particular business at Duffield.
However, I'll make a holiday and go. By dint of seeing folly, I shall get
lessons in patience.«
    The weak point to which Felix referred was his liability to be carried
completely out of his own mastery by indignant anger. His strong health, his
renunciation of selfish claims, his habitual preoccupation with large thoughts
and with purposes independent of everyday casualties, secured him a fine and
even temper, free from moodiness or irritability. He was full of long-suffering
towards his unwise mother, who pressed him daily with her words and urged him,
so that his soul was vexed; he had chosen to fill his days in a way that
required the utmost exertion of patience, that required those little rill-like
out-flowings of goodness which in minds of great energy must be fed from deep
sources of thought and passionate devotedness. In this way his energies served
to make him gentle; and now, in this twenty-sixth year of his life, they had
ceased to make him angry, except in the presence of something that roused his
deep indignation. When once exasperated, the passionateness of his nature threw
off the yoke of a long-trained consciousness in which thought and emotion had
been more and more completely mingled and concentrated itself in a rage as
ungovernable as that of boyhood. He was thoroughly aware of the liability, and
knew that in such circumstances he could not answer for himself. Sensitive
people with feeble frames have often the same sort of fury within them; but they
are themselves shattered, and shatter nothing. Felix had a terrible arm: he knew
that he was dangerous; and he avoided the conditions that might cause him
exasperation, as he would have avoided intoxicating drinks if he had been in
danger of intemperance.
    The nomination-day was a great epoch of successful trickery, or, to speak in
a more parliamentary manner, of war-stratagem, on the part of skilful agents.
And Mr Johnson had his share of inward chuckling and self-approval, as one who
might justly expect increasing renown, and be some day in as general request as
the great Putty himself. To have the pleasure and the praise of electioneering
ingenuity, and also to get paid for it, without too much anxiety whether the
ingenuity will achieve its ultimate end, perhaps gives to some select persons a
sort of satisfaction in their superiority to their more agitated fellow-men that
is worthy to be classed with those generous enjoyments of having the truth
chiefly to yourself, and of seeing others in danger of drowning while you are
high and dry, which