Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind
those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself;
incidentally making use of them for other and more private
ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve.
That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a
good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same
sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.
For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can
never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men,
without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments,
always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.
This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire
from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this
air can give, to those men who become famous more through their
infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert,
than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level
of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when
extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal
instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.
But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown
of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian
herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization.
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