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. 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.