It is a very quick and highly irascible beast and even known to turn on its pursuer.
He was not an agreeable companion, violent in his passions, nervous, restless, and in old age extremely irascible.
Gites may have been inexpensive but they were atrociously uncomfortable and their farmer owners were impossibly irascible.
While discussing noses, he says that those with thick bulbous ends belong to persons who are insensitive, swinish; sharp-tipped belong to the irascible, those easily provoked, like dogs; rounded, large, obtuse noses to the magnanimous, the lion-like; slender hooked noses to the eagle-like, the noble but grasping; round-tipped retrousse noses to the luxurious, like barndoor fowl; noses with a very slight notch at the root belong to the impudent, the crow-like; while snub noses belong to persons of luxurious habits, whom he compares to deer; open nostrils are signs of passion, &c.
His distinction among moral virtues of the justice that renders others their due from the virtues that control the appetites and passions of the agent himself, represents his interpretation of the Niconiachean Ethics; while his account of these latter virtues is a simple transcript of Aristotle's, just as his division of the non-rational element of the soul into " concupiscible " and " irascible " is the old Platonic one.