CHAPTER VIII. 

 EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES Confirmed. 



If we turn to more recent history we still find, and 

 naturally so, that its prominent characters belong to 

 the markedly active type. The most conspicuous 

 figure of modern time is certainly that of Napoleon. 

 The more conspicuous because his career was in fact, 

 from first to last, marked by strange deviations from 

 modern ideas and methods. His family and his early 

 life are of deep interest. He was born while his 

 parents were still in their teens, hence probably some 

 delay in the ossification and union of the bones of his 

 skull which favoured, although not on strictly normal 

 lines, the extraordinary expansion of his brain and the 

 relative smallness of his face and skeleton generally. 

 A peculiar congenital organization was indicated by 

 some nervous malady which his physicians strove to con- 

 ceal. Like many other famous men he took wholly after 

 his mother and even shared her dislike of the language 

 and manners of the French people. His father was an 

 Italian of good birth and of a quiet, retiring, gentle 

 nature. His mother, who sprang from a commonplace 

 Corsican family, was coarse, loud, self-asserting, ener- 

 getic and discontented. Should the time ever come 

 when children are named after the parent they mostly 

 resemble, the Corsican hero will be renamed Napoleon 

 Kamolini. I venture to think a still greater name 

 would be changed : Shakspere's mother and her family 

 were of intellectual and refined disposition ; it was not 



