while the first two operated on paper and on marble, the latter operates on the living being, on the sensitive and suffering flesh of humanity."
II.
HIS ITALIAN TEMPERAMENT.
Analysing Napoleon's temperament, Taine also finds that it belongs to another race and another epoch. "Three hundred years of police and of courts of justice," "of social discipline and peaceful habits," "have diminished the force and violence of the passions natural to men," but in Italy, at the period of the Renaissance, those passions were still intact.
"Human emotions at that time were keener and more profound than at the present day; the appetites were ardent and more unbridled; man's will was more impetuous and more tenacious; whatever motive inspired him, whether pride, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, envy, or sensuality, the inward spring strained with an energy and relaxed with a violence that has now disappeared. All these energies reappear in the great survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of the nervous machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors. Never was there, even among the Malatestas or Borgias, a more sensitive and impulsive intellect, more capable of such electric shocks and explosions, in which the roar
