Wealth is notoriously a fatal gift, and should be shunned, not sought. No one need fear poison if he drinks his wine out of a cheap cup. If the love of money is the root of all evil, the possession of money is a challenge to all evil-doers. What, then, may one rightly desire? Power? This is just as fatal to its possessor. Some are brought to ruin through their great power, subject itself to envy just as great; they are wrecked by their long and brilliant roll of honors; down from the pedestals come their statues, and now the stroke of the axe shatters the very wheels of the triumphal cars. Hark! now the fires are hissing, now, by dint of bellows and forge, that head, the people's idol, is aglow; and the great Sejanus is a crackling! And soon from the face, second to one only in the whole world, they are making pipkins, and basins, and a pan--ay, and even meaner vessels!... What laid low a Crassus, and a Pompey, and that leader who broke the proud Romans' spirit and brought them under his lash? Why, it was just the unscrupulous struggling for the highest place, and the prayer of ambition, heard but too well by the malicious gods. It is but seldom that a king does not take a murderous crowd with him down to Ceres' son-in-law; seldom that a despot dies without blood-letting.... Just weigh Hannibal. How many pounds' weight will you find in that greatest of leaders? This is the man for whom Africa is too small--Africa, lashed by the Moorish main, and stretching thence to the tepid Nile; and, on another side again, to the Ethiopian tribes with their towering elephants! He adds Spain to his empire; he bounds over the Pyrenees; Nature barred his path with her Alp and her snow; he rives the rocks and bursts the mountain with vinegar. Now he holds Italy, yet he still strains forward. "Nothing," cries he, "is gained unless we storm the city gates with our Punic soldiery, and this hand plants my standard in the very heart of Rome!" Oh, what a sight! oh, what a subject for a caricature--the one-eyed general bestriding the Gætulian monster! What, then, is his end? Fie, glory! Why, he in his turn is conquered, and flies headlong into exile; and there he sits, that august dependent--a gazing stock at a king's gates--until it may please His Majesty of Bithynia to awake. The soul which once turned the world upside down shall be quelled, not by a sword, not by a stone, no, nor by a javelin; but by that Nemesis of Cannæ, the avenger of all that blood--just a ring.[E] Off with you, madman! Scour the bleak Alps, that so you may--catch the fancy of schoolboys, and become a theme for declamation! [E] Hannibal always carried with him, concealed in a ring, a dose of poison, with which, at last, he took his own life, to escape capture by the Romans.