Away went Mr. Saunders, with a merry courage, toward the fire. He fell to the ground and prayed; he rose up again and took the stake to which he should be chained in his arms and kissed it, saying: "Welcome the cross of Christ, welcome everlasting life." Being fastened to the stake he fell full sweetly asleep in the Lord.

Fox's "Book of Martyrs."

Savonarola (Girolamo, celebrated preacher and political, as well as religious, reformer of Florence), 1452-1498. "O Florence, what hast thou done to-day?" He was strangled and burnt by the commissioners of the Pope, May 23, 1498. His last words are sometimes given thus: "The Lord has suffered as much for me."

While he and his companions, all three barely covered by their tunics, with naked feet and arms bound, were being slowly led from the ringhiera to the gibbet, the dregs of the populace were allowed to assail them with vile words and viler acts. Savonarola endured this bitter martyrdom with unshaken serenity. One bystander, stirred with compassion, approached him and said a few comforting words, to which he benignantly replied: "At the last hour, God alone can give mortals comfort." A certain priest, named Nerotto, asked him, "in what spirit dost thou bear martyrdom?" He said: "The Lord hath suffered as much for me." He then kissed the crucifix, and his voice was heard no more.

Villari: "Life and Times of Savonarola."

Sax (Hermann Maurice, Marshal of France), 1696-1750. "The dream has been short, but it has been beautiful."

Scarron (Paul, the creator of French burlesque), 1610-1660. "Ah! mes enfants, you cannot cry as much for me as I have made you laugh in my time!" Some say that a few moments later he added, "I never thought that it was so easy a matter to laugh at the approach of death."

The life of Scarron was one of extreme wretchedness. He was, like Heine, a miserable paralytic; his form, to use his own words, "had become bent like a Z." "My legs," he says, "first made an obtuse angle with my thighs, then a right and at last an acute angle; my thighs made another with my body. My head is bent upon my chest; my arms are contracted as well as my legs, and my fingers as well as my arms. I am, in truth, a pretty complete abridgment of human misery." At the time of his marriage (to the beautiful and gifted Mademoiselle d'Aubigné, afterward Madame de Maintenon, the wife for thirty years of Louis XIV.) he could only move with freedom his hand, tongue and eyes. His days were passed in a chair with a hood, and so completely was he the abridgment of man he describes himself that his wife had to kneel to look in his face. He could not be moved without screaming from pain, nor sleep without opium. The epitaph which he wrote on himself is touching from its truth:

Tread softly—make no noise
To break his slumbers deep;
Poor Scarron here enjoys
His first calm night of sleep.
—Russell: Library Notes.

Schiller (Friedrich, "the only German poet who can contest the supremacy of Goethe"), 1759-1805. "Many things are growing plain and clear to my understanding."