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Rh the mother of the execrable Nero. The authoress of these 'Memoirs' was not likely to be just, much less lenient, to the memory of Tiberius. Her mother, the virtuous and high-minded Agrippina—"a matron of the ancient stamp"—her two brothers, Drusus and Nero, had been sacrificed to the fears and jealousies of the Claudian Cæsar, who listened to the evil promptings of his minister Sejanus, and who was further incensed against the family of Drusus by the haughty bearing of the widow of Germanicus. The younger Agrippina had indeed wrongs to avenge; but the destruction of her near kindred was not her only motive for hostility to the name of Tiberius. Rumour had bruited abroad that her father Drusus was in heart a republican, and regarded even Augustus as a usurper. There was division in Cæsar's household. The loyal Germanicus, indeed, seems to have taken no part in it; but his wife, and the Drusi generally, viewed Tiberius as an interloper, and themselves, or at least the head of their family, as the only legitimate successors of Augustus. The hatred which the Plantagenets felt for the Tudors, the hatred which the Jacobites cherished against the house of Hanover, will afford us some measure of the feelings of the children of Drusus for the son of Livia. We no longer accept such writers as Heath and Sandford for our authorities in the case of Cromwell, nor trust Reginald Pole in forming our judgment of Henry VIII. A similar caution may fairly be exercised in the case of Tiberius, as he is exhibited by Tacitus; and, besides Agrippina's 'Memoirs,' Dean Merivale has been the first to turn attention to a very probable cause for the ill fame of Tiberius. He was, in some