His style is swollen,
but never strained, as if he were conscious of playing a part above his
real claims. Even when he was foolish and impious enough to arrogate
miraculous powers and a mission from God, his language showed that he
thought there was something in his character and exploits to give a
color to his--blasphemous pretensions. The empire of the world seemed
to him to be in a measure his due, for nothing short of it corresponded
with his conceptions of himself; and he did not use mere verbiage,
but spoke a language to which he gave some credit, when he called his
successive conquests "the fulfilment of his destiny." This spirit
of self-exaggeration wrought its own misery, and drew down upon him
terrible punishments; and this it did by vitiating and perverting his
high powers. First, it diseased his fine intellect, gave imagination the
ascendency over judgment, turned the inventiveness and fruitfulness of
his mind into rash, impatient, restless energies, and thus precipitated
him into projects, which, as the wisdom of his counsellors pronounced,
were fraught with ruin. To a man, whose vanity took him out of the rank
of human beings, no foundation for reasoning was left. All things seemed
possible. His genius and his fortune were not to be bounded by the
barriers which experience had assigned to human powers.
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