Thus did Wallenstein, at the age of fifty, terminate his active and extraordinary life. To ambition, he owed both his greatness and his ruin; with all his failings, he possessed great and admirable qualities, and had he kept himself within due bounds, he would have lived and died without an equal. The virtues of the ruler and of the hero, prudence, justice, firmness, and courage, are strikingly prominent features in his character; but he wanted the gentler virtues of the man, which adorn the hero, and make the ruler beloved. Terror was the talisman with which he worked; extreme in his punishments as in his rewards, he knew how to keep alive the zeal of his followers, while no general of ancient or modern times could boast of being obeyed with equal alacrity. Submission to his will was more prized by him than bravery; for, if the soldiers work by the latter, it is on the former that the general depends. He continually kept up the obedience of his troops by capricious orders, and profusely rewarded the readiness to obey even in trifles; because he looked rather to the act itself, than its object. He once issued a decree, with the penalty of death on disobedience, that none but red sashes should be worn in the army. A captain of horse no sooner heard the order, than pulling off his gold-embroidered sash, he trampled it under foot; Wallenstein, on being informed of the circumstance, promoted him on the spot to the rank of Colonel. His comprehensive glance was always directed to the whole, and in all his apparent caprice, he steadily kept in view some general scope or bearing. The robberies committed by the soldiers in a friendly country, had led to the severest orders against marauders; and all who should be caught thieving, were threatened with the halter. Wallenstein himself having met a straggler in the open country upon the field, commanded him to be seized without trial, as a transgressor of the law, and in his usual voice of thunder, exclaimed, "Hang the fellow," against which no opposition ever availed. The soldier pleaded and proved his innocence, but the irrevocable sentence had gone forth. "Hang then innocent," cried the inexorable Wallenstein, "the guilty will have then more reason to tremble." Preparations were already making to execute the sentence, when the soldier, who gave himself up for lost, formed the desperate resolution of not dying without revenge. He fell furiously upon his judge, but was overpowered by numbers, and disarmed before he could fulfil his design. "Now let him go," said the Duke, "it will excite sufficient terror."