o not
find it so much as rare and strange. The Spartan history is full of a
thousand more cruel and rare examples; and is; indeed, all miracle in
this respect.

Marcellinus, concerning theft, reports that in his time there was no sort
of torments which could compel the Egyptians, when taken in this act,
though a people very much addicted to it, so much as to tell their name.

A Spanish peasant, being put to the rack as to the accomplices of the
murder of the Praetor Lucius Piso, cried out in the height of the
torment, "that his friends should not leave him, but look on in all
assurance, and that no pain had the power to force from him one word of
confession," which was all they could get the first day. The next day,
as they were leading him a second time to another trial, strongly
disengaging himself from the hands of his guards, he furiously ran his
head against a wall, and beat out his brains.

Epicharis, having tired and glutted the cruelty of Nero's satellites, and
undergone their fire, their beating, their racks, a whole day together,
without one syllable of confession of her conspiracy; being the next day
brought again to the rack, with her limbs almost torn to pieces, conveyed
the lace of her robe with a running noose over one of the arms of her
chair, and suddenly slipping her head into it, with the weight of her own
body hanged herself. Having the courage to die in that manner, is it not
to be presumed that she purposely lent her life to the trial of her
fortitude the day before, to mock the tyrant, and encourage others to the
like attempt?

And whoever will inquire of our troopers the experiences they have had in
our civil wars, will find effects of patience and obstinate resolution in
this miserable age of ours, and amongst this rabble even more effeminate
than the Egyptians, worthy to be compared with those we have just related
of the Spartan virtue.

I know there have been simple peasants amongst us who have endured the
soles of their feet to be broiled upon a gridiron, their finger-ends to
be crushed with the cock of a pistol, and their bloody eyes squeezed out
of their heads by force of a cord twisted about their brows, before they
would so much as consent to a ransom. I have seen one left stark naked
for dead in a ditch, his neck black and swollen, with a halter yet about
it with which they had dragged him all night at a horse's tail, his body
wounded in a hundred places, with stabs of daggers t