. Anything deserving to be defined as "a temper" at all, is a presence not to be forgotten by those within its influence-a fact, though it may not be recognised by its right name. That only should be called a bad temper which needs to be calculated upon and warded against at every turn-which constitutes a recognised trial in those near enough to be subject to itwhich leads those acquainted with it to ask first at every turn of affairs how Mr M

what Mrs N will say to it? sive temper, compatible as it is

will take it?

But every aggres

with a thousand

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