They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus.

The sorrows of the Duchess set inward; if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating conversation in a kind of bravery.
* * * * * JOHN FORD.
_The Broken Heart_ .-- I do not know where to find, in any play, a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising, as in this.

This is indeed, according to Milton, to describe high passions and high actions.

The fortitude of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died, without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence against her nature, keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled.

Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily suffering.