Eutychius as an obscure man,
who made a point at the fifth general council, for which he was rewarded
with the patriarchate of Constantinople--Eutychius, who was already
patriarch when the council assembled; and when he twice tears Formosus
from his grave to parade him in his vestments about Rome,--we may
suspect that the perfect grasp of documentary history from the twelfth
century does not reach backwards in a like degree.

If Mr. Lea stands aloft, in his own domain, as an accumulator, his
credit as a judge of testimony is nearly as high. The deciding test of
his critical sagacity is the masterly treatment of the case against the
Templars. They were condemned without mercy, by Church and State, by
priest and jurist, and down to the present day cautious examiners of
evidence, like Prutz and Lavocat, give a faltering verdict. In the face
of many credulous forerunners and of much concurrent testimony Mr. Lea
pronounces positively that the monster trial was a conspiracy to murder,
and every adverse proof a lie. His immediate predecessor, Schottmueller,
the first writer who ever knew the facts, has made this conclusion easy.
But the American does not move in the retinue of the Prussian scholar.
He searches and judges for himself; and in his estimate of the chief
actor in the tragedy, Clement V., he judges differently. He rejects, as
forgeries, a whole batch of unpublished confessions, and he points out
that a bull disliked by inquisitors is not reproduced entire in the
_Bullarium Dominicanum_. But he fails to give the collation, and is
generally jealous about admitting readers to his confidence, taking them
into consultation and producing the scales. In the case of Delicieux,
which nearly closes the drama of Languedoc, he consults his own sources,
independently of Haureau, and in the end adopts the marginal statement
in Limborch, that the pope aggravated the punishment. In other places,
he puts his trust in the _Historia Tribulationum_, and he shows no
reason for dismissing the different account there given of the death of
Delicieux: "Ipsum fratrem Bernardum sibi dari a summo pontifice
petierunt. Et videns summus pontifex quod secundum accusationes quas de
eo fecerant fratres minores justitiam postularent, tradidit eis eum.
Qui, quum suscepissent eum in sua potestate, sicut canes, cum vehementer
furiunt, lacerant quam capiunt bestiam, ita ipsi diversis afflictionibus
et cruciatibus laniaverunt eum. Et videntes quod neque in