nomenclature of disease to these
exceptional monsters, we need not allow that their atrocities were, at
first at any rate, beyond their control. Moral insanity is often nothing
more than the hypertrophy of some vulgar passion--lust, violence,
cruelty, jealousy, and the like. The tyrant, placed above law and less
influenced by public opinion than a private person, may easily allow a
greed for pleasure or a love of bloodshed to acquire morbid proportions
in his nature. He then is not unjustly termed a monomaniac. Within the
circle of his vitiated appetite he proves himself irrational. He becomes
the puppet of passions which the sane man cannot so much as picture to
his fancy, the victim of desire, ever recurring and ever destined to
remain unsatisfied; nor is any hallucination more akin to lunacy than
the mirage of a joy that leaves the soul thirstier than it was before,
the paroxysm of unnatural pleasure which wearies the nerves that crave
for it.

In Frederick, the modern autocrat, and Ezzelino, the legendary tyrant,
we obtain the earliest specimens of two types of despotism in Italy.
Their fame long after their death powerfully affected the fancy of the
people, worked itself into the literature of the Italians, and created a
consciousness of tyranny in the minds of irresponsible rulers.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we find, roughly speaking,
six sorts of despots in Italian cities.[1] Of these the _first_ class,
which is a very small one, had a dynastic or hereditary right accruing
from long seignioral possession of their several districts. The most
eminent are the houses of Montferrat and Savoy, the Marquises of
Ferrara, the Princes of Urbino. At the same time it is difficult to know
where to draw the line between such hereditary lordship as that of the
Este family, and tyranny based on popular favor. The Malatesti of
Rimini, Polentani of Ravenna, Manfredi of Faenza, Ordelaffi of Forli,
Chiavelli of Fabriano, Varani of Camerino, and others, might claim to
rank among the former, since their cities submitted to them without a
long period of republican independence like that which preceded
despotism in the cases to be next mentioned. Yet these families styled
themselves Captains of the burghs they ruled; and in many instances they
obtained the additional title of Vicars of the Church.[2] Even the
Estensi were made hereditary captains of Ferrara at the end of the
thirteenth century, while they also ackno