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HIS IDEAS, PASSIONS AND INTELLIGENCE.
I.Intense Passions.
Personality and character during the Italian Renaissance and during the present time .-- Intensity of the passions in Bonaparte .-- His excessive touchiness .-- His immediate violence .-- His impatience, rapidity, and need of talking.
-- His temperament, tension, and faults.
On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in intellect.[1201] With us, three hundred years of police and of courts of justice, of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary civilization, have diminished the force and violence of the passions natural to Man.

In Italy, in the Renaissance epoch, they 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, 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 this 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 with the Malatestas and the Borgias, a more sensitive and more impulsive intellect, one capable of such electric shocks and explosions, in which the roar and flashes of tempest lasted longer and of which the effects were more irresistible.

In his mind no idea remains speculative and pure; none is a simple transcript of the real, or a simple picture of the possible; each is an internal eruption, which suddenly and spontaneously spends itself in action; each darts forth to its goal and would reach it without stopping were it not kept back and restrained by force[1202] Sometimes, the eruption is so sudden, that the restraint does not come soon enough.