was going on. Caius, in stupified silence, expected death instead of
empire. Macro alone did not lose his presence of mind. With the utmost
intrepidity, he gave orders that the old man should be suffocated by
heaping over him a mass of clothes, and that every one should then leave
the chamber. Such was the miserable and unpitied end of the Emperor
Tiberius, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. Such was the death, and
so miserable had been the life, of the man to whom the Tempter had
already given "the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them," when he
tried to tempt with them the Son of God. That this man should have been
the chief Emperor of the earth at a time when its true King was living
as a peasant in his village home at Nazareth, is a fact suggestive of
many and of solemn thoughts.



CHAPTER V.

THE REIGN OF CAIUS.

The poet Gray, in describing the deserted deathbed of our own great
Edward III., says:--

"Low on his funeral couch he lies!
No pitying heart, no eye afford
A tear to grace his obsequies!

* * * * *

"The swarm that in the noontide beam were born?
Gone to salute the rising Morn.