This event occurred during the period of the author’s studies at Cambridge; and he can therefore offer his testimony to the truth of the statement; he visited the woman soon after her disinterment. Footnote 62: See Vol. i. p. 369. Footnote 63: Starving to death was a punishment inflicted by the people of Aragon, some years ago; and it is reported by _Tavernier_, that the chief ladies in the kingdom of Tonquin, are at this day starved to death for adultery. The severity of the Roman law on an unchaste Vestal has often exercised the pencil of the artist. An account of its execution on _Rhea_, marked as it always was by circumstances of peculiar horror and solemnity, is to be found in _Plutarch’s_ Life of _Numa_; the offender, conducted by a mute procession across the Forum to the place of her interment near the Colline gate, was made to descend a ladder into the sepulchre, and left there with a lamp, a loaf of bread, and a cruse of water, the opening being immediately closed with earth and stones. Footnote 64: Corsican Gazette, and London Med. & Phys. Jour. March, 1822. Footnote 65: The siege of Jerusalem by the Romans will at once occur to the reader; and of which _Josephus_ has left us so tragic a history: amongst other atrocities, an unhappy woman, reduced to the last extremity by pinching hunger, sacrifices the feelings of a mother to the voracious calls of appetite, butchers her child, and feeds upon the body! Footnote 66: See “Naufrage de la Frégate la Méduse, faisant partie de l’Expedition du Sénégal en 1816,” par _F. B. Savigny_, ex Chirurgien de la Marine, et _Alexandre Corréard_, Ingénieur-Geographe. Paris, 1817.—A very interesting account of this narrative may be found in the Quarterly Review, for October, 1817. Footnote 67: That which we call duration is in fact a feeling of succession, and is computed by the number of ideas that pass through the mind; whenever an event occurs which powerfully excites the attention of an observer, he watches the most minute change, whence he believes that the time which elapses before the whole event is completed, appears to be unusually prolonged. When the infidel sultan of Egypt refused to believe that Mahomet could have ascended into the seven heavens, and have held some thousand conferences with the Almighty in the space of a few minutes, the learned mussulman, who was consulted on the occasion, endeavoured to turn his Majesty to a more strict faith, by demonstrating to him that a short period of time became converted into a long one, when a great multitude of important events were crouded into it. Footnote 68: