into fury, presently commanded his heels to be bored through, causing him, alive, to be dragged, mangled, and dismembered at a cart’s tail.—­[Quintus Curtius, iv. 6.  This act of cruelty has been doubted, notwithstanding the statement of Curtius.]—­Was it that the height of courage was so natural and familiar to this conqueror, that because he could not admire, he respected it the less?  Or was it that he conceived valour to be a virtue so peculiar to himself, that his pride could not, without envy, endure it in another?  Or was it that the natural impetuosity of his fury was incapable of opposition?  Certainly, had it been capable of moderation, it is to be believed that in the sack and desolation of Thebes, to see so many valiant men, lost and totally destitute of any further defence, cruelly massacred before his eyes, would have appeased it:  where there were above six thousand put to the sword, of whom not one was seen to fly, or heard to cry out for quarter; but, on the contrary, every one running here and there to seek out and to provoke the victorious enemy to help them to an honourable end.  Not one was seen who, however weakened with wounds, did not in his last gasp yet endeavour to revenge himself, and with all the arms of a brave despair, to sweeten his own death in the death of an enemy.  Yet did their valour create no pity, and the length of one day was not enough to satiate the thirst of the conqueror’s revenge, but the slaughter continued to the last drop of blood that was capable of being shed, and stopped not till it met with none but unarmed persons, old men, women, and children, of them to carry away to the number of thirty thousand slaves.

CHAPTER II

OF SORROW

No man living is more free from this passion than I, who yet neither like it in myself nor admire it in others, and yet generally the world, as a settled thing, is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience.  Foolish and sordid guise! —­["No man is more free from this passion than I, for I neither love nor regard it:  albeit the world hath undertaken, as it were upon covenant, to grace it with a particular favour.  Therewith they adorne age, vertue, and conscience.  Oh foolish and base ornament!” Florio, 1613, p. 3] —­The Italians have more fitly baptized by this name—­[La tristezza]—­ malignity; for ’tis a quality always hurtful, always idle and vain; and as being cowardly, mean, and base, it is by the Stoics expressly and particularly forbidden to their sages.

But the story—­[Herodotus, iii. 14.]—­says that Psammenitus, King of Egypt, being defeated and taken prisoner by Cambyses, King of Persia, seeing his own daughter pass by him as prisoner, and in a wretched habit, with a bucket to draw water, though his friends about him were so concerned as to break out into tears and lamentations, yet he himself remained unmoved, without uttering a word, his eyes fixed upon the ground; and seeing, moreover, his son immediately after led to execution, still maintained the same countenance; till spying at last one of his domestic and familiar friends dragged away amongst the captives, he fell to tearing his hair and beating his breast, with all the other extravagances of extreme sorrow.