a painful feeling of the mind, excited by the receipt of an injury or affront, and accompanied with a disposition to retaliate on the author of the injury. Bishop Butler observes that anger is far from being a selfish passion, since it is produced by injuries offered to others as well as to ourselves, and was designed by the Author of nature not only to excite us to act vigorously in defending ourselves from evil, but to interest us in the defence or Angerburg rescue of the injured and helpless, and to raise us above the fear of the proud and mighty oppressor.

The same author makes an important distinction, as Dr Reid observes (Active Powers, Essay 3), "between sudden anger or resentment, which is a blind impulse arising from our constitution, and that which is deliberate. The first may be raised by hurt of any kind; but the last can only be raised by injury, real or conceived. Both these kinds of anger or resentment are raised whether the hurt or injury be done to ourselves or to those we are interested in."

Physicians and naturalists have recorded instances of extraordinary cases produced by anger. Borrichius cured a woman of an inveterate tertian ague, which had baffled the art of physic, by putting the patient in a furious fit of anger. Valeriola made use of the same means, with the like success, in a quartan ague. The same passion has been equally salutary to paralytic, gouty, and even dumb persons; to which last it has sometimes given the use of speech. Ettmüller gives divers instances of very singular cures wrought by anger: among others, he mentions a person laid up by the gout, who being provoked by his physician, flew upon him, and was cured. It has often, on the other hand, been productive of fatal effects. We meet with several instances of princes to whom it has proved mortal, e.g. Valentinian the First, Wenceslaus, Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, and others. There are also instances where it produced epilepsy, jaundice, cholera morbus, diarrhoea, &c.