"_Diavalo!_" cried the amazed physician, "you dictate a prescription! why, _I_ am the prince's physician, and not _you!_"
"And _I, Caro_," said Salvator, "am a painter, and not _you_. I leave it to the prince whether I could not prove myself a better physician than you a painter; and write a better prescription than you paint a picture."
The prince, much amused, decided in favor of the painter; Salvator coolly resumed his pencil, and the medical _cognoscente_ permitted the idea of the picture to die away, _sul proprio letto_.
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 _éclat_, 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.