ble
advance. Yet her intellect was less remarkable than the nobility and
sweetness of her mind; other mothers loved their sons because their own
ambition was gratified by their honours, and their feminine wants
supplied by their riches; but Helvia loved her sons for their own sakes,
treated them with liberal generosity, but refused to reap any personal
benefit from their wealth, managed their patrimonies with disinterested
zeal, and spent her own money to bear the expenses of their political
career. She rose superior to the foibles and vices of her time.
Immodesty, the plague-spot of her age, had never infected her pure life.
Gems and pearls had little charms for her. She was never ashamed of her
children, as though their presence betrayed her own advancing age. "You
never stained your face," says her son, when writing to console her in
his exile, "with walnut-juice or rouge; you never delighted in dresses
indelicately low; your single ornament was a loveliness which no age
could destroy; your special glory was a conspicuous chastity." We may
well say with Mr. Tennyson--

"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and, though he trip and fall,
He shall not blind his soul with clay."

Nor was his mother Helvia the only high-minded lady in whose society
the boyhood of Seneca was spent. Her sister, whose name is unknown, that
aunt who had so tenderly protected the delicate boy, and nursed him
through the sickness of his infancy, seems to have inspired him with an
affection of unusual warmth. He tells us how, when her husband was
Prefect of Egypt, so far was she from acting as was usual with the wives
of provincial governors, that she was as much respected and beloved as
they were for the most part execrated and shunned. So serious was the
evil caused by these ladies, so intolerable was their cruel rapacity,
that it had been seriously debated in the Senate whether they should
ever be allowed to accompany their husbands. Not so with Helvia's
sister. She was never seen in public; she allowed no provincial to visit
her house; she begged no favour for herself, and suffered none to be
begged from her. The province not only praised her, but, what was still
more to her credit, barely knew anything about her, and longed in vain
for another lady who should imitate her virtue and self-control. Egypt
was the headquarters for bit