d champion. Nattalis, ever foremost in flatteries,
after praising the prince's exploits in Greece, avows that, like Paris
in Troy, and Alexander at Persepolis, Nero _had_ gloriously fired Rome;
he found it wood, and wished to leave it marble; (so, the catafalque at
the Invalides of the twice-buried Corsican;) in destroying, as well as
blessing, he had asserted his divinity; any after due allusions to
Phoenixes, and fire-kingships, and _coups-de-soliel_ falling from the
same Apollo so great upon the guitar, Nattalis moves that Nero should be
worshipped, and calls on the priest of Jupiter to set a good example.
None dare refuse, and the senate bend before him; whereupon enter, in
clerical procession, augurs, and diviners, men at arms with pole-axes,
and coronaled white bulls, paraded before sacrifice: all this pandering
to present love of splendour and picturesque effect. In the midst of
these classical preparations, enters, with a bevy of attendants, the
haughty queen-like Agrippina, whom Nero, having sent for to complete his
triumph, commands to bend too; but she stoutly refusing, and taking him
fiercely to task, objurgating likewise Rome's degenerate
gray-beards--great bustle--senate broken up hurriedly--and she, with a
"_feri ventrem_," dragged off to be killed by her son's order. Nero
alone with Nattalis by imperial command; his momentary compunction
nullified by the wily Iago, who turns off the subject smoothly to a new
object of desire: Publius was the only senator not in his place, and
Publius has a daughter, the fairest in Rome, Lucia--had not the emperor
noticed her among Agrippina's women? Nero, charmed with any scheme of
novelty that may change remorseful thoughts, is induced, nothing loth,
to attempt the subtle abduction of the heroine; a body-guard, headed as
always by Manlius, ready in the vestibule to escort him, and exit.
Nattalis, alone for a minute, betrays his own selfish schemes concerning
Lucia, who had refused him before, and alludes to his secret reasons for
urging on the maddened Nero to the worst excesses.

_Third scene_ (or part, or _act_, if it must be so), expounds, in
fitting contrast to the foregoing, the tender loves of Lucia and
Manlius; a gentle home-scene, a villa and its terraced gardens: also, as
Lucia is a Christian, we have, poetically, and not puritanically, an
insight into her scruples of conscience as to the heathenism of her
lover: and also into _his_ consistent nobility of charac