The reverence and self-devotion of Adonijah for the Supreme Being was perfectly unintelligible to the tribune, whose mind, although it had shaken off the superstitious idolatry of his ancestors, was deeply infected with the atheistical philosophy of the times. Matter was the only divinity the young soldier acknowledged; for Lucius Claudius believed either “that there were no gods, or gods that cared not for mankind.” The existence of the soul after death, and a future state of reward and punishment, had never been entertained by him for a moment. The heathen mythology indeed darkly inculcated these two great points of faith, but Lucius Claudius derided the heathen deities whose attributes rather gave him the idea of bad men exercising ill-gotten power than those which his reason ascribed to divinity. Murder, rapine, lust, and cruelty, that in life deserved, in his opinion, the scourge and cross, had been deified by flattering men after death. Yet, though refusing to pay any worship to the host of idols Rome with blind stupidity had gathered from all the countries she had conquered, Lucius Claudius had dedicated his fair young sister to the service of Vesta before his departure for the Parthian war, either from the idea prevalent among free-thinking men, even in our day, that women ought to be religious, or that he thought to secure Lucia Claudia from those snares which a corrupt city like Rome offered to her youth and beauty. Julius Claudius, the younger brother of the tribune, was esteemed too careless and dissolute a character to be intrusted with the guardianship of a lady of whose family every daughter had been chaste. Lucius bribed the lictors to delay the execution of the refractory slave till he had spoken to the emperor, and departed to consult with his brother respecting the means to be taken with Nero, to avert the doom of a person whose constancy he deemed worthy even of the ancient Roman name. CHAPTER IV. “But thou, with spirit frail and light, Wilt shine awhile and pass away, As glowworms sparkle through the night, But dare not stand the test of day.” BYRON.