62 EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 



and sunk downwards on his breast. The mental char- 

 acteristics of the man of action were equally striking 

 many of them in their most unwelcome forms. He 



-- was precocious, alert, petulant, censorious, fitful. His 

 thirst for pre-eminence was not a passion it was an 

 insanity. He was a stranger to all the profounder 

 emotions. He knew nothing of deep love, of genuine 

 anger loudness and petulance and imperiousness are 

 not anger nothing of fierce hatred. He bad no moral 

 scruples and was indifferent to all restraints, yet he 

 certainly was not a licentious man ; he was indeed, to 

 adopt the expression of a leading novelist, " not sensual 

 enough to be affectionate/' He rewarded without love 

 and destroyed without hate. 



In either temperament one or two elements may 



] dwarf all others. Sensuality may dwarf the finer 



emotions in the impassioned ; the activities which 



make for self-elevation may dwarf the finer activities 



in the active. Napoleon's abnormal demand for pre- 



,' dominance stands alone in its activity, its intensity, its 

 defiance of every moral impulse, either personal or 

 national, and in its transitory success a success that 

 was of necessity transitory because it was not based 

 on any principle of natural growth. In contemplating 

 his career we are carried back to a dreamy past. A 

 sort of human mastodon moves across the stage of 

 modern life, and brings before us extinct ideals, extinct 

 morals, and the need of almost extinct adjectives. 



Napoleon's intellect was not a normal reasoning-out 

 power; not a faculty which looked round life with an 

 equal as well as a capable eye (for this implies wisdom 

 which he did not possess) ; he was incapable of calm, 

 - impersonal, and detached contemplation. His vast 

 capacity showed itself in taking, at any moment, a 



