attempt, not less piteous than the longing, at self-consolation--all the struggle and conflict of emotion which stilled themselves, at least for a moment, by that sudden plunge into the snow, and wild, violent, bodily exertion, are either lost upon the teller of the tale, or perhaps he fears to do his master injustice by revealing any consciousness of the possibility of such thoughts. But it is a very remarkable peculiarity of Francis's history, that whereas every saint in the Calendar, from Antony downwards, is sometimes troubled with visions of voluptuous delight, only Francis, in his pure dreams, is tempted by the modest joys of wife and children--the most legitimate and tenderest love."[39] The reader must not expect any historical exactitude or critical spirit from our author. For his purpose a narrative was just as useful whether true or false, but it probably never occurred to him to question the exact truth of any statement that he found written in a book. The murder of Seneca (p. 9) is certainly not the least of the many crimes which stain the memory of Nero, but the circumstances of his death are not exactly described by the mediæval scribe. Whether the philosopher and former tutor was implicated in the conspiracy of Piso may be doubted, but some ambiguous phrases he had used were reported to the Emþeror, whose messenger demanded an explanation of their meaning. The reply of Seneca was either unsatisfactory or the tyrant had decided to be rid of his former guide. As in more recent times in Japan the condemned man was expected to be his own executioner, and Seneca opened his veins and allowed the life to ooze from them with a stoicism that was certainly heroic if not untainted by theatrical display. The character of Seneca will ever remain one of the puzzles of history, for the grave moralist was accessory to the murder of Agrippina, and not unsuspected of licentiousness, and of the accumulation of an enormous fortune of three hundred million sestertii by injustice and fraud. The statements of Dion Cassius as to the misdeeds of the philosopher must be weighed against the absence of any condemnation of his proceedings in the pages of Tacitus.