[Light-HEARTEDNESS not in our own power.]

A second presumption is furnished also from our familiar experience.  The high-pitched, hilarious temperament and disposition commonly appear in company with some well-marked characteristics of corporeal vigour.  Such persons are usually of a robust mould; often large and full in person, vigorous in circulation and in digestion; able for fatigue, endurance, and exhausting pleasures.  An eminent example of this constitution was seen in Charles James Fox, whose sociability, cheerfulness, gaiety, and power of dissipation were the marvel of his age.  Another example might be quoted in the admirable physical frame of Lord Palmerston.  It is no more possible for an ordinarily constituted person to emulate the flow and the animation of these men, than it is to digest with another person’s stomach, or to perform the twelve labours of Hercules.

A third fact, less on the surface, but no less certain, is, that the men of cheerful and buoyant temperament, as a rule, sit easy to the cares and obligations of life.  They are not much given to care and anxiety as regards their own affairs, and it is not to be expected that they should be more anxious about other people’s.  In point of fact, this is the constitution of somewhat easy virtue:  it is not distinguished by a severe, rigid attention to the obligations and the punctualities of life.  We should not be justified in calling such persons selfish; still less should we call them cold-hearted:  their exuberance overflows upon others in the form of heartiness, geniality, joviality, and even lavish generosity.  Still, they can seldom be got to look far before them; they do not often assume the painfully circumspect attitude required in the more arduous enterprises.  They are not conscientious in trifles.  They cast off readily the burdensome parts of life.  All which is in keeping with our principle.  To take on burdens and cares is to draw upon the vital forces—­to leave so much the less to cheerfulness and buoyant spirits.  The same corporeal framework cannot afford a lavish expenditure in several different ways at one time.  Fox had no long-sightedness, no tendency to forecast evils, or to burden himself with possible misfortunes.  It is very doubtful if Palmerston could have borne the part of Wellington in the Peninsula; his easy-going temperament would not have submitted itself to all the anxieties and precautions of that vast enterprise.  But Palmerston was hale and buoyant, and the Prime Minister of England at eighty:  Wellington began to be infirm at sixty.

[Limitations of the mental forces.]