by speaking low, in opposition to the motions of his displeasure.
If you are conscious of being in a passion, keep your mouth shut, lest
you increase it. Many a person has dropped dead in a rage. Fits of
anger bring fits of disease. "Whom the gods would destroy they first
make mad." "Keep cool," says Webster, "anger is not argument." "Be
calm in arguing," says George Herbert, "for fierceness makes error a
fault, and truth discourtesy."

To be angry with a weak man is to prove that you are not strong
yourself. "Anger," says Pythagoras, "begins with folly and ends with
repentance." You must measure the strength of a man by the power of
the feelings he subdues, not by the power of those which subdue him.

De Leon, a distinguished Spanish poet, after lying years in dungeons of
the Inquisition, dreary, and alone, without light, for translating part
of the Scriptures into his native tongue, was released and restored to
his professorship. A great crowd thronged to hear his first lecture,
out of curiosity to learn what he might say about his imprisonment.
But the great man merely resumed the lecture which had been so cruelly
broken off five years before, just where he left it, with the words
"Heri discebamus" (Yesterday we were teaching). What a lesson in this
remarkable example of self-control for those who allow their tongues to
jabber whatever happens to be uppermost in their minds!

Did you ever see a man receive a flagrant insult, and only grow a
little pale, bite his quivering lip, and then reply quietly? Did you
ever see a man in anguish stand as if carved out of solid rock,
mastering himself? Have you not seen one bearing a hopeless daily
trial remain silent and never tell the world what cankered his home
peace? That is strength. "He who, with strong passions, remains
chaste; he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in
him, can be provoked, and yet restrain himself and forgive,--these are
strong men, the spiritual heroes."

"You will be remembered only as the man who broke my nose," said young
Michael Angelo to the man Torrigiano, who struck him in anger. What
sublime self-control for a quick-tempered man!

"You ask whether it would not be manly to resent a great injury," said
Eardley Wilmot: "I answer that it would be manly to resent it, but it
would be Godlike to forgive it."

That man has conquered his tongue who can allow the ribald jest or
scurrilous word to die unspoken on his