clergy that had been voted in France. He was pronounced to be a schismatic, and as such perjured, degraded, and wholly stripped of all his dignities and privileges. But it happened that both these Cardinals died before there had been any opportunity for testing the validity of these sentences to disable them from admission at election time to the exercise of indelible rights. The stormy days in the wake of the French Revolution furnished also some instances of Cardinals smitten with the prevailing passion for repudiating old-fashioned institutions, and indulging in a display of new ideas. During the heyday excitement of a republic that seemed triumphant on the Capitol, two Cardinals, of whom one belonged to a great and princely family in Rome, thought it good policy to turn their backs on what looked like a foundering fortune. In March 1798, Cardinal Altieri wrote to the Pope expressing his wish to divest himself of the purple, on the ground of a growing sense of bodily infirmities. But Pius VI., who knew that other motives prompted the unusual application, addressed a letter to the Cardinal, remonstrating against his setting an example of faint-
