Confident, optimistic, disposed towards hopefulness, ruddy, florid, bloody, blood-red, having blood as the dominant humour.
The last part of the definition refers to the mediaeval concept which saw an individual's physiology being determined by the relative amounts of four liquids - blood, yellow bile, (the mythical) black bile, and phlegm - in his or her body. Accordingly, these dictated his or her complexion, temperament or disposition, the four consequent temperaments being choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic, the most desirable of these being a sanguine disposition.
Could one really consign a person to such anachronistic categories as 'choleric', 'melancholic', 'sanguine' or 'phlegmatic' when surely each of us is a differently calibrated combination of all four?
Matthew Micklewright has no time to reflect on such oddness and implausibility when, at the age of eight, he is hauled out of bed in the middle of the night and removed, by truck, from his parents' view. He never sees them again, for they are melancholic and he, the shadowy, offstage authorities have decreed, is sanguine, the most impressive and fortunate category of them all.
Alex Clark, The Observer, 12 March 2006, Observer
reviewing Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom. (Amazon)
Four hundred years on from the template fashioned by Shakespeare's sorry jesters and tragic clowns, one never expects a modern novelist to be too sanguine over the fate of the stand-up comedian.
D.J. Taylor, Guardian, 7 December 2002, Guardian
reviewing John O'Farrell's This is Your Life. (Amazon)
Although Jefferson is usually viewed as someone with a sunny and sanguine temperament, Beran contends that beneath the reasoned surface of his thinking lay depths of gloomy forebodings and dark fears of ennui.
Gordon Wood, The New York Times, 14 December 2003, New York Times
reviewing Michael Knox Beran's Jefferson's Demons. (Amazon)
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