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2 was an Italian. He remained, in some respects, an Italian all his life. In Taine's eyes, too, he is not only an Italian, but an Italian of the Middle Ages. "He belongs," says Taine, "to another race and another epoch." And then, in a series of wonderful passages, Taine traces back the heritage of Napoleon to those men and those times. "The man-plant," says Alfieri, "is in no country born more vigorous than in Italy," "and never," goes on Taine, "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 II., and Macchiavelli." In those times great personalities fought for crowns, money, and life at one cast, and when they succeeded, established a government remarkable for splendour, order, and firmness. This was the period of great adventurers—great in battle, great in council, great in courage, great in imagination, great in their love of the arts. All these qualities are reproduced in Napoleon.

"He is," says Taine, "a posthumous brother of Dante and Michael Angelo; in the clear outlines of his vision, in the intensity, coherence, and inward logic of his reverie, in the profundity of his meditations, in the superhuman grandeur of his conceptions, he is, indeed, their fellow and their equal. His genius is of the same stature and the same structure; he is one of the three sovereign minds of the Italian Renaissance, only,