In the north of Europe they saw wild barbarians and drunken ruffians murdering and pillaging like the more civilised Europeans. In Spain they found upon the throne deceit and hypocrisy wearing the mask of religion. They saw, at an _auto-da-fe_, men and women immolated in the flames to the mild Deity of the Christians; and they heard the grand inquisitor, Torquemada, boast to Ferdinand and Isabella that, since the establishment of the holy tribunal, it had tried eighty thousand suspected persons, and had burnt six thousand convicted heretics. When Faustus first saw the ladies and cavaliers assembled in the grand square, dressed in their richest habits, he imagined that he had come just in time for some joyous festival; but when he heard the condemned wretches howling and lamenting in the midst of a mob of monks who were at their devotions, he was convinced that religion, when misused, makes man the most execrable monster on the earth. He, however, began to imagine that all these horrors were the necessary consequences of man's nature, who is an animal that must either tear his fellow-creatures to pieces, or be torn to pieces by them. The Devil, perceiving that Faustus was amazed and confounded by these scenes, said to him: "Thou seest how the courts of Europe resemble each other in wickedness and crime. Let us now go to Rome, and see whether the ecclesiastical government goes on better." The malicious Leviathan flattered himself that Alexander the Sixth, who wore at that time the triple crown, and held in his hands the keys of heaven and of hell, would give the finishing blow to the harassed spirit of Faustus, and would enable him to return below with his victim. For a long time he had been weary of staying on the earth; for although he had in the course of many thousand years so often traversed it, he still saw merely the same beings and the same actions. From this we may learn that there is something so annoying in uniformity, that even the wild horrors of Satan's hall are to be preferred to it.