TEMPERAMENTS. 309 



which are liable to spring upon the most circumspect of us in the 

 shape of physiological incest ; as if in the decalogue and through the 

 ingenuity of man there were not already more crimes than human 

 nature can withstand, that we should be exposed to others we know 

 not of. This physiological crime consists in the marital union of like 

 temperaments. Human science has revealed another latent offense, 

 called sexual incompatibility, which, so far as I know, has not yet, 

 in its sexual guise, obtruded itself in the divorce courts. It is a 

 standing rebuke to those who build imaginary sciences, without a foot- 

 hold in the solid world of facts, that, in giving their shadowy creations 

 to the people, they are inviting the cold scrutiny of an aggregate 

 common-sense that never fails in time to separate the true from the 

 false. 



But temperaments have been made to play a more agreeable role 

 in human affairs than in defining physiological crimes. In the history 

 of this physical attribute it is interesting to cite its literary aspects. 

 Ben Jonson devoted whole plays to the idealizations of individual 

 temperaments, in which a peculiarity was made to play its part as a 

 dramatis persona. The keen and careful analysis of the poet in 

 character is immortalized in his play of " Every Man in his Humor." 

 Shakespeare proved himself a good physiologist as well as a good 

 judge of a conspirator in contrasting Cassius, "lean and hungry," 

 with men " that are fat ; sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' 

 nights." In the earlier English novels, temperament was given a more 

 careful study than in the modern school of light literature. Gold- 

 smith proved himself an enemy of the humoral pathologists in saying 

 of Olivia, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," that the temper of woman 

 is generally formed from the cast of her features. Fielding, in his 

 creative novel of " Tom Jones," speaks of temperaments in such a 

 happy vein of his inimitable philosophy, that it is worth quoting and 

 remembering : " I make no manner of doubt," he says, " but that, in 

 this light, we may see the imaginary future chancellor just called to 

 the bar, the archbishop in crape, and the prime-minister at the tail 

 of an opposition, more truly happy than those w T ho are invested with 

 all the power and profit of these respective offices." A more perfect 

 description of a sanguine man was never written. Novelists, as a 

 rule, analyze temperaments the opposite of their own in their ideal 

 characters. Scott generally describes the bilious in his heroes and 

 heroines, and is never purely realistic in describing the sanguine type 

 to which he belonged. Dickens is always happier in his female char- 

 acters, and they are good specimens of the sanguine. Dolly, the 

 locksmith's daughter, is a very truthful portrait of this type ; while 

 Mark Tapley, famous as the character may be, is an atrabilious, w T ho 

 is continually violating his physiology by being happy under the 

 very circumstances that bring out the unmixed misery of his class. 

 Dickens himself was decidedly of the lymphatic a type he rarely 



