“Here was a temper less by nature tuned
Than harmonized by discipline to rule,
And by religion sanctified to peace.”
The pen is too truly said to be a fruitful source of regrets to some of us, in regard of the outbreaks of temper we allow it to put on paper; and never is the sting sharper, says one essayist, than when we realize that our imprudence is in black and white, beyond our reach, irrevocable. “We send off our letter, to repent sometimes how bitterly!” Litera scripta manet. Hence the advice of another, never to write in anger, or, at any rate, to keep your letter till you are cool. We are recommended, when indignant at any one’s conduct, to write a letter couched in the strongest terms possible, as satirical and cutting as we can make it, and having done this, to direct, seal, and put it in our desk for a few hours, then read it for our own satisfaction, and tear it up. Another popular authority, earnestly deprecating angry letters, lays down as a rule to be observed throughout the letter-writing world, that no angry letter be posted till four and twenty hours shall have elapsed since it was written. “We all know how absurd is that other rule, of saying the alphabet when you are angry. Trash! Sit down and write your letter; write it with all the venom in your power; spit out your spleen at the fullest; it will do you good: you think you have been injured; say all that you can say with all your poisoned eloquence, and gratify yourself by reading it while your temper is still hot. Then put it in your desk, and, as a matter of course, burn it before breakfast the following morning. Believe me that you will then have a double gratification.” Loquitur the perhaps most widely read, and without a perhaps the most prolific, writer of the day.
When Cœur-de-Lion, in Scott’s “Talisman,” incensed and mortified at the Templar’s tactics, yet foresaw the penalty of giving way to his headlong resentment, with a strong effort he remained silent till he had repeated a pater noster, that being the course which “his confessor had enjoined him to pursue when anger was likely to obtain dominion over him.” The familiar “count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram,” in one of Mr. Dickens’ later stories is but another practical application of the selfsame text.
Gibbon adds to his account of the public penance inflicted by Ambrose on Theodosius, for the massacre of Thessalonica, this remark: “and the edict which interposes a salutary interval of thirty days between the sentence and the execution, may be accepted as the worthy fruits of his [the emperor’s] repentance.” For it was by a hasty resolve that Theodosius swore in his wrath to expiate the blood of his lieutenant, Botheric, by the blood of a guilty people; his fiery and choleric temper being impatient of the dilatory forms of a judicial inquiry. In hot haste he despatched the messengers of death; but attempted, when it was too late, to prevent the execution of his own orders. Avenging furiously in haste, he had to repent at leisure; and he did repent.
It is impossible, perhaps, observed Dean Swift, for the best and wisest among us to keep so constant a guard upon our temper but that we may at some time or other lie open to the strokes of fortune. Incensed on one occasion, “it was natural for me to have immediate recourse to my pen and ink; but before I would offer to make use of them, I resolved deliberately to tell over a hundred; and when I came to the end of that sum, I found it more advisable to defer drawing up my intended remonstrance till I had slept soundly on my resentments.” We are told of the celebrated Macklin, that although so particular in drilling the performers at rehearsals, he was scrupulous in keeping his temper down, the irritability of which he knew too well; and that on one occasion he interposed an hour by his stop-watch, all retiring together from the stage to the green-room, at the end of which time all were in good humour again, and the rehearsal was resumed. “When the evil effects of hasty anger approach, the consequences of which may be irretrievable,”—thus moralizes a fellow-craftsman, John O’Keeffe,—“it would be no harm if all of us could suppress our own feelings, even for Macklin’s green-room hour.” His mighty master, Shakspeare, would have supplied him with a precedent, in the case of good Duke Humphrey, who says as he re-enters,—
“Now, lords, my choler being overblown
With walking once about the quadrangle,
I come to talk of commonwealth affairs.”