It would be out of place here to enter into any detail of the startling and violent changes by which these tranquil occupations were rudely interrupted. The Cardinal had watched with deep anxiety the gradually increasing demands with which each successive generous and confiding measure of the administration of Pius IX. had been met; but even his sagacious mind, schooled as it had already been in the vicissitudes of former revolutions, was not prepared for the succession of terrible events which crowded themselves into the last few weeks of the “year of revolution”—the furious demands of the clubs—the expulsion of the Jesuits—the assassination of De Rossi—the obtrusion of a republican ministry—the flight of the Pope—the proclamation of the Republic. Amid all the terrors of the time, he had but one thought—gratitude for the safety of the Pope. He was urged by his friends to imitate the example of the main body of the Cardinals, and to follow his Sovereign to Gaeta or Naples; but he refused to leave Rome, and continued through all the scenes of violence which followed the flight of Pius IX., to live, without any attempt at concealment, at his old quarters in the Palazzo Valentiniani. Nevertheless, although, personally, Cardinal Mezzofanti suffered no molestation, the alarm and anxiety inseparable from such a time, could not fail to tell upon a constitution, at no time robust, and of late years much enfeebled. From the beginning of the year 1849, his strength began sensibly to diminish. It was characteristic of the man that even all the terrors of the period could not make him forget his favourite festival of the Epiphany; and that, among the numberless more deplorable changes which surrounded him, he still had a regret for the absence of the accustomed Polyglot Academy of the Propaganda. Before the middle of January he became so weak, that it was with the utmost difficulty he was able to say mass in his private chapel. While he was in this state of extreme debility, he was seized with an alarming attack of pleurisy; and although the acute symptoms were so far relieved at the end of January, that his family entertained sanguine hopes of his recovery, this illness was followed, in the early part of February, by an attack of gastric fever, by which the slender remains of his strength were speedily exhausted.