lips, and maintain an indignant
silence amid reproaches and accusations and sneers and scoffs. "He is
a fool who cannot be angry," says English, "but he is a wise man who
will not."

Peter the Great made a law in 1722 that a nobleman who should beat his
slave should be regarded as insane, and a guardian appointed to look
after his property and person. This great monarch once struck his
gardener, who took to his bed and died. Peter, hearing of this,
exclaimed with tears in his eyes, "Alas! I have civilized my own
subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet have I not been able to
civilize or conquer myself." The same monarch, when drunk, rushed upon
Admiral Le Fort with a sword. Le Fort, with great self-possession,
bared his breast to receive the stroke. This sobered Peter, and
afterwards he asked the pardon of Le Fort. Peter said, "I am trying to
reform my country, and I am not yet able to reform myself."
Self-conquest is man's last and greatest victory.

A medical authority of highest repute affirms that excessive labor,
exposure to wet and cold, deprivation of sufficient quantities of
necessary and wholesome food, habitual bad lodging, sloth and
intemperance, are all deadly enemies to human life, but they are none
of them so bad as violent and ungoverned passion,--that men and women
have frequently lived to an advanced age in spite of these, but that
instances are very rare where people of irascible tempers live to
extreme old age.

It was the self-discipline of a man who had never looked upon war until
he was forty that enabled Oliver Cromwell to create an army which never
fought without annihilating, yet which retired into the ranks of
industry as soon as the government was established, each soldier being
distinguished from his neighbors only by his superior diligence,
sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace.

How sweet the serenity of habitual self-command! When does a man feel
more a master of himself than when he has passed through a sudden and
severe provocation in silence or in undisturbed good humor?

Whether teaching the rules of an exact morality, answering his corrupt
judges, receiving sentence of death, or swallowing the poison, Socrates
was still calm, quiet, undisturbed, intrepid.

It is a great thing to have brains, but it is vastly greater to be able
to command them. The Duke of Wellington had great power over himself,
although his natural temper was extremely irritable.