Salvator Rosa, in his last illness, demanded of the priests and others that surrounded him, what they required of him. They replied, "in the first instance to receive the sacrament as it is administered in Rome to the dying." "To receive the sacrament," says his confessor, Baldovini, "he showed no repugnance, but he vehemently and positively refused to allow the host, with all the solemn pomp of its procession, to be brought to his house, which he deemed unworthy of the divine presence." He objected to the ostentation of the ceremony, to its _eclat_, to the noise and bustle, smoke and heat it would create in the close sick chamber. He appears to have objected to more than it was discreet to object to in Rome: and all that his family and his confessor could extort from him on the subject was, that he would permit himself to be carried from his bed to the parish church, and there, with the humility of a contrite heart, would consent to receive the sacrament at the foot of the altar. As immediate death might have been the consequence of this act of indiscretion, his family, who were scarcely less interested for a life so precious, than for the soul which was the object of their pious apprehensions, gave up the point altogether; and on account of the vehemence with which Salvator spoke on the subject, and the agitation it had occasioned, they carefully avoided renewing a proposition which had rallied all his force of character and volition to their long abandoned post. The rejection of a ceremony which was deemed in Rome indispensably necessary to salvation, by one who was already stamped with the church's reprobation, soon spread; report exaggerated the circumstance into a positive expression of infidelity; and the gossip of the Roman ante-rooms was supplied for the time with a subject of discussion, in perfect harmony with their love for slander, bigotry, and idleness. "As I went forth from Salvator's door," relates the worthy Baldovini, "I met the _Canonico Scornio_, a man who has taken out a license to speak of all men as he pleases. 'And how goes it with Salvator?' demands this Canonico of me. 'Bad enough, I fear.'--Well, a few nights back, happening to be in the anteroom of a certain great prelate, I found myself in the centre of a circle of disputants, who were busily discussing whether the aforesaid Salvator would die a Schismatic, a Huguenot, a Calvinist, or a Lutheran?--'He will die, Signor Canonico,' I replied, 'when it pleases God, a better Catholic than any of those who now speak so slightingly of him!'--and so pursued my way." This _Canonico_, whose sneer at the undecided faith of Salvator roused all the bile of the tolerant and charitable Baldovini, was the near neighbor of Salvator, a frequenter of his hospitable house, and one of whom the credulous Salvator speaks in one of his letters as being "his neighbor, and an excellent gentleman."