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 her 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.