["Who, amongst such delights would not remove out of his thoughts
the anxious cares of love.”—­Horace, Epod., ii. 37.]

To return to what I was saying before, I am tenderly compassionate of others’ afflictions, and should readily cry for company, if, upon any occasion whatever, I could cry at all.  Nothing tempts my tears but tears, and not only those that are real and true, but whatever they are, feigned or painted.  I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather; but I very much lament the dying.  The savages do not so much offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who torment and persecute the living.  Nay, I cannot look so much as upon the ordinary executions of justice, how reasonable soever, with a steady eye.  Some one having to give testimony of Julius Caesar’s clemency; “he was,” says he, “mild in his revenges.  Having compelled the pirates to yield by whom he had before been taken prisoner and put to ransom; forasmuch as he had threatened them with the cross, he indeed condemned them to it, but it was after they had been first strangled.  He punished his secretary Philemon, who had attempted to poison him, with no greater severity than mere death.”  Without naming that Latin author,—­[Suetonius, Life of Casay, c. 74.]—­who thus dares to allege as a testimony of mercy the killing only of those by whom we have been offended; it is easy to guess that he was struck with the horrid and inhuman examples of cruelty practised by the Roman tyrants.

For my part, even in justice itself, all that exceeds a simple death appears to me pure cruelty; especially in us who ought, having regard to their souls, to dismiss them in a good and calm condition; which cannot be, when we have agitated them by insufferable torments.  Not long since, a soldier who was a prisoner, perceiving from a tower where he was shut up, that the people began to assemble to the place of execution, and that the carpenters were busy erecting a scaffold, he presently concluded that the preparation was for him, and therefore entered into a resolution to kill himself, but could find no instrument to assist him in his design except an old rusty cart-nail that fortune presented to him; with this he first gave himself two great wounds about his throat, but finding these would not do, he presently afterwards gave himself a third in the belly, where he left the nail sticking up to the head.  The first of his keepers who came in found him in this condition:  yet alive, but sunk down and exhausted by his wounds.  To make use of time, therefore, before he should die, they made haste to read his sentence; which having done, and he hearing that he was only condemned to be beheaded, he seemed to take new courage, accepted wine which he had before refused, and thanked his judges for the unhoped-for mildness of their sentence; saying, that he had taken a resolution to despatch himself for fear of a more severe and insupportable death, having entertained an opinion, by the preparations he had seen in the place, that they were resolved to torment him with some horrible execution, and seemed to be delivered from death in having it changed from what he apprehended.