I should advise that those examples of severity by which ’tis designed to retain the people in their duty, might be exercised upon the dead bodies of criminals; for to see them deprived of sepulture, to see them boiled and divided into quarters, would almost work as much upon the vulgar, as the pain they make the living endure; though that in effect be little or nothing, as God himself says, “Who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do;”—­[Luke, xii. 4.]—­and the poets singularly dwell upon the horrors of this picture, as something worse than death: 

         “Heu! reliquias semiustas regis, denudatis ossibus,
          Per terram sanie delibutas foede divexarier.”

["Alas! that the half-burnt remains of the king, exposing his bones,
should be foully dragged along the ground besmeared with gore.” 
—­Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., i. 44.]

I happened to come by one day accidentally at Rome, just as they were upon executing Catena, a notorious robber:  he was strangled without any emotion of the spectators, but when they came to cut him in quarters, the hangman gave not a blow that the people did not follow with a doleful cry and exclamation, as if every one had lent his sense of feeling to the miserable carcase.  Those inhuman excesses ought to be exercised upon the bark, and not upon the quick.  Artaxerxes, in almost a like case, moderated the severity of the ancient laws of Persia, ordaining that the nobility who had committed a fault, instead of being whipped, as they were used to be, should be stripped only and their clothes whipped for them; and that whereas they were wont to tear off their hair, they should only take off their high-crowned tiara.’—­[Plutarch, Notable Sayings of the Ancient King.]—­The so devout Egyptians thought they sufficiently satisfied the divine justice by sacrificing hogs in effigy and representation; a bold invention to pay God so essential a substance in picture only and in show.

I live in a time wherein we abound in incredible examples of this vice, through the licence of our civil wars; and we see nothing in ancient histories more extreme than what we have proof of every day, but I cannot, any the more, get used to it.  I could hardly persuade myself, before I saw it with my eyes, that there could be found souls so cruel and fell, who, for the sole pleasure of murder, would commit it; would hack and lop off the limbs of others; sharpen their wits to invent unusual torments and new kinds of death, without hatred, without profit, and for no other end but only to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of the gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries of a man dying in anguish.  For this is the utmost point to which cruelty can arrive: 

              “Ut homo hominem, non iratus, non timens,
               tantum spectaturus, occidat.”

["That a man should kill a man, not being angry, not in fear, only
for the sake of the spectacle.”—­Seneca, Ep., 90.]