tain a majority. He was a thoroughly unpopular man, of a hard, narrow, and avaricious nature, that weighed tyrannically on such whose timid nerves quailed, but could elicit sympathies only from dependants by disposition or parasites by choice. He was a man feared and detested. Cardinal Lambruschini was, besides, a prelate incapable of cloaking his passions, or of checking his tongue in the transports of his humour. During his administration he had governed in concurrence with the Court of Vienna, to which he owed elevation; and when he entered the Conclave as chief of a party, it was with the view of maintaining the conservative principles of policy he had clung to for sixteen years, and with the hope of securing to himself, at the least, a renewed lease of his former position if he were forced to give up the tiara itself to another. The men who followed his standard were the incarnations of retrogradism, or individuals specially bound to him; though it is believed that, in the event of finding himself obliged to forego all hope of his own election, he contemplated making a candidate of Cardinal Franzoni—a man more open to generous feelings, more
