The next morning the Emperor came into the library. He asked for his own Carthaginian history, and sat by the window, looking at it without reading. Then he beckoned to me, and finding the passage on the death of Hannibal, he pointed to it and tried to say something. “She”--he began, but two large tears rolled down his cheeks, and he choked. Since then he has never mentioned Messalina; he works, eats, and talks like a man whose spirit is elsewhere, or a person who is walking in his sleep. Farewell, I can write no more, for I am shattered by this tragedy and the dreadful end of one of the few really good women I have ever seen. NERO INTERVIEWED ROME, A.D. 64 _Letter from a Greek Traveller to his friend in Athens_ It is fifteen years since I was last at Rome, and although I was prepared to find a change in everything, I had not expected this complete transformation. The Rome I knew, the Rome of the straggly narrow streets and rotting wooden houses, has disappeared, and in its place there is a kind of Corinth on a huge scale, marred of course by the usual want of taste of the Romans, but imposing nevertheless and extraordinarily gay and brilliant. The fault of the whole thing is that it is too big: the houses are too high, the streets too broad, everything is planned on too large a scale. From the artist’s point of view the effect is deplorable; from the point of view of the casual observer it is amusing in the highest degree. The broad streets--a blaze of coloured marble and fresh paint--are now crowded with brilliant shops where you see all that is new from Greece and the East, together with curiosities from the North and the barbarian countries. Everybody seems to be spending money. The shops are crowded from morning till night. The display of gold trinkets, glass vases, carpets, rugs, silks, gold and silver tissues, embroideries, all glittering in the sunlight, dazzles the eye and imposes by the mass and glare of colour and gaudiness. There is no doubt that the Emperor is extraordinarily popular, and whenever he shows himself in public he is greeted with frantic enthusiasm. Of course there are some mal-contents among the old-fashioned Liberals, but they have no influence whatever and count practically for nothing, for what are their grumblings and their eternal lamentations about the good old times and the Empire going to the dogs, in the scale with the hard solid fact that ever since Nero came to the throne the prosperity of the Empire has increased in every possible respect? For the first time for years the individual has been able to breathe freely, and owing to the splendid reforms which he has carried through in the matter of taxation, an intolerable load of oppression has been lifted from the shoulders of the poor, and I can assure you they are grateful.