their days, great promise doomed to be always unfulfilled. Of all
characters, these are perhaps the most disappointing; they have so
much in their favour, and the one thing wanting, steadiness of
purpose, renders useless their most beautiful gifts. These two groups
seem to be the most common among the Teutons and Celts of Northern
Europe with fair colouring and tall build; perhaps the other two types
are correspondingly more numerous among the Latin races. They are
choleric, ambitious, or self-isolated, as the cast of their mind is
eager or scornful and generally capable of dissimulation; the world is
not large enough for their Bonapartes. But if bitterness and sadness
predominate, they are carried on an ebbing tide towards pessimism and
contemptuous weariness of life; their soft type, in so far as they
have one, has the softness of powder, dry and crushed, rather than
that of a living organism. In children, this type, fortunately rare,
has not the charm or joy of childhood, but shows a restless straining
after some self-centred excellence, and a coldness of affection which
indicates the isolation towards which it is carried in later life.
Lastly, there is the unquiet group of nervous or melancholic
temperaments, their melancholy not weighed down by listless sadness as
the inactive lymphatics, but more actively dissatisfied with things as
they are--untiringly but unhopefully at work--hard on themselves,
anxious-minded, assured that in spite of their efforts all will turn
out for the worst, often scrupulous, capable of long-sustained
efforts, often of heroic devotedness and superhuman endurance, for
which their reward is not in this world, as the art of pleasing is
singularly deficient in them. Here are found the people who are "so
good, but so trying," ever in a fume and fuss, who, for sheer
goodness, rouse in others the spirit of contradiction. These
characters are at their best in adversity, trouble stimulates them to
their best efforts, whereas in easy circumstances and surrounded with