himself on my fig-tree, let him make haste, for I am going to cut it down. In like manner,” said the pontiff, “if my friends wish to solicit from me any favours, they must not delay, for I am sensible that the hour of my departure draws near.” The priest in waiting having informed him that they were going to offer solemn prayers for his recovery—“Pray rather,” said he, “that the Lord’s will may be done; for we often petition for that which is not conducive to our good.” When he was conscious of the near approach of death, he piously participated in the customary ceremonies, and then caused himself to be raised from his bed and conveyed to the chair of St. Peter, where he breathed his last on the twenty-third day of February, 1447.[368] The funeral eulogium of the deceased pontiff was pronounced by Tommaso da Sarzana, who had lately been promoted by his favour to the bishopric of Bologna, and to the dignity of cardinal. The acquisition of this honour prepared the way for the exaltation of Tommaso to the summit of ecclesiastical preferment. On the sixth of March he was by the unanimous voice of the conclave invested with the pontifical purple, on which occasion he assumed the name of Nicolas V. His biographer, Gianozzo Manetti, asserts, that his advancement to this high dignity was prognosticated to him in the following manner. When the conclave was assembled for the purpose of filling the vacancy which had just occurred in the chair of St. Peter, and Tommaso was sleeping at dead of night in the small chamber allotted to him on that occasion, he dreamt that Eugenius appeared before him arrayed in his pontifical robes, of which he divested himself, and commanded him to put them on; and that on his refusal to comply with this requisition, the deceased pontiff violently enforced his obedience, and invested him with all the insignia of papal authority. Gianozzo seems to intimate, that in this dream there was something præternatural. But a slight acquaintance with the constitution of the human mind would have convinced him, that there is nothing miraculous in the circumstance of a cardinal’s dreaming that his brows are encircled with the tiara.[369]