WHEN I asserted that the Inquisition had never undergone any change, that as it existed in the time of its founder, Innocent III., so it continued in the days of its renowned legislator, Paul IV., and in those of the fierce persecutors of good Christians, Pius V. and Gregory XII., and that we find it still preserving the same character, in our own time, under Gregory XVI. and Pius IX., I did not intend to lead my readers to suppose that it invariably, after having arranged its plans and established its system of laws, carried on its operations with the same uniform regularity; and in undeviating exactitude pursued its unchanging course, however baleful, with the steady progress of a planet in its orbit, without ever deviating from it in the smallest possible degree. No, such was not the idea I intended to give. In its spirit it has always been the same, and its laws have never undergone any change; but nothing is more varied, more uncertain, more changeable, than the manner in which it has acted to attain its purposes. With the same spirit and the same laws, the Inquisition of Rome is, nevertheless, different from that of Spain, and the Inquisition of the nineteenth century greatly varies from that of the three preceding centuries. The slaughter of the Albigenses and the Waldenses, that of the Moors, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew, are events, so similar to each other, that whoever has read of the first is little astonished at the second or the third. But between the perpetration of these acts it was expedient that at least the period of a century should intervene, in order that the people might have time to recover from the shock they had experienced, and be induced to receive fresh arguments in favour of a repetition of the same enormity. In the meanwhile a thousand other events took place of a totally different character. For example, Pius V., while he was burning his heretics in Rome, or drowning them in the Lagoons of Venice, while he persecuted the Moors in Spain, and sent his bands to destroy the Jews, made himself patron of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who, after having been driven out of Rhodes, were dispersed abroad in various parts; he obtained for them the island of Malta; and lavished his bounty upon them with unsparing hand, in order that they might fortify themselves on that rock. Now what did these Knights of Malta become? The pirates of the Inquisition, founded by Dominic di Guzman. Yes; these crusaders, who assumed to themselves the title of Christian Knights, ended by becoming a pack of plundering blood-hounds, ever on the alert to hunt out their victims, and who, even now, do not blush to acknowledge themselves as the _Familiars_ of the Inquisition; though so dishonourable do they know their trade to be, that they are obliged to carry it on under the mask of secrecy. But these heroes who still keep up the empty title of Knights of Malta, ingloriously end their