as short as possible, by cutting off useless delays, by going on with the hearing and trial of such causes, even on days when the labours of the other judges are suspended; by disallowing every appeal which has for its apparent object merely a postponement of final judgment; and by not admitting an unnecessary multitude of witnesses, &c.*

* In order to show the practical in combination with the theoretical, we here supply a programme of an "auto-da-fa," in which the parts of the royal family of Spain, and of all the great functionaries, are formally arranged. It is given on the authority of the countess d'Aulnois, who accompanied her husband, an official diplomatist, to Madrid, towards the close of the reign of the imbecile animal whose early death opened a passage to the Spanish throne for the house of Bourbon:

"In the great place at Madrid there shall be a theatre erected fifty feet long; it shall be raised up as high as the balcony designed for the king, and no higher.

"On the right side of the king's balcony, quite across the theatre, there shall be raised an amphitheatre of twenty-five or thirty steps, designed for the council of the inquisition and the other councils of Spain, on the uppermost of which shall be placed the chairs, under a canopy, for the general inquisitor, a great deal higher than the king's balcony. On the left of the theatre and the king's balcony there shall be another amphitheatre, as big as the first, upon which the criminals shall be placed.

"In the middle of the great theatre shall be raised another very little one, on which shall be made two cages, where the criminals shall be kept while their sentence is reading. There shall be likewise placed upon the great theatre three chairs for the readers of the judgment, and for the preacher, before whom there shall be an altar erected.

"The places for their catholic majesties shall be so ordered, that the queen shall be on the left hand of the king, and on the right of the queen-mother. All the queen's ladies of honour shall take up the rest of the length every way of the same balcony; there shall be other balconies prepared for the ambassadors and lords and ladies of the court, and scaffolds for the people.

"The ceremony shall begin by a procession from St. Mary's church. A hundred charcoal-men, armed with pikes and musquets, shall march before, because they provide the wood which is to burn those that are condemned to the fire. Next them shall follow the Dominicans, with a white cross carried before them. The duke de Medina Celi shall carry the standard of the inquisition, according to a privilege that is hereditary to his family; this standard is of red damask; on one side of it is represented a naked sword in a crown of laurel, and on the other the arms of Spain. After that there shall be carried a green cross, wrapped about with black crape; and after it shall march several grandees, and other

This revolting system of jurisprudence has simply been put under some restriction in Spain and Portugal; while at Milan the inquisition itself has at length been entirely suppressed.*

SECTION III.

The inquisition is well known to be an admirable and truly christian invention for increasing the power of the pope and monks, and rendering the population of a whole kingdom hypocrites.

persons of quality of the inquisition, covered with cloaks that have black and white crosses upon them, embroidered with gold thread. The march shall be brought up by fifty halberdiers or guards to the inquisition, clothed in black and white, and commanded by the marquis de Pouar, hereditary protector of the inquisition of the kingdom of Toledo. After the procession has in this manner passed by the palace, it shall come to the great place; the standard and the green cross shall be fixed upon the altar; and the Dominicans only shall remain upon the theatre, and spend part of the night in singing psalms, and as soon as day breaks they shall celebrate several masses upon the altar.

"The king, the queen, the queen-mother, and all the ladies, must be in their balconies about seven o'clock in the morning. At eight the procession shall begin to march, as it did the day before, by the company of charcoal-men, who shall place themselves on the left-hand of the king's balcony; the right shall be for his guards. Afterwards several men shall bear certain pasteboard effigies as big as life, some of them representing those that died in prison, whose bones shall also be carried in coffers with flames painted round them; and the rest shall represent those who have escaped, and who have been condemned for contumacy: these figures shall be placed at one end of the theatre. After that their sentence shall be read, and they shall be executed."-T.

* It has just been suppressed also in Sicily and Tuscany: Genoa and Venice have the weakness still to keep it up; but it is not suffered to exhibit any activity. It still subsists, but it is deprived of power, in the states of the house of Savoy. The glory of abolishing this odious monument of the fanaticism and barbarism of our fathers, has never yet tempted any sovereign pontiff to effect it. The inquisition at Rome has been an object of scorn to Europe, and even to the Romans themselves, since its absurd prosecution of Galileo. The noblesse of Avignon permit the existence of this tribunal in a corner of France, and, satisfied with entertaining no apprehensions of danger from it, are insensible to the disgrace of wearing its monkish yoke. In Spain and Portugal the inquisition, conducted with less atrocity than formerly, is repossessed of all its power, and threatens with imprisonment and confiscation all who attempt conferring any improvement on those deluded and miserable countries.-French Ed.

St. Dominic is usually considered as the person to whom the world is principally indebted for this institution. In fact, we have still extant a patent granted by that great saint, expressed precisely in the following words: 66 : I, brother Dominic, reconcile to the church Roger, the bearer of these presents, on condition of his being scourged by a priest on three successive Sundays from the entrance of the city to the church doors; of his abstaining from meat all his life; of his fasting for the space of three Lents in a year; of his never drinking wine; of his carrying about him the 'san-benito? with crosses; of his reciting the breviary every day, and ten paternosters in the course of the day, and twenty at midnight; of his preserving perfect chastity, and of his presenting himself every month before the parish priest, &c.; the whole under pain of being treated as heretical, perjured, and impenitent."

Although Dominic was the real founder of the inqui sition, yet Louis de Paramo, one of the most respectable writers and most brilliant luminaries of the holy office, relates, in the second chapter of his second book, that God was the first instituter of the holy office, and that he exercised the power of the preaching brethren, that is of the Dominican order, against Adam. In the first place Adam is cited before the tribunal: "Adam ubi es?"-Adam, where art thou? And in fact, adds Paramo, the want of this citation would have rendered the whole procedure of God null.

The dresses formed of skins, which God made for Adam and Eve, were the model of the 'san-benito,' which the holy office requires to be worn by heretics. It is true that, according to this argument, God was the first tailor; it is not however the less evident, on account of that ludicrous and profane inference, that he was the first inquisitor.

Adam was deprived of the immoveable property he possessed in the terrestrial paradise, and hence the holy office confiscates the property of all whom it condemns.

-Louis de Paramo remarks, that the inhabitants of Sodom were burnt as heretics because their crime is a

formal heresy. He thence passes to the history of the Jews; and in every part of it discovers the holy office. Jesus Christ is the first inquisitor of the new law; the popes were inquisitors by divine right; and they afterwards communicated their power to St. Dominic.

He afterwards estimates the number of all those whom the inquisition has put to death; he states it to be considerably above a hundred thousand.

His book was printed in 1589, at Madrid, with the approbation of doctors, the eulogiums of bishops, and the privilege of the king. We can, at the present day, scarcely form any idea of horrors at once so extravagant and abominable; but at that period nothing appeared more natural and edifying. All men resemble Louis de Paramo when they are fanatics.

Paramo was a plain direct man, very exact in dates, omitting no interesting fact, and calculating with precision the number of human victims immolated by the holy office throughout the world.

He relates, with great naïveté, the establishment of the inquisition in Portugal, and coincides perfectly with four other historians who have treated of that subject. The following account they unanimously agree in :

:

Singular Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal.

Pope Boniface had long before, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, delegated some Dominican friars to go to Portugal, from one city to another, to burn heretics, mussulmen, and Jews; but these were itinerant and not stationary; and even the kings sometimes complained of the vexations caused by them. Pope Clement VII. was desirous of giving them a fixed residence in Portugal, as they had in Arragon, and Castile. Difficulties however arose between the court of Rome and that of Lisbon; tempers became irritated, the inquisition suffered by it, and was far from being perfectly established.

In 1539, there appeared at Lisbon a legate of the pope, who came, he said, to establish the holy inquisition on immoveable foundations. He delivered his letters

to king John III. from pope Paul III. He had other letters from Rome for the chief officers of the court; his patents as legate were duly sealed and signed; and he exhibited the most ample powers for creating a grand inquisitor and all the judges of the holy office. He was however in fact an impostor, of the name of Saavedra, who had the talent of counterfeiting handwritings, seals, and coats of arms. He had acquired the art at Rome, and was perfected in it at Seville, at which place he arrived in company with two other sharpers. His train was magnificent, consisting of more than a hundred and twenty domestics. To defray, at least in part, the enormous expense with which all this splendour was attended, he and his associates borrowed at Seville large sums in the name of the apostolic chamber of Rome; everything was concerted with the most consummate art.

The king of Portugal was at first perfectly astonished at the pope's dispatching a legate to him without any previous announcement to him of his intention. The legate hastily observed, that in a concern so urgent as that of establishing the inquisition on a firm foundation, his holiness could admit of no delays, and that the king might consider himself honoured by the holy father's having appointed a legate to be the first person to announce his intention. The king did not venture to reply. The legate on that very day constituted a grand inquisitor, and sent about collectors to receive the tenths; and before the court could obtain answers from Rome to its representations on the subject, the legate had brought two hundred victims to the stake, and collected more than two hundred thousand crowns.

However, the marquis of Villanova, a Spanish noble. man, of whom the legate had borrowed at Seville a very considerable sum upon forged bills, determined, if possible, to repay himself the money with his own hands, instead of going to Lisbon and exposing himself to the intrigues and influence of the swindler there. The legate was at this time making his circuit through the country, and happened very conveniently