“Help us, O Lord! with patient love to bear
Each other’s faults, to suffer with true meekness;
Help us each other’s joys and griefs to share,
But let us turn to thee alone in weakness.”
More than half of us are bad-tempered — at least so an English philosopher tells us. He claims that this is no mere general statement and no bit of guesswork; he gives us the figures for it. He arranged to have about two thousand people put unconsciously under espionage as to their ordinary temper, and then had careful reports made of the results. The footing up of the returns has been announced, and is decidedly unflattering to the two thousand tempers that were thus put to the test. More than half of these people — to be entirely accurate, fifty-two per centum of them — are set down as bad-tempered in various degrees. The dictionary has been wellnigh exhausted of adjectives of this order in giving the different shades of badness.
Acrimonious, aggressive, arbitrary, bickering, capricious, captious, choleric, contentious, crotchety, despotic, domineering, easily offended, gloomy, grumpy, hasty, huffy, irritable, morose, obstinate, peevish, sulky, surly, vindictive, — these are some of the qualifying words. There are employed, in all, forty-six terms, none of which describes a sweet temper.
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