The official revenue assigned from the Civil List for a cardinal resident in Rome, is four thousand Roman crowns (between eight and nine hundred pounds sterling); by far the greater part of which is absorbed in the necessary expenses of his household, the payment of his chaplain, secretary, and servants, the maintenance of his state equipage, &c.; so that for those cardinals who, like Mezzofanti, possess no private fortune, the remnant available for purely personal expenditure is very trifling indeed. With Mezzofanti’s frugal and simple habits, however, it not only proved amply sufficient to supply all his own modest wants, but also enabled him to enlarge and extend the unostentatious charities which, throughout his entire life, he had never failed to bestow, even while he was himself struggling against the disadvantages of a narrow and precarious income. So well known, indeed, were his almost prodigal charities, while in charge of the Vatican, and his consequent poverty at the time of his nomination to the Cardinalate, that the Pope, Gregory XVI., himself presented him, from the Pontifical establishment, the two state carriages[501] which form the necessary equipage of a Cardinal in all processions and other occasions of public ceremonial. He selected for his residence the Palazzo Valentiniani, in the Piazza SS. Apostoli; where his nephew, Gaetano Minarelli, and Anna, one of his unmarried nieces, came to live with him on his nomination to the Cardinalate, and continued to reside until his death. The news of his elevation was received with great pleasure at Bologna, and was the occasion of many public and private demonstrations. The most remarkable of these was from the Academy of the _Filopieri_, of which he had been the President at the time of his removal from Bologna. The Italians are singularly conservative of established forms; the members of the Academy, in accordance with a usage which may almost be called classical, met in full assembly (with all the accompaniments of decorations, inscriptions, and music, in which Italian taste is displayed on such occasions), to congratulate their fellow-academician. The congratulatory addresses, however, which in England would have been a set of speeches and resolutions, here, as became the “Lovers of the Muses,” took a poetical form; and a series of odes, sonnets,[502] elegies, _canzoni_, _terzine_, and epigrams, in Greek, Latin, and Italian, were recited by the members. Some of them are exceedingly spirited and graceful. They were all collected into a little volume, which, with great delicacy and good taste, is dedicated not to the Cardinal himself, but to his nephew, Monsignor Joseph Minarelli, of whom I have already spoken, and who was at this time Rector of the university of Bologna.[503]