ied, was only the more speedily murdered for the sport of
the multitude. From the hour of his seizure he never saw the face of
day, until he was brought out as a public show, a loyal and festal
sacrifice, to do honor to the entrance of some travelling viceroy, some
new married princess, or, on more fortunate occasions, to the presence
of the sovereign. The dungeons were then drained, the human wreck of the
torture and scourge were gathered out of darkness, groups of misery and
exhaustion with wasted forms and broken limbs, and countenances subdued
by pain and famine into idiotism, and despair, and madness; to feed the
fires round which the Dominicans were chanting the glories of popery,
and exulting in the destruction of the body for the good of the soul!

In the original establishment of the inquisition in 1198, it had raged
against the Vaudois and their converts. But the victims were exhausted;
or not worth the pursuit of a tribunal which looked to the wealth as
keenly as to the faith of the persecuted. Opulence and heresy were at
length to be found only to Spain, and there the inquisition turned with
a gigantic step. In the early disturbances of the Peninsula, the Jews,
by those habits of trade, and mutual communion, which still make them
the lords of commerce, had acquired the chief wealth of the country. The
close of the Moorish war in the 15th century had left the Spanish
monarch at leisure for extortion; and he grasped at the Jewish gains in
the spirit of a robber, as he pursued his plunder with the cruelty of a
barbarian. The inquisition was the great machine, the comprehensive
torturer, ready to squeeze out alike the heart and the gold. In 1481, an
edict was issued against the Jews; before the end of the year, in the
single diocess of Cadiz, two thousand Jews were burnt alive! The fall of
the kingdom of Grenada, in 1492, threw the whole of the Spanish Moors
into the hands of the king. They were cast into the same furnace of
plunder and torture. Desperate rebellions followed; they were defeated
and, in 1609, were finally exiled. "In the space of one hundred and
twenty nine years, the inquisition deprived Spain of three millions of
inhabitants."

On the death of Leo X. in 1521, Adrian, the inquisitor general was
elected pope. He had laid the foundation of his papal celebrity in
Spain. "It appears, according to the most moderate calculation, that
during the five years of the ministry of Adrian, 24,025 persons were