anguage 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 the show-places of Gaul, is sought for in
vain to-day; a single night suffic