relationship. He is a descendant of the great Italians,
the men of action of the year 1400, the military adventurers, usurpers,
and founders of governments lasting their life-time. He inherits in
direct affiliation their blood and inward organization, mental and
moral.[1142] A bud, collected in their forest, before the age of
refinement, impoverishment, and decay, has been transported into a
similar and remote nursery, where a tragic and militant regime is
permanently established. There the primitive germ is preserved intact
and transmitted from one generation to another, renewed and invigorated
by interbreeding. Finally, at the last stage of its growth, it springs
out of the ground and develops magnificently, blooming the same as ever,
and producing the same fruit as on the original stem. Modern cultivation
and French gardening have pruned away but very few of its branches and
blunted a few of its thorns: its original texture, inmost substance,
and spontaneous development have not changed. The soil of France and of
Europe, however, broken up by revolutionary tempests, is more favorable
to its roots than the worn-out fields of the Middle Ages and there it
grows by itself, without being subject, like its Italian ancestors, to
rivalry with its own species; nothing checks the growth; it may absorb
all the juices of the ground, all the air and sunshine of the region,
and become the Colossus which the ancient plants, equally deep-rooted
and certainly as absorbent, but born in a less friable soil and more
crowded together, could not provide.

II. The Leader and Statesman

Intelligence during the Italian Renaissance and at the
present day.--Integrity of Bonaparte's mental machinery.
--Flexibility, force, and tenacity of his attention.--Another
difference between Napoleon's intellect and that of his
contemporaries.--He thinks objects and not words.--His
antipathy to Ideology.--Little or no literary or
philosophical education.--Self-taught through direct
observation and technical instruction.--His fondness for
details.--His inward vision of physical objects and places.
--His mental portrayal of positions, distances, and
quantities.

"The human plant," said Alfieri, "is in no country born more vigorous
than in Italy"; and never, in Italy, was it so vigorous as from 1300 to
1500, from the contemporaries of Dante down to those of Michael
Angelo, Caesar Borgia, Julius