There is a passage in Montesquieu's Persian Letters that reads like a paraphrase and expansion of this: “Quand le médecin est auprès de mon lit, le confesseur me trouve à son avantage. Je sais bien empêcher la religion de m'affliger quand je me porte bien; mais je lui permets de me consoler quand je suis malade lorsque je n'ai plus rien à espérer d'un côté, la religion se présente, et me gagne," etc. Plutarch tells us of Tullus Hostilius, that he exulted in irreligious opinions while in health, but was frightened into superstition when taken ill. To this passage, one of Plutarch's translators, Dr. Langhorne, appends a footnote, about none being so superstitious in distress as those who, in their prosperity, have laughed at religion; and cites as an instance the famous Canon Vossius, who was "no less remarkable for the greatness of his fears, than he was for the littleness of his faith." Cowper would cite to the same purpose a more distinguished example:

"The Frenchman first in literary fame ;

Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same.

The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew
Bon-mots to gall the Christian and the Jew:

An infidel when well, but what when sick?

Oh, then a text would touch him to the quick."

Swift gives a satirical narrative of "what passed in London during the general consternation of all ranks and degrees of mankind" on account of the predicted destruction of the world by a comet, on a given day. Friday was the declared day; and during Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, public bewilderment and terror are described as extreme-the churches crowded, and thousands praying in the public streets. At length Friday came. But as the day wore on, popular fears began to abate, then lessened every hour; "at night they were almost extinct, till the total darkness that hitherto used to terrify, now comforted every freethinker and atheist. Great numbers went together to the taverns, bespoke suppers, and broke up whole hogsheads for joy. The subject of all wit and conversation was to ridicule the prophecy and rally each other.

All the quality and gentry were perfectly ashamed, nay, some utterly disowned that they had manifested any signs of religion.

But the next day, even the common people, as well as their betters, appeared in their usual state of indifference. They drank, they swore, they lied, they cheated, they quarrelled, they murdered. In short, the world went on in the old channel." To apply what Butler says of "saints" in his application of the word, as a cant term then of political significance: "For saints in peace degenerate,

And dwindle down to reprobate ;

And though they've tricks to cast their sins,
As easy as serpents do their skins,

That in a while grow out again,

In peace they turn mere carnal men;
And from the most refined of saints
As naturally turn miscreants,'

As barnacles turn solan geese

I' th' islands of the Orcades."

That is a fine stroke of nature, in the Knight's Tale (from Chaucer), where Dryden makes Arcite resolve, only when and not until moribund, to avow the wrong he has done to Palamon, and own his fear of repeating it should he recover: "When 'twas declared all hope of life was past,

Conscience (that of all physic works the last)
Caused him to send for Emily in haste.

With her, at his desire, came Palamon;"

to whom Arcite owns the faithless part he has played, and desires forgiveness, but at the same time makes this frank avowal :

"And much I doubt, should Heaven my life prolong,

I should return to justify my wrong;

For while my former flames remain within,

Repentance is but want of power to sin."

Mr. Tennyson pictures for us a similar instance in Sir Lancelot :

*

"Yet the great knight in his mid-sickness made

Full many a holy vow and pure resolve.

In the etymological sense, now practically obsolete, of misbeliever.

These, as but born of sickness, could not live;
For when the blood ran lustier in him again,
Full often the sweet image of one face,
Making a treacherous quiet in his heart,
Dispersed his resolution like a cloud."

Treating of missions in Abyssinia in the sixteenth century, Gibbon relates how, in a moment of terror, the emperor promised to reconcile himself and his subjects to the Catholic faith. "But the vows," adds the historian, "which pain had extorted, were forsworn on the return of health." Swift again, in his history of England,-for the Dean of St. Patrick wrote one-tells how William Rufus fell dangerously sick at Gloucester, on his return from Scotland, and being moved by the fears of dying, began to discover great marks of repentance, with many promises of amendment and retribution. "But as it is the disposition of men who derive their vices from their complexions, that their passions usually beat strong and weak with their pulses, so it fared with this prince, who, upon recovery of his health, soon forgot the vows he had made in his sickness, relapsing with greater violence into the same irregularities," etc.

Michael Germain-who, however, is allowed to have looked upon the religious observances of Rome with the eye of a French encyclopédiste-makes merry, as one of Mabillon's Italian expedition (in 1685), at the expense of that indolent and hypochondriacal Pope (so Sir James Stephen calls him), Innocent XI. "If I should attempt," writes this French Benedictine, "to give you an exact account of the health of his Holiness, I must begin with Ovid, 'In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas.' At ten he is sick, at fifteen well again, at eighteen eating as much as four men, at twenty-four dropsical. The worst of it is, that they say he has given up all thoughts of creating new cardinals, forgetting in his restored health the scruples he felt when sick; like other great sinners;" like Louis XV., for instance, at the commencement of whose last illness Mr. Carlyle so vividly depicts the consternation of the infamous Du Barry, lest she should have to take flight, as er predecessors had been constrained to do when the Well

beloved (Bien-aimé) had been sick before. "Should the Most Christian King die, or even get seriously afraid of dying! For, alas! had not the fair, haughty Chateauroux to fly, with wet cheeks and flaming heart, from that fever scene at Metz, long since; driven forth by sour shavelings? She hardly returned, when fever and shavelings were both swept into the background. Pompadour, too, when Damiens wounded Royalty 'slightly, under the fifth rib,' . . . had to pack, and be in readiness; yet did not go, the wound not proving poisoned." His Most Christian Majesty was of no distant kin with that profligate viscount in Mr. Thackeray's story, who used to recount misdeeds "with rueful remorse when he was ill, for the fear of death set him instantly repenting; and with shrieks of laughter when he was well, his lordship having a very great sense of humour." Of the same kindred comes the same author's Miss Crawley, as we see her ill with fright, in her lonely, loveless old age. When in health and good spirits, this venerable inhabitant of Vanity Fair, we are assured, had as free notions about religion and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire; but "when illness overtook her, it was aggravated by the most dreadful terrors of death, and an utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner." Nor be forgotten, as a scion of the same stock, that puffy, pursy, pusillanimous creature, Jos. Sedley, of whom we read that, in the course of his voyage home from Bengal, he disappeared in a panic during a two-days' gale, and remained in his cot reading a religious tract left on board by a missionary's wife; while, "for common reading he had brought a stock of novels and plays," to which of course he would return with all the more zest and devotion when the perils of the gale were past.

Comparing the influence on the mind of danger of death, and of danger from a storm, or from some other external cause than sickness, Archbishop Whately ascribes to the storm a much larger virtue of "wholesome discipline" than to the deadly sickness. He says, "The well-known proverb, 'The devil was sick,' etc., shows how generally it has been observed that people, when they recover, forget the resolutions formed

during sickness. One reason of the difference, and perhaps the chief, is, that it is so much easier to recall exactly the sensations felt when in perfect health and yet in imminent danger, and to act over again, as it were, in imagination, the whole scene, than to recall fully, when in health, the state of mind during some sickness, which itself so much affects the mind along with the body."

And yet the effects defective of a storm are a commonplace with the satirists. Peter Pindar devotes a "poem" to the subject; and a greater poet-if the said Peter can be called poet at all—has a forcible stanza on the equinoxes, when the Parcæ cut short the further spinning

"Of seamen's fates, and the loud tempests raise
The waters, and repentance for past sinning
In all who o'er the great deep take their ways:
They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don't;
Because, if drown'd, they can't-if spar'd, they won't."

T

SLEEP AND DEATH.

ST. JOHN xi. 11-14.

O His disciples our Lord spoke of His friend, and theirs, our friend, Lazarus," as sleeping; intimating at the same time His intention of going on to Bethany, that He might awaken him out of sleep. "Then said His disciples, Lord, if he sleep he shall do well. Howbeit, Jesus spake of his death; but they thought that He had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead."

The affinity of sleep to death is familiarly recognised in the Old Testament as in the New; indeed, in universal literature of whatever age, sacred and profane. Bathsheba anticipates the day, only too near at hand, when her lord the king “shall sleep with his fathers." Daniel foretells the awaking of many that sleep in the dust of the earth. The psalmist utters a deprecation lest he sleep the sleep of death. Jesus declared