d descended from the Alps. A long
season of inactivity followed, during which the Romans were too prudent
to hazard a conflict with Hannibal in the field, and he was too weak in
siege artillery to attempt the reduction of any of their fortified
cities. But the time was not lost by that indefatigable commander, and
the following passage from Arnold will both show how it was employed,
and serve as a fair specimen of the style of that powerful and lamented
writer:--

"Never was Hannibal's genius more displayed than during this
long period of inactivity. More than half of his army consisted
of Gauls, of all barbarians the most impatient and uncertain in
their humour, whose fidelity, it was said, could only be
secured by an ever open hand; no man was their friend any
longer than he could gorge them with pay or plunder. Those of
his soldiers who were not Gauls, were either Spaniards or
Africans; the Spaniards were the newly conquered subjects of
Carthage, strangers to her race and language, and accustomed to
divide their lives between actual battle and the most listless
bodily indolence; so that when one of their tribes first saw
the habits of a Roman camp, and observed the centurions walking
up and down before the praetorium for exercise, the Spaniards
thought them mad, and ran up to guide them to their tents,
thinking that he who was not fighting could do nothing but lie
at his ease and enjoy himself. Even the Africans were
foreigners to Carthage; they were subjects harshly governed,
and had been engaged within the last twenty years in a war of
extermination with their masters. Yet the long inactivity of
winter quarters, trying to the discipline of the best national
armies, was borne patiently by Hannibal's soldiers; there was
neither desertion nor mutiny amongst them; even the fickleness
of the Gauls seemed spell-bound; they remained steadily in
their camp in Apulia, neither going home to their own country,
nor over to the enemy. On the contrary, it seems that fresh
bands of Gauls must have joined the Carthaginian army after the
battle of Thrasymenus, and the retreat of the Roman army from
Ariminum. For the Gauls and the Spaniards and the Africans were
overpowered by the ascendancy of Hannibal's character; under
his guidance they felt themselves invincible; with such a