He pawns his queen's jewels next year; and finally summons all the gentlemen of England who had forty pounds a year, to come and receive the honour of knighthood, or pay to be excused! 277. II. The failures of Edward, or of twenty Edwards, would have done Florence no harm, had she remained true to herself, and to her neighbouring states. Her merchants only fall by their own increasing avarice; and above all by the mercantile form of pillage, usury. The idea that money could beget money, though more absurd than alchemy, had yet an apparently practical and irresistibly tempting confirmation in the wealth of villains, and the success of fools. Alchemy, in its day, led to pure chemistry; and calmly yielded to the science it had fostered. But all wholesome indignation against usurers was prevented, in the Christian mind, by wicked and cruel religious hatred of the race of Christ. In the end, Shakspeare himself, in his fierce effort against the madness, suffered himself to miss his mark by making his usurer a Jew: the Franciscan institution of the Mount of Pity failed before the lust of Lombardy, and the logic of Augsburg; and, to this day, the worship of the Immaculate Virginity of Money, mother of the Omnipotence of Money, is the Protestant form of Madonna worship. 278. III. The usurer's fang, and the debtor's shame, might both have been trodden down under the feet of Italy, had her knights and her workmen remained true to each other. But the brotherhoods of Italy were not of Cain to Abel--but of Cain to Cain. Every man's sword was against his fellow. Pisa sank before Genoa at Meloria, the Italian Ægos-Potamos; Genoa before Venice in the war of Chiozza, the Italian siege of Syracuse. Florence sent her Brunelleschi to divert the waves of Serchio against the walls of Lucca; Lucca her Castruccio, to hold mock tournaments before the gates of vanquished Florence. The weak modern Italian reviles or bewails the acts of foreign races, as if his destiny had depended upon these; let him at least assume the pride, and bear the grief, of remembering that, among all the virgin cities of his country, there has not been one which would not ally herself with a stranger, to effect a sister's ruin.