So had it come about that of all the emperors Rome had known, and of all the tyrants and despots in every land and era, who had followed the fine art of self-expression, and who had shown what human nature really is—in, as it were, the nude, when any man is released from time-serving and is made omnipotent,—of all these, there had remained just one whose name was remembered everywhere; just one whose fame was imperishable; just one who had become a never-dying myth: and that one was Nero. The legend of Nero was, in a world wherein every other man stayed more or less unwillingly an unfulfilled Nero, the supreme type of the literature of escape. The legend of Nero was a poem which men would not ever forget: it was a poem current in all languages: and it was a poem which, now, everybody could cordially admire and delight in, because time had removed the need of considering any current moral standards or one’s own physical safety in judging this poem, now that Nero was only a character in a book, like—as the Emperor said, with a quaint revealment of his retained interest in literature,—like Iago or Volpone or Tartuffe. For whether you called any particular book a history or a poem or a drama did not, of course, effect the impressiveness and vigor and complexity of the character drawing in it, nor the value of the author’s apt and edifying revelations as to any eternal verities of man’s being. “For, certainly,” said Nero, “my life presented, as no other artist has ever done, the gist of all human nature as that nature actually is, when freed of such inhibitions as constrain it in but too many baffled lives. My life was, thus, a connoisseur’s production, and a work of art which escaped even the grave risk of anti-climax. For there was not anything lacking in the ending of it, either. My fall and the circumstances of my death were so æsthetically right that, as an artist, I never in my life enjoyed anything quite so much. Nothing could conceivably have been in better taste. For, overnight, as you may remember, I passed from the throne of the world, to hide in a tumbled-down out-house, under a ragged, very faded blue coverlet, and to perish thus by my own hand,—with an appropriate tragic verse upon my lips,—and without any friend remaining anywhere. No tragedy could have been more boldly proportioned, with all the Aristotelian unities so exactly preserved. And it was most gratifyingly led up to, too. For just as I was about to approach the dénouement of my poem, the statues of my Lares tumbled down miraculously, the hind quarters of my favorite riding-horse were transformed into the hind quarters of an ape, and the doors of the mausoleum of Augustus having unclosed of their own accord, there issued from the tomb a divine voice which summoned me to destruction. These incidents, I repeat, were gratifying, for they showed that the exercise of my art had been viewed by Heaven appreciatively. Ah, yes, in all I was peculiarly favored.”