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 that had been given
him, not to kill him, but to put him to pain and to affright him, who had
endured all this, and even to being speechless and insensible, resolved,
as he himself told me, rather to die a thousand deaths (as indeed, as to
matter of suffering, he had borne one) before he would promise anything;
and yet he was one of the richest husbandmen of all the country. How
many have been seen patiently to suffer themselves to be burnt and
roasted for opinions taken upon trust from others, and by them not at all
understood? I have known a hundred and a hundred women (for Gascony has
a certain prerogative for obstinacy) whom you might sooner have made eat
fire than forsake an opinion they had conceived in anger. They are all
the more exasperated by blows and constraint. And he that made the story
of the woman who, in defiance of all correction, threats, and
bastinadoes, ceased not to call her husband lousy knave, and who being
plunged over head and ears in water, yet lifted her hands above her head
and made a sign of cracking lice, feigned a tale of which, in truth, we
every day see a manifest image in the obstinacy of women. And obstinacy
is the sister of constancy, at least in vigour and stability.

We are not to judge what is possible and what is not, according to what