* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The health of James had been during some years declining and he
had at length, on Good Friday, 1701, suffered a shock from which
he had never recovered. While he was listening in his chapel to
the solemn service of the day, he fell down in a fit, and
remained long insensible. Some people imagined that the words of
the anthem which his choristers were chanting had produced in him
emotions too violent to be borne by an enfeebled body and mind.
For that anthem was taken from the plaintive elegy in which a
servant of the true God, chastened by many sorrows and
humiliations, banished, homesick, and living on the bounty of
strangers, bewailed the fallen throne and the desolate Temple of
Sion: "Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us; consider and
behold our reproach. Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our
houses to aliens; the crown is fallen from our head. Wherefore
dose thou forget us for ever?"

The King's malady proved to be paralytic. Fagon, the first
physician of the French Court, and, on medical questions, the
oracle of all Europe, prescribed the waters of Bourbon. Lewis,
with all his usual generosity, sent to Saint Germains ten
thousand crowns in gold for the charges of the journey, and gave
orders that every town along the road should receive his good
brother with all the honours due to royalty.21

James, after passing some time at Bourbon, returned to the
neighbourhood of Paris with health so far reestablished that he
was able to take exercise on horseback, but with judgment and
memory evidently impaired. On the thirteenth of September, he had