ristic pleasantry of Sir Thomas More
exhilarated his last moments, when, observing the weakness of the
scaffold, he said, in mounting it, "I pray you, see me up safe, and for
my coming down, let me shift for myself!" Sir Walter Rawleigh passed a
similar jest when going to the scaffold.[131]

My ingenious friend Dr. Sherwen has furnished me with the following
anecdotes of death:--In one of the bloody battles fought by the Duke
d'Enghien, two French noblemen were left wounded among the dead on the
field of battle. One complained loudly of his pains; the other, after
long silence, thus offered him consolation: "My friend, whoever you are,
remember that our God died on the cross, our king on the scaffold; and
if you have strength to look at him who now speaks to you, you will see
that both his legs are shot away."

At the murder of the Duke d'Enghien, the royal victim looking at the
soldiers, who had pointed their fusees, said, "Grenadiers! lower your
arms, otherwise you will miss, or only wound me!" To two of them who
proposed to tie a handkerchief over his eyes, he said, "A loyal soldier
who has been so often exposed to fire and sword can see the approach of
death with naked eyes and without fear."

After a similar caution on the part of Sir George Lisle, or Sir Charles
Lucas, when murdered in nearly the same manner at Colchester, by the
soldiers of Fairfax, the loyal hero, in answer to their assertions and
assurances that they would take care not to miss him, nobly replied,
"You have often missed me when I have been nearer to you in the field of
battle."

When the governor of Cadiz, the Marquis de Solano, was murdered by the
enraged and mistaken citizens, to one of his murderers, who had run a
pike through his back, he calmly turned round and said, "Coward, to
strike there! Come round--if you dare face--and destroy me!"

Abernethy, in his Physiological Lectures, has ingeniously observed that
"Shakspeare has represented Mercutio continuing to jest, though
conscious that he was mortally wounded; the expiring Hotspur thinking of
nothing but honour; and the dying Falstaff still cracking his jests upon
Bardolph's nose. If such facts were duly attended to, they would prompt
us to make a more liberal allowance for each other's conduct, under
certain circumstances, than we are accustomed to do." The truth seems to
be, that whenever the functions of the mind are not disturbed by "the
nervous functions of the digestive organs