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 them; and both these princesses were destined to effect a powerful influence on the life of our philosopher.
What part Seneca had taken during the few troubled days after the murder of Caius we do not know.