So Boileau satirises the “intrepid” scoffer, who puts off believing in God until fever prostrates him; who is almost as quick as the lightning to lift up his hands to heaven when the lightning glares across it, but laughs at poor feeble humanity as soon as the atmosphere is cleared and the storm quite spent:
“Attend pour croire en Dieu que la fiévre le presse;
Et, toujours dans l’orage au ciel levant les mains,
Dès que l’air est calmé, rit des faibles humains.”
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describes in one of her vivacious letters a stormy passage she has just made from Calais to Dover, and diverts herself not a little, as her ladyship’s manner is, at the distress of a fellow-passenger, in alternations of anxiety as to being lost herself and losing her smuggled head-dress. “She was an English lady that I had met at Calais, who desired me to let her go over with me in my cabin. She had brought a fine point-head, which she was contriving to conceal from the custom-house officers. When the wind grew high, and our little vessel cracked, she fell very heartily to her prayers, and thought wholly of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she returned to the worldly care of her head-dress;” and the alternative exclamations of the distracted creature are liberally specified by Lady Mary; who then adds: “This easy transition from her soul to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies that both gave her, made it hard to determine which she thought of greatest value.”
Lord Lytton, in one of his fictions, comments on the instinct, as he calls it, of that capricious and fluctuating conscience, belonging to weak minds, “which remains still and drooping and lifeless as a flag on a mast-head during the calm of prosperity, but flutters and flaps and tosses when the wind blows and the wave heaves.” And an example to the purpose is given in the case of a selfish uncle, whose orphan nephews are all but coldly discarded until his own son is in extremis. “Mr. Beaufort ... thought very acutely and remorsefully of the condition of the Mortons, during the danger of his own son. So far indeed from his anxiety for Arthur monopolising his care, it only sharpened his charity towards the orphans; for many a man becomes devout and good when he fancies he has an immediate interest in appeasing Providence.” Such a man, in such a case, becomes at any rate lavish of promises, which perhaps at the moment he even intends to keep. But how are promises of this kind usually kept? Much after the manner predicated of Bajazet, by Acomat, in the French tragedy; a vaguely worded intimation, but definite enough in its scope: only let the pressure that extorts the promise be withdrawn, and gone will be the value of the promise too:
“Promettez: affranchi du péril qui vous presse,
Vous verrez de quel poids sera votre promesse.”
Pope would consign such trifles light as air to the lunar sphere,