rs; who kill him, (after he has vainly attempted
in despair to kill himself,) and Galba sits on the throne, while Nero,
unpitied and unhelped, gasps out in the middle his dying speech.
Meanwhile, at the other side, Manlius has killed Nattalis for his
treachery, cut the bonds of Publius and Lucia, and all ends in moral
justice for the triumph of good, and the defeat of evil; Manlius and
Lucia, hand in hand, Publius with white head and upraised hands blessing
them, Nero, a mangled corpse, Nattalis in his dying agonies persecuted
by the vindictive Rufa, and Galba hailed as Caesar by the assembled
Romans. So, upon a magnificent _tableau_, slowly falls the lawny
curtain.

Patient reader, what think you of my long-winded tragedy? No quibbling
about Nero having really died in a drain, four years after the murder of
Aggrippina; no learned disquisitions, if you please, as to his innocence
of Rome's fire, a counterpart to our slander on the Papacy in the matter
of London's; spare me, I pray you, learned pundit, your suspicions about
Galba's too probable _alibi_ in Spain. Tell me rather this: do I falsify
history in any thing more important than mere accidental anachronisms
and anatopisms? do I make an untrue delineation of character, blackening
the good, or white-washing the wicked? Do I not, by introducing Nero's
three greatest crimes so near upon his assassination, merely accelerate
the interval between causes and effect? And is not tragic dignity
justified in varnishing, with other compost than the dregs of Rome, the
exit of the last true Caesar of the Augustan family? For all the rest,
good manager, provide me actors, and I am even now uncertain--such is my
weakness--whether this skeleton might not at some time be clad with
flesh and skin, and a decent Roman toga. I fear it will yet haunt me as
a '_Midsummer Night's Dream_,' destroying my quiet with involuntary
shreds and patches of long-metred blank; the notion is still vivacious,
albeit scotched: Alexandrine though the synopsis appear, it must not be
thrown on the highroad as a dead snake; nay, let me cherish it yet on my
hearth, and not hurl it away like a _bonum waviatum_; a little more
boiling up of Roman messes in my brain, and my tragedy might flow forth
spontaneously as lava. What if this book be, after all, a sort of
pilot-balloon, to show my huge Nassau the way the wind blows--a feeler
as to which and which may please? Whether or not this be so, I will
still confess