eded partly by arguments, partly by intimidation, and
partly by holding out the not unreasonable hopes of a great improvement
on the previous reign.

[Footnote 27: The full name of Claudius was Tiberius Claudius Drusus
Caesar Germanicus.]

For although Claudius had been accused of gambling and drunkenness, not
only were no _worse_ sins laid to his charge, but he had successfully
established some claim to being considered a learned man. Had fortune
blessed him till death with a private station, he might have been the
Lucien Bonaparte of his family--a studious prince, who preferred the
charms of literature to the turmoil of ambition. The anecdotes which
have been recorded of him show that he was something of an
archaeologist, and something of a philologian. The great historian Livy,
pitying the neglect with which the poor young man was treated, had
encouraged him in the study of history; and he had written memoirs of
his own time, memoirs of Augustus, and even a history of the civil wars
since the battle of Actium, which was so correct and so candid that his
family indignantly suppressed it as a fresh proof of his stupidity.

Such was the man who, at the age of fifty, became master of the
civilized world. He offers some singular points of resemblance to our
own "most mighty and dread sovereign," King James I. Both were learned,
and both were eminently unwise;[28] both of them were authors, and both
of them were pedants; both of them delegated their highest powers to
worthless favourites, and both of them enriched these favourites with
such foolish liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them
had been terrified into constitutional cowardice by their involuntary
presence at deeds of blood. Both of them, though of naturally good
dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of cruelty; and both
of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty, succeeded only in
rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir Walter Raleigh in
prison, and Claudius drove Seneca into exile. The parallel, so far as I
am aware, has never been noticed, but is susceptible of being drawn out
into the minutest particulars.

[Footnote 28: "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers," says our own poet.
Heraclitus had said the same thing more than two thousand years before
him, [Greek: polumaoiae ou didasho].]

One of his first acts was to recall his nieces, Julia and Agrippina,
from the exile into which their brother had driven t