Yes, but of all the preparations for atrocious. crime, none is more ominous or complete than a presumption of possessing superhuman virtue. Sanctity of this heroic and immortal order may dip its hands in blood and fear no stain! Illusions such as these, egregious as they may seem, are not foreign to the human mind. The holy arrogance of the soul, so long as it can be held entire, is a warrant that will cover all extents of guilt. There is no murder in murder, no falsewere flowing in the east and the west, at the instigation of spiritual heroes, the interior of the Church blazed with the superhuman virtues of ANGELICAL doctors, and SERAPHIC doctors-and so forth. Yes, and at the very moment that the duty of the civil power to aid the Church in the extermination of heretics and infidels was loudly preached, the fervours of the saints were reaching such a pitch (if we are to credit their devoted biographers) as often to lift them while in prayer many feet from the ground. "F. Leo the secretary of St. Francis (of Assisi) and his confessor, testified that he had seen him in prayer raised above the ground so high, that his disciple could only touch his feet, which he held and watered with his tears; and that sometimes he saw him raised much higher." Lives of the Saints, October 4. It was in one of these elevatious that the saint received those far-famed stigmas of which his order have so much boasted-unless indeed we listen to the story which affirms that St. Francis and St. Dominic, while together at Rome, fell out, and actually proceeded to blows; when the latter seizing a spit, inflicted some severe wounds upon his unarmed friend. This story perhaps should be regarded as an allegory, intended to prefigure the hot animosities that afterwards prevailed between the ghostly progeny of the two Founders. It is remarkable that, besides other "bones of contention," these very stigmas became the subject of a fierce warfare between the rival orders; the Dominicans having the audacity to claim for their Founder the very honour which the Franciscans had long thought their own without dispute.-But we have wandered from our purpose, and return to it to remind the reader that, at the very time when the miraculous wound in the (right) side of St. Francis was oozing gore in attestation of his seraphic piety, the soil of Languedoc was soaking in the blood of the luckless inhabitants-blood shed at the instigation, or under the eyes, of these same superhuman saints.

ness in perjury, no sin in any sin, if but the perpetrator is inflate with the persuasion of himself being a demigod in goodness. No selfdeception so extreme can be maintained by men who walk along with others upon the vulgar level of human interests: whoever would be mad at this rate, assuredly must not be citizen, neighbour, husband, or father; for the duties and offices of these relations teach even the most preposterous minds some common sense. It is celibacy and the cell that skreen the infatuation, and that foment it.24

Surrounded as we are in the present day, happily, by circumstances altogether of another sort, nothing less than a vigorous and continued effort of the imagination can enable us to follow those links of transition by which, so often, the stern ascetic, whose devout meditations we may even now peruse with pleasure and advantage, has passed to the fervours of a truculent zeal. These links are fewer than at first we may think. Let any one conceive himself to have laid down, as he may put off a garment, every social affection, remote and intimate, and to have thrown off every sympathy with what animates the open world, and to be mulct at once of manhood and humanity, and with a sort

24 There are exceptions. Simon de Montfort was bred not in the cell but the camp; and although, as Mr. Butler assures us, "his zeal and piety equalled him to the apostolic men;" yet had he acquired it all in the open world.

of desperate apathy to look down upon the theatre of life. Add to this supposition the heats of a turgid piety, and then ask whether much would be wanting to open the way to cruel or vindictive desires.

Or let any one entertain another supposition— as for example, that being arraigned on the indistinct ground of some political offence, in relation to which prejudice and passion have much scope, he stood at the bar, and saw his jury to consist of a dozen cowled anchorets, just summoned from their dens of morose meditation. Who would indulge a hope of receiving justice from such a band? Aye, would not a man shudder were he to descry only one such being among the twelve, and must he not believe that the pertinacious rancour of that one would effect his destruction?

Shall we pass from the light and air of an English court, to some pestilent cavern of the Holy Office ?—an atmosphere in which Justice has never borne to remain even an hour, and in which Mercy never spoke.25 The reverend assessors, with their obsequious ministers-tools in hand, are, we will imagine, drawn in even

25 The author will be thought to have forgotten that the great Ximenes de Cisneros presided eleven years in the court of the Inquisition. Did then neither Justice nor Mercy accompany the cardinal in his descents to the vaults of the Holy Office? Yes, the Justice and the Mercy of the Romish Church went with him there. By what rule are we to think of men-that of their professions, or that

!

proportions from the three classes just specified. To the right and left sit those of the first sortthe lookers on, whose vote for the use of the rack and pully has often had a motive more detestable than even the most horrid malice, and who hasten the consent of the court to a fatal sentence that they may save the hour of some adulterous appointment. Next are those of our second class, in whose bosoms mingled passions, and alternate irreconcilable desires, are beating like the waves of a tempest-troubled sea. To them is not this very hour of gloomy service the season toward which tumultuous emotions have long been tending, as the time when they should get vent? It is then that the grinding torments of wounded pride or despair are to relax a while; as if the culprit (Jew, or Moor,

of their deeds? During the inquisitor-generalship of Ximenes, fifty thousand Moors, under terror of death and torture, received the grace of baptism; while more than an equal number of the refractory were condemned. Of these, two thousand five hundred and thirty-six he burned alive. Or, supposing the whole number to have been evenly distributed through the period of his presidentship, it will appear that between Sunday and Sunday of every week of those years he committed (to reject the odd two hundred and forty-eight) four men or women to the flames! Let it be affirmed that, in the "New Regulations," some regard was paid to the rights of the accused; yet was the entire process a horrible snare, so contrived as to render the escape of the victim almost impossible. Besides, is not reason insulted by talking at all of the justice of the details of a judicial process, the object of which was to maintain an execrable usurpation? We may mourn indeed that a mind of fine quality should be found in company with a Torquemada; but we must not so outrage the great principles of virtue as, on account of talents or accomplishments, to skreen one murderer of thousands, while we consign another to infamy.

or heretic) who is to groan his hour upon the wheel, were to take up as substitute the anguish that grasps the heart of his judge. Nay, we do not carry imagination too far;-it belongs to human nature thus to feel;-the sight, and even the infliction of extreme suffering, loosens for a moment the gripe of internal distress. The vulture of remorse or revenge forgets his part to glare upon other agonies, and rests appeased in listening to another's sighs.

But what say we of the President of the Court to him we must allow the praise of loftier motives. Not since sunset of yesterday has he tasted bread, or moistened his shrivelled bloodless lip. Watching and prayer, though they have not spent him, have wrought up the chronic fever of his pulse to a tremulous height, that almost reaches delirium. Yet settled and calm is his front, and his eye glazed: the spirit, how is it abstracted from mortal connexions ! human sympathies are as remote from his soul as are the warmth, the fruits, and the pleasures of a sultry Syrian glen, from the glaciers and snow that encrust the summits of Lebanon. The communion of the soul is with the things of another world.-Alas! not the world of love and joy, but the gulph of misery! In every sense, immediate and figurative, this terrible personage is son and minister of hell. And now he comes from his cell to his chair that he may again realize, in a palpable, visible, and audible form,