Napoleon Bonaparte

Emerson describes Napoleon as a pattern democrat who superadded insight and generalization to mineral and animal force, so that men saw the natural and intellectual powers combined as if sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. He was a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, embarrassed by no scruples, with a hand of iron immediately connected to his head. He matters because he represents the man of the world — the popular external life and aims of the nineteenth century — and the question of what such force, without moral aim, can finally build.