That an over-sanguine person is incapable of taking an altogether safe view of things, and that he is always in more or less peril, is true; but it is also true that his very delusions are the source of an energy and daring which must always be wanting to the timorous and despondent.
His infatuation may, no doubt, be regarded as merely a mild phase of insanity, since he will often see that which to the soberest sense is undiscernible, while he often appears blind and deaf to the most obvious facts before him. But if the delusions are akin to those of a madman, the strength and the daring are the madman’s too.
Undoubtedly he who has this temperament should be regarded as one of fortune’s favourites. The light that leads him on may often prove delusive, but it does not always do so, and even when it does it sheds a cheery glow upon his path that enables him to enjoy his life as he goes along, and at times permits him to revel in the anticipation of successes that are never to be his.
Cowards die many times before their death;
The valiant never taste of death but once,
says Cæsar. In the same sense the hopeful individual enjoys good fortune many times, the anxious and despondent only once; and sometimes not at all.
A more important consideration is the fact that whereas the cares, and worries, and disappointments of life have a natural tendency to intensify the over anxiety and apprehensiveness of those who yield to a proneness in that direction, they tend in an ordinary way to correct the opposite fault.
There are, it is true, some to whom experience seems to bring little wisdom, and there are still more to whom experience brings wisdom, only when it is too late to be very effective; but as a rule the individual who starts in life with a superabundant dash of the buoyant and hopeful in his composition, starts with, no doubt, a somewhat perilous fault, but yet with a fault which time and experience will greatly modify and reduce; while he who is wanting in this faculty of hope has a no less serious flaw in his composition, and one which, unless he strive against it, time and experience will but increase.
The sanguine temperament and self-reliant nature of Peace caused him to surmount difficulties which other men would have sunk under. And had he turned his thoughts and mind more in a proper direction, he had sufficient qualities to have caused him to have cut a respectable figure in the world; but it was not in his nature to abstain from wrong-doing.
He was guided by no moral principle, but had been radically wrong from his earliest childhood.