lives around him than was the case in an earlier and simpler if less decorous age, but also he who was anxious to vote with a single-minded desire to promote the best interests of the Church had a no simpler matter before him. Father Bona is as holy a man as any the Church ever canonized. But what if his zeal for religious reformation should, by pulling the rein too tight, operate in the contrary direction? Cardinal Odeschalchi is a man of sound judgment as well as the most fervent and sincere piety. But what of that, if he is unversed in matters of State, and not likely to be able to hold his own against the encroachments of France and her highhanded sovereign? And it is not only a question of what one would, but of what one can do! Even if the man be found fitted in all respects for the manifold and heterogeneous necessities of the Church, is he one whom it will be possible to induce the electors to accept? And these are the difficulties that presented themselves to an entirely single-minded elector, either of the conscientious or unconscientious sort. How much more was the matter confused and complicated for those who were not single-minded in either direction. And this probably was the case, to a greater or lesser degree, with every man in the Conclave! It could hardly be otherwise, indeed, than that the business of electing a Pope should have been becoming ever more and more difficult!

The Conclave which resulted in the election of Clement X. was a specially long and difficult one. The moderation of the last Popes in the matter of nepotism tended very powerfully to complicate matters. In the old days of the Aldobrandini, the Borghesi, and the

Ludovisi, each successive nephew and family had waged such a war to the knife against the previous one, that when a Conclave came the nephew of the last deceased Pope was the influential man in it, who was at the head of the largest following. But Innocent, who followed Urban the Barberini, had left no nephews. The nephew of Alexander VII., Cardinal Chigi, had exercised his power with such moderation that his recommendations had often had as much weight with Clement, Alexander's successor, as with that Pontiff himself. Of the Rospigliosi, during the short pontificate of their Pope, Clement IX., the same may be said. And it thus came to pass that Barberini, though three Popes had reigned during twenty-six years since the death of Urban VIII., was still, perhaps, the most powerful man in the Conclave. And though, of course, the Cardinals Chigi and Rospigliosi were both at the head of parties, there was no such internecine enmity between them as to shut out possibilities, or even probabilities, of coalition and co-operation. These old enmities were softened and in some sort civilised, not, however, appeased entirely; for the President De Brosses in his letters written from Italy, in 1739-40, tells us of a Princess Albani, who used to say that people of Papal families died twice, once at the death of their uncle and once at their own natural demise.

It is probable, also, that on the occasion of the Conclave of which we are speaking, the season of the year at which it was held contributed to the inordinate length of it. Their Eminences went into Conclave in December. There was, therefore, no malaria demon to

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drive them to a decision by constant reminders of the probable results of tarrying long at their work. We hear some talk about the severity of the season; and doubtless their Eminences would have passed the December days and nights more comfortably in their own palaces than in the fir-plank cells erected in the cold bleak halls of the Vatican. But a little discomfort is one thing, and a danger of death, greater than that of the soldier on the field of battle, is another! So the cardinals, perplexed by the embarras de richesse, offered by a Sacred College containing over twenty soggetti papabili, did not hurry themselves; and at the end of the first two months the Conclave had done nothing beyond convincing most of the heads of parties that no one of them was strong enough to secure the election of any one of the candidates who stood first or even second on their lists.

A detailed but very confused and ill-written narrative of this election of Clement X. has been left by some conclavist, who tells us that he has had a long experience of such matters, and has been shut up in many a Conclave, but confesses that all his practised knowledge of the subject has but very imperfectly enabled him to read all the riddles and disentangle all the cross-purposes in which this long Conclave was fertile. One thing, however, is abundantly clear from it, that despite all the bulls and threatened excommunications on the subject, and despite all the ostentatious and formal ceremonial pretending to secure the absolute isolation of the cardinals from the outside world, negotiations had been entered into and plans arranged for the coming election,

in anticipation of the reigning Pope's death, and communications of the most avowed and open description were going on, apparently almost uninterruptedly, with the outside world. While roasted capons were being ostentatiously prodded by the examining probes of the custos of the Conclave at the turntables, where the dinners of the cardinals were with much ceremonial passed in to them, to ascertain that no letter or hidden. message of any kind was concealed within them, we find it stated, as if it were completely a matter of course, that the Conclave suspended its operations while a reply was awaited from some Court or some ambassador who had been consulted as to such or such probabilities or possible solutions!

At one moment, towards the end of the Conclave, the chance of the austere and saintly Odeschalchi seemed a good one; and we hear of his adherents waiting the return of a messenger sent to France with the hope of securing the adherence of the French party! And Cardinal Bona, the ascetic monk, went about the Conclave speaking of Odeschalchi's exalted virtue, and declaring that the Holy Ghost at the end of so wearisome a conflict was about to conclude it once for all by an election of his own making, which would tend to the sure reformation so much needed in the Church-discourses, says the conclavist, which set so many tongues wagging about such a tendency, that the combined intentions. which arose from them amounted to an exclusion for the proposed reforming Pope!

Gradually the ideas of the leaders of factions began to draw together towards Altieri as a man to whom nobody

had any special objection. Nobody, or nearly so-not quite. For we read that Barberini, who had now made up his mind to try for the election of Altieri, showed Cardinal Pio one day a paper on which was written the name of Altieri. Whereupon Pio, having cast his eyes on the paper, did not give him time to add a word, but told him at once that "he had had a long litigation with that person in the court of the Rota, that the Eminence whose name was written there had lost his cause, and that he (Pio) had made him pay the damages. So that your Eminence must excuse me!" "True!" said Barberini; "excuse me; I had forgotten it. Let us say no more about it." And it is notable, in accordance with a remark that has already been made, that the grounds on which Cardinal Pio states that he cannot vote for Altieri, and which Barberini at once accepts and considers to be quite as a matter of course unanswerable, are not that Pio, the winner of the cause, owes Altieri a grudge because of the lawsuit, but that he takes it so much for granted that Altieri owes him such a grudge on that account, that common prudence requires that he should do nothing towards putting into that man's hands the supreme power of the Papacy.

Chigi, who had entered the Conclave, in his own persuasion and in that of most others, both within and without the Conclave, the most likely man to have in effect the nomination of the new Pope, had become entirely convinced not only that such power was entirely out of his reach, but that he might be well content if he could succeed in averting the election of one whose elevation would be especially objectionable to him; and