e secular
ranks, some of them notorious for their independent and
anti-Roman-Catholic opinions. When they began to recruit novices, they
were unable to find any decent men, or known family, who would submit
their children to their rule; and their noviciate was consequently
composed of only ninety young persons, and these drawn from the lowest
classes of society.

For the space of seventeen years they maintained themselves in this
precarious condition, without advancing one step in their popularity, and
even without exhibiting any of the qualities which had given confidence
to their rule in former times. Far from captivating the will of the
people, they exasperated it to such a degree, that in 1834, after the
death of the king, the people of Madrid, in one of those moments of
madness and irritation so frequent after the scourge of the cholera,
penetrated the establishment of those holy fathers, and inhumanly
sacrificed them to their fury. Even to this day the mystery which
covered that sanguinary catastrophe has never entirely been revealed.
One thing is certain, that in spite of the religious ideas of Spaniards,
and of the superstitious veneration with which they beheld a religious
habit, the Jesuits were immolated without causing one murmur of
fanaticism or one tear of compassion.

It is but a few years ago that the Spanish government had the
inexpressible condescendence to allow a community of Jesuits to establish
itself in the magnificent convent of Loyola, the country of their
founder. The last revolution which happened in that country offered them
an opportunity of putting in practice those absolute principles which
have always governed their conduct. The government of Espartero,
informed of their secret intrigues, by which they contrived to agitate
the public mind in the Basque provinces in favour of Don Carlos, ordered
them to be expelled to the Balearic Islands; but they, fearful perhaps of
severer measures being adopted against them, and convinced of the general
hatred in which they were held by the people, fled to France, from whence
it is probable they will not attempt to recross the frontier.

Monachism, then, has entirely disappeared from Spain, where only two
convents remain for the instruction of those who are destined for the
priesthood in the Philippine Islands. These men live within the
cloisters according to the ancient regime; but they are forbidden to
appear in public in the costumes of the