

SEVEN PRINCIPAL LAWS OF HEREDITY. 235 



ruin to the state. We have in Nero, at different 

 ages, a repetition of what must have been the mood 

 of Agrippina at different ages. I remember a bust 

 of Nero at eighteen or twenty years of age, exhib- 

 iting brutal coarseness, perfidy, and the puffy face 

 of physical indulgence. A bust representing him 

 later in life shows- a withered lower face, contrasting 

 oddly with the dewlap in the chin, and the thick 

 neck. His last busts show these same traits, together 

 with a wrinkled forehead and scornful and lawless 

 lips ; and yet the fibre of the man's brain and face 

 was not so bad as the form of both. 



Turn to the other side of the hall, however, in 

 Rome, and you will see Marcus Aurelius, the most 

 virtuous, perhaps, of all the emperors. As surely as 

 infernal traits went down upon Nero, celestial ones 

 went down upon Marcus Aurelius. I suppose the 

 latter was no more to be praised for what he inher- 

 ited than Nero was to be blamed for what came to 

 him exclusively through the laws of hereditary de- 

 scent. I hold that Nero was sane. Some historians 

 have gone so far as to suppose that his bad traits 

 quenched in him moral responsibility; but he had 

 freedom of will, and was responsible for the bad use 

 he made of his inheritance. Marcus Aurelius, on 

 the other side, seems to have been pushed from 

 before birth into the position of a philosopher, and 

 a saint of the pagan sort. He had by inheritance 

 a predisposition to the virtues which his reign ex- 

 hibited. 



Now, was Providence unkind to Nero? Was 



