Extraordinary and superior, made for command[41] and for conquest,
singular and of an unique species, is the feeling of all his
contemporaries. Those who are most familiar with the histories of
other nations, Madame de Staël and, after her, Stendhal, go back to
the right sources to comprehend him, to the "petty Italian tyrants of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries," to Castruccio-Castracani, to
the Braccio of Mantua, to the Piccinino, the Malatestas of Rimini, and
the Sforzas of Milan. In their opinion, however, it is only a chance
analogy, a psychological resemblance. Really, however,
and)historically it is a positive relationship. He is a descendant of
the great Italians, the men of action of the year 1400, the military
adventurers, usurpers, and founders of governments lasting their life-
time. He inherits in direct affiliation their blood and inward
organization, mental and moral.[42] A bud, collected in their forest,
before the age of refinement, impoverishment, and decay, has been
transported into a similar and remote nursery, where a tragic and
militant régime is permanently established. There the primitive germ
is preserved intact and transmitted from one generation to another,
renewed and invigorated by interbreeding. Finally, at the last stage
of its growth, it springs out of the ground and develops
magnificently, blooming the same as ever, and producing the same fruit
as on the original stem. Modern cultivation and French gardening have
pruned away but very few of its branches and blunted a few of its
thorns: its original texture, inmost substance, and spontaneous
development have not changed. The soil of France and of Europe,
however, broken up by revolutionary tempests, is more favorable to its
roots than the worn-out fields of the Middle Ages and there it grows
by itself, without being subject, like its Italian ancestors, to
rivalry with its own species; nothing checks the growth; it may absorb
all the juices of the ground, all the air and sunshine of the region,