The man whose head and heart had in a desperate emergency and amid a despairing people paved the way for their deliverance, was no more when it became possible to carry out his design. Whether his successor Hasdrubal forbore to make the attack because the proper moment seemed to him not yet to have arrived, or whether, a statesman rather than a general, he believed himself unequal to the conduct of the enterprise, we are unable to determine. When, at the beginning of 219 B.C., he fell by the hand of an assassin, the Carthaginian officers of the Spanish army summoned to fill his place Hannibal, the eldest son of Hamilcar. He was still a young man, born in 247 B.C., and now, therefore, in his twenty-ninth year; but his life had already been fraught with varied experience. His first recollections picture to him his father fighting in a distant land and conquering on Ercte; he shared that unconquered father’s fortunes and sympathized with his feelings on the peace of Catulus, on the bitter return home, and throughout the horrors of the Libyan war. While still a boy he had followed his father to the camp, and he soon distinguished himself. His light and firmly built frame made him an excellent runner and boxer and a fearless rider; the privation of sleep did not affect him, and he knew like a soldier how to enjoy or to want his food. Although his youth had been spent in [Illustration: HANNIBAL.] the camp, he possessed such culture as was bestowed on the noble Phœnicians of the time; in Greek, apparently after he had become a general, he made such progress under the guidance of his intimate friend Sasilus of Sparta as to be able to compose state papers in that language. As he grew up, he entered the army of his father to perform his first feats of arms under the paternal eye, and to see him fall in battle by his side. Thereafter he had commanded the cavalry under his sister’s husband Hasdrubal and distinguished himself by brilliant personal bravery as well as by his talents as a leader. The voice of his comrades now summoned him--their tried and youthful leader--to the chief command, and he could now execute the designs for which his father and his brother-in-law had died. He took possession of the inheritance, and was worthy of it. His contemporaries tried to cast stains of all sorts on his character; the Romans charged him with cruelty, the Carthaginians with covetousness; and it is true that he hated as only Oriental natures know how to hate, and that a general who never fell short of money and stores can hardly have been other than covetous. Nevertheless, though anger and envy and meanness have written his history, they have not been able to mar the pure and noble image which it presents.