But Seneca from the very first had been guilty of a fatal error in the education of his pupil. He had governed him throughout on the ruinous principle of _concession_. Nero was not devoid of talent; he had a decided turn for Latin versification, and the few lines of his composition which have come down to us, _bizarre_ and effected as they are, yet display a certain sense of melody and power of language. But his vivid imagination was accompained by a want of purpose; and Seneca, instead of trying to train him in habits of serious attention and sustained thought, suffered him to waste his best efforts in pursuits and amusements which were considered partly frivolous and partly disreputable, such as singing, painting, dancing, and driving. Seneca might have argued that there was, at any rate, no great harm in such employments, and that they probably kept Nero out of worse mischief. But we respect Nero the less for his indifferent singing and harp-twanging just as we respect Louis XVI. less for making very poor locks; and, if Seneca had adopted a loftier tone with his pupil from the first, Rome might have been spared the disgraceful folly of Nero's subsequent buffooneries in the cities of Greece and the theatres of Rome. We may lay it down as an invariable axiom in all high education, that it is _never_ sensible to permit what is bad for the supposed sake of preventing what is worse. Seneca very probably persuaded himself that with a mind like Nero's--the innate worthlessness of which he must early have recognised--success of any high description would be simply impossible. But this did not absolve him from attempting the only noble means by which success could, under any circumstances, be attainable. Let us, however, remember that his concessions to his pupil were mainly in matters which he regarded as indifferent--or, at the worst, as discreditable--rather than as criminal; and that his mistake probably arose from an error in judgment far more than from any deficiency in moral character. Yet it is clear that, even intellectually, Nero was the worse for this laxity of training. We have already seen that, in his maiden-speech before the Senate, every one recognized the hand of Seneca, and many observed with a sigh that this was the first occasion on which an Emperor had not been able, at least to all appearance, to address the Senate in his own words and with his own thoughts. Tiberius, as an orator, had been dignified and forcible; Claudius had been learned and polished; even the disturbed reason of Caligula had not been wanting in a capacity for delivering forcible and eloquent harangues; but Nero's youth had been frittered away in paltry and indecorus accomplishments, which had left him neither time nor inclination for weightier and nobler pursuits.