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 who had most at heart the independence of the Church and her freedom from schism, to get the Pope to promulgate an instrument which might effectually obviate the danger in question. Of the Prelates so minded the most prominent for energy and resolution was Cardinal Antonelli. On the great dispersion of the Court of Rome, he had taken refuge neither with the Emperor nor with the King of Naples, but on the coast of the Tuscan Maremma, until, after the capture of Malta, he proceeded to Venice at the express desire of the Pope. On his way thither, Cardinal Antonelli passed through Florence, where he contrived to obtain two audiences of Pius VI., but only by an artifice, and became painfully impressed with the Pope's decaying powers of body and mind, and the isolation in which he was placed from inter-