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Rh tremendous amount; he has undertaken even more; but "whatever he may have undertaken is far surpassed by what he has imagined." For, great as was his practical power, "his poetical faculty is stronger." This poetical faculty it is which ultimately saved his enemies, for "it is too vigorous for a statesman"; "its grandeur is exaggerated into enormity, and its enormity degenerates into madness." And then Taine reproduces some of his wild dreamings, to which he gave vent when the moment of expansion was on him, and his brilliant Italian vocabulary was at the service of his excited imagination; as, for instance―he is talking to Bourrienne:

Europe is a molehill; never have there been great empires and great revolutions except in the Orient with its 600,000,000 of men.' The following year, at St. Jean d'Acre, on the eve of the last assault, he added: 'If I succeed, I shall find in the town the pacha's treasure and arms for 300,000 men. I stir up, and arm all Syria. . . . I march on to Damascus and Aleppo; as I advance in the country my army will be increased by the discontented. I proclaim to the people the abolition of slavery, and of the tyrannical government of the pachas. I reach Constantinople with armed masses. I overthrow the Turkish empire; I found in the East a new and grand empire, which fixes my place with posterity, and perhaps I return to Paris by the way of Adrianople,