“O tempora! O mores!”
“To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but a bravery of the Stoics.”—Bacon.
I am afraid that you will hear at the whist table a good deal about temper, unless you are particularly fortunate; that so-and-so is good-tempered, or the reverse; that if we were all better tempered, something or other might be different, and similar platitudes. Now these mostly start on the utterly false assumption that everybody is equally subject to the same annoyances.
“Tender and delicate persons must needs be oft angry; they have so many things to trouble them, which more robust natures have little sense of.”—Ibid.
That the greatest exponent of Bumblepuppy has necessarily the longest temper goes without saying—of course he has! He has nothing to ruffle him, for he has everything his own way; he plays as he thinks fit (supposing him to think at all, or ever to be fit); if his partner makes a mistake it is any odds he never sees it; de non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem est ratio; here is one cause of equanimity.
If it is any amusement to him—and I presume it is, otherwise he would not do it—from his cradle to his grave to play a game of which he knows absolutely nothing, and if in pursuit of that amusement he thinks it worth his while to take a certain amount of his own and his partner’s capital, and to throw it in the street, why should he lose his temper? Although he has paid his money, he has had his choice—another cause of equanimity.
Ah Sin played a game he did not understand, and remained quite calm and unperturbed, though he was a heathen and an Asiatic; while his antagonist disgraced our common Christianity by letting his angry passions rise because things were going against him.
If both partners, then, are of the same mind and the same calibre—either bad or good—to quote an American author, “all is peas,” and like the place
“Where brothers dwell and sisters meet
Quarrels should never come.”