The many who had had a share in Messalina's fall would be only too glad to poison every reminiscence of her life; and the deadly implacable hatred of the worst woman who ever lived would find peculiar gratification in scattering every conceivable hue of disgrace over the acts of a rival whose young children it was her dearest object to supplant.

That Seneca did not deign to chronicle even of an enemy what Agrippina was not ashamed to write,--that he spared one whom it was every one's interest and pleasure to malign,--that he regarded her terrible fall as a sufficient claim to pity, as it was a sufficient Nemesis upon her crimes,--is a trait in the character of the philosopher which has hardly yet received the credit which it deserves..