The cardinals, when the agitation produced by the visit of the emperor was a little subdued, returned to their party intrigues, and vainly endeavoured, during three long months, to give a successor to St Peter. At last the Spanish cardinals, who seem to have purposely delayed their voyage till that moment, in order to decide by their votes and their influence a contest which must have by this time tried both parties, arrived in Rome, and entered the Conclave. La Ceda and De Solis, the latter Archbishop of Seville, and possessing Charles III.’s confidence, began at once to explore the ground, and to take all the necessary measures to succeed in their purpose, Bernis still pretending to be the negotiator of the Conclave. The Spaniards, leaving him to rejoice in this opinion, set themselves quietly to work, and soon succeeded in bringing the matter to a conclusion, by the choice of a candidate who was accepted by both parties. This candidate was Cardinal Ganganelli, of whom we must give some account before proceeding further. Lorenzo Ganganelli was born in the town of St Arcangelo, on the 30th of October 1705, of a plebeian family, his father being a labourer. Like his predecessor, the goatherd of Montalto, Lorenzo entered at a very early age the order of St Francis (the Cordeliers),[367] and distinguished himself by a constant application, by the love of solitude, and by a calm, equal, and placid conduct. His principal occupation was the study of theology, in which he became a proficient and able professor. But his long meditation upon this science did not inspire him with a spirit of fanaticism and persecution, but, on the contrary, with a spirit of tolerance and love for his fellow-men; and, what appears still more rare, he did not in the least alter his jovial and agreeable manners. Nor did he, plunged as he was in the study of divinity, become insensible to the charms of nature, or to the attractions of the fine arts. He delighted in natural history, and spent many of his leisure hours in dissecting insects, or in collecting plants. He cultivated literature with some success; and if he was not a judicious connoisseur, he certainly was a warm protector of the fine arts, and was passionately fond of music.[368] One of his masters had once said of him in this particular, “No wonder he loves music, seeing that everything in his mind is in harmony.”[369] From his earliest youth, Lorenzo conceived hopes of rising to an extraordinary station in life; and his ambition, which was ardent and persevering, persuaded him that he was destined by Providence to perform extraordinary deeds; which persuasion gave to all his conduct the characteristic turn of a mysterious reliance on the future. When his parents dissuaded him from entering the cloister, Lorenzo, although he was then very young, answered that a monk’s frock had often preceded the purple, and that the two last Sistuses had issued from the convents of St Francis. Indeed,