ed to defend himself, which he did apparently with a good deal of skill. Having occasion, in the course of his defence, to quote a passage of scripture,-" Unless a man be born of water, &c."-he was surprised to find that the Inquisitor seemed quite unaware of the existence of such a passage. He asked where it was to be found, sent for a New Testament, and like a docile disciple of the redoubted Captain Cuttle, overhauled it, and when found, made a note of it mentally, but made no remark. He acted in the same way when our author referred to a decree of the Council of Trent. It will be remembered that we stated, as if incidentally, that no record had been taken of the proceedings of the third audience. The confession then made, therefore, did not confer any advantage on him who made it. The Promoter then moved that, inasmuch as M. Dellon, in addition to what he had confessed, had been further accused, and sufficiently convicted, of having spoken with contempt of the Inquisition and its ministers, and of having even used language of disrespect to the sovereign pontiff and against his authority, and inasmuch as the obstinacy which he had evinced, in despising so many delays and so many kind warnings that had been given him, was a clear proof that he had had very pernicious designs, and that his intention had been to teach and to foment heresy-he had thereby incurred the penalty of the greater excommunication; that his goods should be confiscated, and himself delivered to the secular arm, to be punished for his crimes according to the rigour of the laws-that is, to be burnt. To this demand of the prosecutor, our author replied as he best could. The strong point of his defence lay in the fact that he had actually confessed his ascription of fallibility to the Inquisition. This confession had not been recorded, and he could get no benefit from it.

After this he was brought up three or four times in the course of a month, and urged to make confession of what he had said respecting the Pope; but this he could not do. He was also urged to admit the major of the Promoter's syllogism, that his intention, in the facts that he had confessed, was to defend heresy; but this he strenuously denied; and certainly the sentiments that he expresses everywhere in the book before us, are far from being heretical, i. e. protestant. We find him, for example, continually lamenting that in his captivity, he was deprived of the privilege of attending mass; we find him ascribing every blink of sunshine that found its way unto his cell to the good offices of the blessed virgin; we find him lamenting that the Portuguese custom of administering baptism to infants only on the eighth day after their birth, must lead to many children dying, "without being regenerated by the holy sacrament of baptism,"

and so "being deprived of the felicity of heaven for ever." Whatever these sentiments may be, they are not protestant sentiments. And M. Dellon was not aught else than a devoted Romanist.

And now our prisoner noticed an unusual activity and bustle in the Santa casa. Every morning he heard the shrieks of one and another, who were being put to the torture. The season of advent was at hand, and he remembered to have heard that that was the season when the Autos-da-fé were generally celebrated. He knew that they took place at intervals of two or three years, and he had now been in confinement nearly two years, and he did not know whether one had been celebrated the advent before his imprisonment. He knew, moreover, that the prisoners were very numerous, for he heard the opening and shutting of many cell-doors, when the rations were distributed. All these circumstances combined to raise in him a confident expectation that his trials were approaching their end, and that death or liberty would soon deliver him from the solitude of his cell. A man is not in an enviable "frame of mind," when these two, death and liberty, are put into the same scale, and when either the one or the other is regarded as so much preferable to some third thing, that the difference between the two is regarded as insignificant, in comparison with the difference between either of them and that third. Not enviable truly.

But the first Sunday in advent came. It passed. Another week. The second Sunday came; it passed; and hope passed with it. The Auto-da-fé must be put off for another year. Three hundred and sixty-five days must pass-ay, three hundred and sixty-six, for next year is leap-year! It is too much.

But the darkest hour is that before the dawn. The Auto-dafé was generally celebrated on the first or second Sunday in advent; but not necessarily or uniformly; and on the 11th of January, 1676, there were indications that something important was to be transacted on the morrow. On that night, M. Dellon was distracted by many thoughts, but at last, about 11 o'clock, he fell asleep. His slumbers were of short duration. They were broken by the entrance of the Alcaide and guards :—

"The Alcaide handed me a dress which he ordered me to put on, and to be ready to come out when he should call me. He then went away, leaving a lighted lamp in my cell. I had not strength either to rise or to give him any answer, and as soon as the men left me, I was seized with so violent a fit of trembling that for more than an hour, I could not look at the dress that had been brought At last I rose, and prostrating myself before a cross which I had painted on the wall, I committed myself to God, and left my fate in his hands. Then I put on the dress, which consisted of a

to me.

vest with sleeves down to the elbows, and trowsers, which came down to the ancles, the whole being made of black cloth striped with white."

There was a meaning in these same white stripes. They meant life, and liberty, and country, and authorship, and the dedication of the book before us to Mademoiselle des Cambout de Coislin, and some good measure of posthumous fame. But M. Dellon could not read all this; he knew not the character, and could not read the hieroglyphics.

About two in the morning, the guards returned, and M. Dellon was led into a long gallery, where he found a good number of his fellow-prisoners ranged along the wall. Others were gradually brought forward until the number amounted to about 200. As these were all dressed like himself, and as he could see no distinction in the manner of treating any of them, he thought it likely that the fate of all was to be the same. But he could not imagine it possible that the common fate of such a multitude should be death; and thus did a ray of hope once more shine into his soul.

And the hope was not delusive. He had to pass two hours of dire suspense, while the criminals were dressed with scapulars (san benitos) and caps (carrochas) indicating the various grades of their crimes. His agitation during this ceremony is simply and forcibly described, but we shall not dwell upon it. At last, however, the preparations were finished. Just before daylight on that sabbath morning, the great bell of the cathedral clanged out its booming notes, while from all the country round, immense crowds of men and women, and of little boys and girls, are flocking in to Goa, to hold high festival. Inside the Santa Casa, the officials of the Inquisition have arranged the procession, and have decked out those who are to take part in it in the various uniforms of life or death. The Confessors have received the last shrift of those who are doomed to die: the Inquisitor has taken his place in the great hall, and around him are assembled a large number of the inhabitants of Goa, summoned for a purpose that will presently appear. Each criminal, carrying a wax taper, marches singly into this hall. As he enters, the secretary reads out from a list the name of one of the gentlemen present, who rises and places himself by the side of the criminal he is to be his sponsor in the Auto-da-Fè. Our author had for his sponsor the Portuguese admiral, which proved afterwards to be a fortunate occurrence for him. The procession is now formed. It is headed by the Dominicans, before whom is borne the gorgeous banner of the holy office. Then come the prisoners and their sponsors, arranged according to the crimes of

the former, the least criminal having the precedence, and those doomed to die bringing up the rear, accompanied by effigies of such as have died during their trial, and such as have been tried after death. The bones of such are also borne in boxes in the procession. We cannot detail all the marching and countermarching, the oaths, and sermons, and sentences. Any one who will enquire into the matter, will be struck with the great skill displayed in arranging the whole ceremonial, with the object of magnifying the holy office, and striking terror into the hearts of the spectators.

Our author's sentence was that he should be excommunicated, his effects confiscated, and himself banished from India, and condemned to serve in the galleys of Portugal for five years, and further to undergo such penances as the Inquisition should prescribe.

We need not dwell upon the subsequent history of M. Dellon. After about a fortnight he was ironed and taken on board ship, and made over to the charge of the Captain, who was ordered to deliver him over to the Inquisition at Lisbon. As soon as the anchors were up, his irons were taken off, and he seems to have received kind treatment, for which we suspect he was more or less indebted to the accident of his having the admiral for his sponsor. When the ship arrived at Brazil, he was put into prison there, but was kindly treated. After a short stay here, he re-embarked and reached Lisbon on the 16th December, about eleven months from Goa. Here he was set to his penal servitude of five years as a galley-slave in the dock-yards. But through the intercession of some of his countrymen, the grand Inquisition were prevailed on to remit the unexpired portion of his sentence, and after a servitude of about eighteen months, he was liberated on the 1st of June, 1677. After some difficulties and obstructions, he found means to procure a passage in a vessel bound for France; and after a lapse of four years, he set about the composition of his narrative, which he kept four years longer before he could make up his mind to publish it.

Such is a brief summary of a single case, and that not an aggravated one, of oppression and injustice inflicted by this spiritual court in the name of Jesus Christ. We see no reason to doubt the perfect accuracy of the narrative. Not only does an air of truthfulness pervade it, not only was its substantial vraisemblance admitted by the Inquisitor to Dr. Buchanan, but there is almost a perfect coincidence between the course of procedure represented to have been followed, with the rules laid down for the guidance of the courts of the Inquisition in Spain. These rules had been kept secret until they were published in SEPT., 1857.

N

Llorente's History of the Inquisition in that country. They could not therefore have been known to our author, who wrote more than 100 years earlier. Yet the treatment which he represents himself as having experienced, is, even to the most minute particulars, that which is prescribed in these rules for the treatment of persons accused as he was.

Such then being the quality of the Inquisition, it becomes a matter of interest to enquire into the number of its victims. Now we have seen that in the Auto-da-Fè, in which our author bore a part, there were about 200 men, besides women, of whom we do not know the number. But supposing them to have been but half as numerous as the men, we have a total of 300, the accumulation of twenty-five months that had elapsed since the last Auto-da-Fè. We see then that the evil was not a theoretical one merely. We should say it was rather of the most practical. We learn from Llorente that the number of victims in Spain from A.D. 1481 to A.D. 1808, a period of 328 years, was 341,021, giving an average of as nearly as possible 1,040 a year. Of these, 31,912, or ninety-seven a year, were burnt. These are simple facts. If we set out with what we may now reckon an axiom, that persecution for religion is altogether wrong, and consider that the Inquisition could not take cognizance of crimes, but only of sins, we come to the conclusion that all these were murdered. But even if we give the Inquisition the credit of the darkness of the age in which it was instituted, and of the countries in which it was established, it would require a man of singular charity, or singular absence of the power of judging from cause to effect, to believe that with a tribunal so constituted, and proceedings so conducted, a very larger number were not made to experience wrongfully the severity of the laws, even if those laws had not been themselves wrongful.

And what has been the result? Read it in the history of Portugal; read it in the present as compared with the past state of Goa. Our author furnishes us with a description of the city as it was in his days

:

"We come now to the celebrated city of Goa, the most beautiful, the largest, and the most magnificent in all India. It is situated under the fifteenth degree (of latitude.) The Portuguese have built it on a small island formed by the river. On the two points of land, between which the river falls into the sea, there are two very fine forts, that on the southern point, called Mourmougon, and that on the northern Agoada. As the island extends down to the junction of the river with the sea, the most westerly point of the island is almost abreast of the two points on which those forts stand, and here they have constructed a harbour.