But it was not thus that he was to feel the wrath of God. The doom was past, but the punishment deferred. The most terrible part of his retribution was that he was let alone to fill to the brim the cup of his iniquity. Sin was to be to him the punishment of sin, and the avenging scourge was put into the hand of his own vices. The first fearful crime which he had committed ought to have lit up his dark conscience with its fierce, unnatural, revealing glare. It did so for a moment, but only to leave him in deeper darkness. His moral sense was hardened to a still deadlier callosity, until he developed into the execration of mankind. What helped him to this rapid obduracy was the vileness and hypocrisy of the world around him. The death of Britannicus had to be announced to the Senate. The eyes of Nero had to weep crocodile tears, and the pen of Seneca to be employed in venal falsities. No one could doubt the hand of Seneca in the elegant pathos of the sentence which told the Conscript Fathers that deaths so immature as that of Britannicus were subjects of such bitter grief that his funeral had been hurried over in accordance with the ancestral custom which forbade the protraction of anguish by public oration or funeral obsequies. ‘I have lost the aid of my brother,’ continued the specious oration which Nero learnt by heart; ‘no hopes are left to me save in the commonwealth. A prince like myself, who is now the sole survivor of a family born to the supremest dignity, needs all the love and all the help of the Senate and the people.’