infliction of another and a greater.

The monotony of wickedness and outrage becomes at length fatiguing to the
coarsest and most callous senses; and the historian, even, who caters
professedly for the taste which feeds upon the monstrous and the
hyperbolical, is glad at length to escape from the long evolution of his
insane atrocities, to the striking and truly scenical catastrophe of
retribution which overtook them, and avenged the wrongs of an insulted
world. Perhaps history contains no more impressive scenes than those in
which the justice of Providence at length arrested the monstrous career of
Nero.

It was at Naples, and, by a remarkable fatality, on the very anniversary
of his mother's murder, that he received the first intelligence of the
revolt in Gaul under the Propraetor Vindex. This news for about a week he
treated with levity; and, like Henry VII. of England, who was nettled, not
so much at being proclaimed a rebel, as because he was described under the
slighting denomination of "one Henry Tidder or Tudor," he complained
bitterly that Vindex had mentioned him by his family name of AEnobarbus,
rather than his assumed one of Nero. But much more keenly he resented the
insulting description of himself as a "miserable harper," appealing to all
about him whether they had ever known a better, and offering to stake the
truth of all the other charges against himself upon the accuracy of this
in particular. So little even in this instance was he alive to the true
point of the insult; not thinking it any disgrace that a Roman emperor
should be chiefly known to the world in the character of a harper, but
only if he should happen to be a bad one. Even in those days, however,
imperfect as were the means of travelling, rebellion moved somewhat too
rapidly to allow any long interval of security so light-minded as this.
One courier followed upon the heels of another, until he felt the