ed, and two who were to have been transported for
ten years, to transportation for life. In comparison with death, the
condition of the prisoners, with whom the jails and fortresses were
crowded to suffocation, was scarcely to be envied. Though all were
uncondemned, and most of them innocent, the whole were delivered over to
the merciless authority of apostolic miscreants, who seemed to find no
gratification but in the invention of new modes of inflicting misery.

Among the incarcerated were many persons in affluent circumstances,
who charitably contributed to support the poorer prisoners, whom their
tyrants were willing should perish by starvation. To deprive them of all
assistance, indeed, government ordered their benefactors to be removed
from the dungeons in the city, to those of St. Julian, Belem, and Bugio.
Here, without being brought to trial, the prisoners were cut off from
all communication, even with the members of their own families. Many
of them died of want and confinement, and the usurper was suspected of
poisoning others. No rank, sex, or character was respected; a child
of five years of age was kept in solitary confinement five days, and
subjected to the tortures of a prison to extort evidence against its
father and mother. A refugee Spanish bishop, who had been a member
of the Cortes of 1812, and had since lived in security at Lisbon,
was thrown into a dungeon, and died in four days, in consequence of
maltreatment, and his body was thrown into a hole in the esplanade of
the castle without burial. The most sanguinary scenes took place both at
Oporto and Lisbon. The rage of the tyrant was backed by the priests,
who in their sermons and publications applauded the work of death and
devastation as an acceptable offering to the Divine Majesty. One Jose
Agostino, a monk and court preacher, published a pamphlet called "The
Beast Flayed," urging the necessity of multiplying sacrifices, and
recommending that the constitutionalists should be hanged up by the
feet, and the people joyfully treated with fresh meat from the
gallows. These sentiments only added fuel to the flames of Don Miguel's
vengeance, and the kingdom was laid at the mercy of a set of men to
whose vengeance, brutality, and avarice there were no bounds. One step
downward in the path of moral turpitude ever leads to another. From
the moment of his return, Don Miguel had hated his sister Bonna Maria,
because she had been her brother's regent, and had b