umental service. Unhappily, Touchwood's great powers
have been only so far manifested as to be believed in, not demonstrated.
Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to do
would be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his love of disappointing
complacent expectancy which has gone so far as to keep up this
lamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive
work which he would have written if nobody had expected it of him?

One can see that if Touchwood were to become a public man and take to
frequent speaking on platforms or from his seat in the House, it would
hardly be possible for him to maintain much integrity of opinion, or to
avoid courses of partisanship which a healthy public sentiment would
stamp with discredit. Say that he were endowed with the purest honesty,
it would inevitably be dragged captive by this mysterious, Protean bad
temper. There would be the fatal public necessity of justifying
oratorical Temper which had got on its legs in its bitter mood and made
insulting imputations, or of keeping up some decent show of consistency
with opinions vented out of Temper's contradictoriness. And words would
have to be followed up by acts of adhesion.

Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so
under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order of
character can coexist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the
nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental
habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception,
conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds--for a
human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in
its windings--but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high
character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities
shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not
perfectly, obeyed.

If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes,
intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or cruel words, and
falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make
amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the
less ugly because they are ascribed to "temper." Especially I object to
the assumption that his having a fundamentally good disposition is
either an apology or a compensation for his bad behaviour. If his temper
yesterday made him lash the ho