t honesty, his copious learning, and the public
persecutions he suffered, and the ten imprisonments he endured,
inflicted by all parties, dignified him with the title of "the
Cato of the Age;" and one of his own party facetiously described
him as "William the Conqueror," a title he had most hardly earned
by his inflexible and invincible nature. Twice he had been cropped of
his ears; for at the first time the executioner having spared the
two fragments, the inhuman judge on his second trial discovering them
with astonishment, ordered them to be most unmercifully cropped--then
he was burned on his cheek, and ruinously fined and imprisoned in a
remote solitude,[103]--but had they torn him limb by limb, Prynne had
been in his mind a very polypus, which, cut into pieces, still loses
none of its individuality.

His conduct on the last of these occasions, when sentenced to be
stigmatised, and to have his ears cut close, must be noticed. Turning
to the executioner, he calmly invited him to do his duty--"Come,
friend, come, burn me! cut me! I fear not! I have learned to fear the
fire of hell, and not what man can do unto me; come, scar me! scar
me!" In Prynne this was not ferocity, but heroism; Bastwick was
intrepid out of spite, and Burton from fanaticism. The executioner had
been urged not to spare his victims, and he performed his office with
extraordinary severity, cruelly heating his iron twice, and cutting
one of Prynne's ears so close, as to take away a piece of the cheek.
Prynne stirred not in the torture; and when it was done, smiled,
observing, "The more I am beaten down, the more I am lift up." After
this punishment, in going to the Tower by water, he composed the
following verses on the two letters branded on his cheek, S. L., for
schismatical libeller, but which Prynne chose to translate "Stigmata
Laudis," the stigmas of his enemy, the Archbishop Laud.

Stigmata maxillis referens insignia LAUDIS,
Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo.

The heroic man, who could endure agony and insult, and even thus
commemorate his sufferings, with no unpoetical conception, almost
degrades his own sublimity when the poetaster sets our teeth on edge
by his verse.

Bearing Laud's stamps on my cheeks I retire
Triumphing, God's sweet sacrifice by fire.

The triumph of this unconquered being was, indeed, signal. History
scarcely exhibits so wonderful a reverse of fortune, and so strict a
retribution, as occurred at this even