I may here mention that he continued the same practice to the end of his life. Even after his elevation to the cardinalate, he could hardly ever be induced to have recourse to a fire, or even to the little portable brazier, called _scaldino_, which students in Italy commonly employ, as a resource against the numbness of the feet and hands produced by the dry but piercing cold which characterizes the Italian winter. CHAPTER III. [1803-1806.] From the commencement of 1803, those difficulties of the Abate Mezzofanti’s position, which merely arose from the straitness of his income, began gradually to diminish. On the 29th of January in that year he was appointed assistant librarian of the _Istituto_ of Bologna; one of those munificent literary institutions of which Italy is so justly proud, founded in the end of the seventeenth century by the celebrated General Count Marsigli, and enriched by the munificence of many successive scholars and citizens of Bologna; especially of the great Bolognese Pope, Benedict XIV. Its collections and museums are among the finest in Italy; and the library contains above a hundred and fifty thousand volumes. But whatever of pecuniary advantage he derived from this appointment, was perhaps more than counterbalanced by the constant demand upon his time from the charge of so extensive a library: especially as he confesses that, up to that period, he had seldom bestowed a thought on the study of bibliography. To add to the ordinary engagements of librarian, too, it was determined, sometime after Mezzofanti’s appointment, to prepare a Catalogue Raisonné, in which the Oriental and Greek department naturally fell to his share. For the Oriental department of the library there seems, up to this time, to have been no catalogue, or at least an exceedingly imperfect and inaccurate one; and as a definite time was fixed for the completion of the task, it became for Mezzofanti a source of serious and protracted embarrassment, to which he alludes more than once in his correspondence. A more congenial occupation, however, was offered to him soon afterwards. In the end of the same year, he was restored to his former position in the university. On the 4th of November in that year, he was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages;—a place which he was enabled to hold in conjunction with his office in the Library of the Institute. A few months after his installation, he read at the university, June 23rd, 1804, on the occasion of conferring degrees, the first public dissertation of which I have been able to discover any record. The subject was “The Egyptian Obelisks.” The dissertation itself has been lost; but Count Simone Stratico, of Pavia, to whom we owe the notice of its delivery, speaks of it as “most judicious and learned,” and replete with antiquarian erudition.[317]