ed powerless, the voice dies away, the eyes are darkened,
there is ringing in the ears, the limbs sink under us by the
influence of fear."--Lucretius, iii. 155.]

he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must
tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having
reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our
reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness;
he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if
not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice:

"Humani a se nihil alienum putet."

["Let him not think himself exempt from that which is incidental to
men in general."--Terence, Heauton, i. 1, 25.]

The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their
greatest heroes of tears:

"Sic fatur lacrymans, classique immittit habenas."

["Thus he speaks, weeping, and then sets sail with his fleet."
--Aeneid, vi. i.]

'Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for
totally to suppress them is not in him to do. Even our great Plutarch,
that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus
and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could
proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been
stimulated by some other passion.--[Plutarch, Life of Publicola, c. 3.]
--All actions exceeding the ordinary bounds are liable to sinister
interpretation, for as much as our liking no more holds with what is
above than with what is below it.

Let us leave that other sect, that sets up an express profession of
scornful superiority--[The Stoics.]--: but when even in that sect,
reputed the most quiet and gentle, we hear these rhodomontades of
Metrodorus:

"Occupavi te, Fortuna, atque cepi: omnesque aditus tuos
interclusi ut ad me aspirare non posses;"

["Fortune, I have got the better of thee, and have made all the
avenues so sure thou canst not come at me."
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 9.]

when Anaxarchus, by command of Nicocreon the tyrant of Cyprus, was put
into a stone mortar, and laid upon with mauls of iron, ceases not to say,
"Strike, batter, break; 'tis not Anaxarchus, 'tis but his sheath that you
pound and bray so"; when we hear our martyrs cry out to the tyrant from
the middle of the flame, "This side is roasted enough