Ex pede Herculem may often prove safe enough, but ex verruca
Tullium is liable to mislead a hasty judge of his fellow-men.

I have studied the people called misers and thought a good deal about
them. In former years I used to keep a little gold by me in order to
ascertain for myself exactly the amount of pleasure to be got out of
handling it; this being the traditional delight of the old-fashioned
miser. It is by no means to be despised. Three or four hundred dollars
in double-eagles will do very well to experiment on. There is something
very agreeable in the yellow gleam, very musical in the metallic clink,
very satisfying in the singular weight, and very stimulating in the
feeling that all the world over these same yellow disks are the
master-keys that let one in wherever he wants to go, the servants that
bring him pretty nearly everything he wants, except virtue,--and a good
deal of what passes for that. I confess, then, to an honest liking for
the splendors and the specific gravity and the manifold potentiality of
the royal metal, and I understand, after a certain imperfect fashion, the
delight that an old ragged wretch, starving himself in a crazy hovel,
takes in stuffing guineas into old stockings and filling earthen pots
with sovereigns, and every now and then visiting his hoards and fingering
the fat pieces, and thinking ever all that they represent of earthly and
angelic and diabolic energy. A miser pouring out his guineas into his
palm and bathing his shrivelled and trembling hands in the yellow heaps
before him, is not the prosaic being we are in the habit of thinking him.
He is a dreamer, almost a poet. You and I read a novel or a poem to help
our imaginations to build up palaces, and transport us into the emotional
states and the felicitous conditions of the ideal characters pictured in
the book we are reading. But think of him and the significance of the
symbols he is handling as compared with the empty syllables and words we
are using to build our aerial edifices with! In this hand he holds the
smile of beauty and in that the dagger of revenge. The contents of that
old glove will buy him the willing service of many an adroit sinner, and
with what that coarse sack contains he can purchase the prayers of holy
men for all succeeding time. In this chest is a castle in Spain, a real
one, and not only in Spain, but anywhere he will choose to have it. If
he would know what is the liberality of judgmen