Liberality is concerned with money matters, and lies between extravagance and meanness.  Really it means the right treatment of money, both in spending and receiving it—­the former rather than the latter.  A man is not really liberal who lavishes money for baser purposes, or takes it whence he should not, or fails to take due care of his property.  The liberal man tends to err in the direction of lavishness.  Extravagance is curable, but is frequently accompanied by carelessness as to the objects on which the money is spent and the sources from which it is obtained.  The habit of meanness is apt to be ineradicable, and is displayed both in the acquisition and in the hoarding of money.

Munificence is a virtue concerned only with expenditure on a large scale, and it implies liberality.  It lies between vulgar ostentation and niggardliness.  It is possible only for the wealthy, and is concerned mainly with public works, but also with private occasions of ceremony.  The error of vulgar ostentation is misdirection of expenditure, not excess.  Niggardliness abstains from a proper expenditure.

Magnanimity is the virtue of the aristocrat; its excess is self-glorification, its deficiency self-depreciation.  The magnanimous man will bate nothing of his claim to honour, power and wealth, not as caring greatly for them, but as demanding what he knows to be his due.  This character involves the possession of the virtues; the man must act in the grand manner and on the grand scale.  He knows his own superiority, does not conceal it, and acts up to it.  Self-glorification overrates its own capacities; self-depreciation underrates them and shuns its responsibilities, being the more reprehensible of the two.

There is a nameless virtue which stands to magnanimity in the same relation as that of liberality to munificence; these being concerned with honours, as those with money.  The excess is ambition, the deficiency is the lack of it; but here terminology fails us.

Good temper is a mean between ill-temper—­whether of the irascible, the sulky, or the cantankerous kind—­and something for which we have no name (poor-spiritedness).  Friendliness comes between the excessive desire to please and boorishness.  It is a social virtue which might be defined as goodwill plus tact.  Sincerity [there is no English term quite corresponding to the Greek] is the quality opposed on the one side to boastfulness, and on the other to mock-modesty; it is displayed by the man who acknowledges, but who never exaggerates his own merits.  In the social display of wit and humour, there is a marked mean between the buffoon and the dullard or prig.  Shame is a term implying a feeling rather than a habit; like fear, it has a physical effect, producing blushes, and seems, in fact, to be fear of disrepute.  To the young, it is a safeguard against vice; the virtuous man need never feel it; to be unable to feel it implies the habit of vice.  Continence is not properly in the category of moral virtues.