bet,
Haec inter obliviscitur?"

["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 nai