up, tie up,” said he, “she limps.”  And they tell another story of the same kind of a fellow in Denmark, who being condemned to lose his head, and the like condition being proposed to him upon the scaffold, refused it, by reason the girl they offered him had hollow cheeks and too sharp a nose.  A servant at Toulouse being accused of heresy, for the sum of his belief referred himself to that of his master, a young student, prisoner with him, choosing rather to die than suffer himself to be persuaded that his master could err.  We read that of the inhabitants of Arras, when Louis xi. took that city, a great many let themselves be hanged rather than they would say, “God save the King.”  And amongst that mean-souled race of men, the buffoons, there have been some who would not leave their fooling at the very moment of death.  One that the hang man was turning off the ladder cried:  Launch the galley,” an ordinary saying of his.  Another, whom at the point of death his friends had laid upon a bed of straw before the fire, the physician asking him where his pain lay:  “Betwixt the bench and the fire,” said he, and the priest, to give him extreme unction, groping for his feet which his pain had made him pull up to him:  “You will find them,” said he, “at the end of my legs.”  To one who being present exhorted him to recommend himself to God:  “Why, who goes thither?” said he; and the other replying:  “It will presently be yourself, if it be His good pleasure.”  “Shall I be sure to be there by to-morrow night?” said he.  “Do, but recommend yourself to Him,” said the other, “and you will soon be there.”  “I were best then,” said he, “to carry my recommendations myself.”

In the kingdom of Narsingah to this day the wives of their priests are buried alive with the bodies of their husbands; all other wives are burnt at their husbands’ funerals, which they not only firmly but cheerfully undergo.  At the death of their king, his wives and concubines, his favourites, all his officers, and domestic servants, who make up a whole people, present themselves so gaily to the fire where his body is burnt, that they seem to take it for a singular honour to accompany their master in death.  During our late wars of Milan, where there happened so many takings and retakings of towns, the people, impatient of so many changes of fortune, took such a resolution to die, that I have heard my father say he there saw a list taken of five-and-twenty masters of families who made themselves away in one week’s time:  an incident somewhat resembling that of the Xanthians, who being besieged by Brutus, fell—­men, women, and children—­into such a furious appetite of dying, that nothing can be done to evade death which they did not to avoid life; insomuch that Brutus had much difficulty in saving a very small number.—­["Only fifty were saved.”—­Plutarch, Life of Brutus, c. 8.]

Every opinion is of force enough to cause itself to be espoused at the expense of life.  The first article of that valiant oath that Greece took and observed in the Median war, was that every one should sooner exchange life for death, than their own laws for those of Persia.  What a world of people do we see in the wars betwixt the Turks and the Greeks, rather embrace a cruel death than uncircumcise themselves to admit of baptism?  An example of which no sort of religion is incapable.