Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiff’s temporal government of Rome, that he—Gregory the Great—relieved by the bounty of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and needy—his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his name, the requirements of indigence and merit. “Nor would the pontiff indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion.” A _non possumus_ this, in its beneficent _nisi prius_ scope, more appreciable by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A sovran’s interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of exceptional interest in the eyes of fellow-subjects. Leigh Hunt knew this, when he pictured, in her early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the Queen of these realms, “Too generous-happy to endure The thought of all the woful poor Who that same night lay down their heads In mockeries of starving beds, In cold, in wet, disease, despair, In madness that will say no prayer; With wailing infants some; and some By whom the little clay lies dumb; And some, whom feeble love’s excess, Through terror, tempts to murderousness. And at that thought the big drops rose In pity for her people’s woes; And this glad mother and great queen Weeping for the poor was seen, And vowing in her princely will That they should thrive and bless her still.” Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and _at_, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the “vulgar herd,” that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance—by courtesy historical; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of Falstaff’s bread bill to his running account for sack—one of Anne of Austria’s sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of suffering _in propriâ personâ_,—the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortress—but his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger: “that he should have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment’s thought [O, I have ta’en too little thought of this!]