“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother.” “There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22] Whereas in the Middle Ages— “The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23] With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover (like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he cheerfully risked being roasted eternally. As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between mediæval and modern as follows:— “Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the papers say about the execution of those condemned to death; they reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man. What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado, roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan. These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24] Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part, although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.