equitable, and, it may be readily allowed, the most liberal act of policy that emanated from the earlier Roman emperors.  “Claudius had taken it into his head,” says Seneca, “to see all Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, and Britons clad in the toga.”  But at the same time he took great care to spread everywhere the Latin tongue, and to make it take the place of the different national idioms.  A Roman citizen, originally of Asia Minor, and sent on a deputation to Rome by his compatriots, could not answer in Latin the emperor’s questions.  Claudius took away his privileges, saying, “He is no Roman citizen who is ignorant of the language of Rome.”

Claudius, however, was neither liberal nor humane towards a notable portion of the Gallic populations, to wit, the Druids.  During his stay in Gaul he proscribed them and persecuted them without intermission; forbidding, under pain of death, their form of worship and every exterior sign of their ceremonies.  He drove them away and pursued them even into Great Britain, whither he conducted, A.D. 43, a military expedition, almost the only one of his reign, save the continued struggle of his lieutenants on the Rhine against the Germans.  It was evidently amongst the corporation of Druids and under the influence of religious creeds and traditions, that there was still pursued and harbored some of the old Gallic spirit, some passion for national independence, and some hatred of the Roman yoke.  In proportion as Claudius had been popular in Gaul did his adopted son and successor, Nero, quickly become hated.  There is nothing to show that he even went thither, either on the business of government or to obtain the momentary access of favor always excited in the mob by the presence and prestige of power.  It was towards Greece and the East that a tendency was shown in the tastes and trips of Nero, imperial poet, musician, and actor.  L. Verus, one of the military commandants in Belgica, had conceived a project of a canal to unite the Moselle to the Saone, and so the Mediterranean to the ocean; but intrigues in the province and the palace prevented its execution, and in the place of public works useful to Gaul, Nero caused a new census to be made of the population whom he required to squeeze to pay for his extravagance.  It was in his reign, as is well known, that a fierce fire consumed a great part of Rome and her monuments.  The majority of historians accuse Nero of having himself been the cause of it; but at any rate he looked on with cynical indifference, as if amused at so grand a spectacle, and taking pleasure in comparing it to the burning of Troy.  He did more:  he profited by it so far as to have built for himself, free of expense, that magnificent palace called “The Palace of Gold,” of which he said, when he saw it completed, “At last I am going to be housed as a man should be.”  Five years before the burning of Rome, Lyons had been a prey to a similar scourge, and Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius, “Lugdunum, which was one of