It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans, and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.