It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, as the case developed, the attitude of the Valladolid judges became less and less favourable to Luis de Leon. Judges are mortals and liable to error. The very pertinacity of the prisoner may have impressed them badly.[80] It is in the highest degree improbable that they attached any importance to his few slips. He speaks of having a naturally weak memory which, so he declares, had grown worse while he was in prison,[81] and he was frankly sceptical as to the possibility of any man's recalling every incident in squabbles that happened years before.[82] As it happens, his memory seems to have been excellent. No doubt it failed him now and then; but seldom did it mislead him on any essential point.[83] It is conceivable that Luis de Leon's judges at Valladolid thought him lacking in deference. Though perfectly respectful, his attitude to them was anything but subservient. The judges were accustomed to see prisoners who were brought before them crushed with awe and a sense of impending doom. Conscious of the baselessness of the charges against him, the accused seemed to take his acquittal as certain; and he stood so little in awe of his judges that he announced his intention of appealing over their heads to the members of the Supreme Inquisition.[84] Timidity was not among his failings. A priest of Astudillo, formerly a student at Salamanca, had occasionally strayed into Luis de Leon's densely-packed lecture-room, and retained an abiding impression of the professor's _desenvoltura_ in his chair.[85] Luis de Leon had not become wholly subdued during the intervening years. He did not mince words in court, and indulged in sweeping denunciations of large groups of men; he branded all Dominicans as 'enemies';[86] he was scarcely more indulgent in speaking of the Jeromites (who resented his opposition to the candidature of their representative, Hector Pinto, for a chair at Salamanca);[87] and on general grounds, not unconnected with ancient academic rancours, he objected to the entire faculty of theology at the University of Alcalá de Henares.[88] The evidence of such persons should, he suggested, be discounted in advance. Slow to think evil of his neighbours, Luis de Leon was apt, once his suspicions were aroused, to fling his net widely. He had some inkling that he and his had the fatal gift of rousing antagonism. His uncle had been a practising lawyer, and Luis de Leon argued that all who had suffered through the professional activities of his kinsman should be debarred from testifying in his case.[89] The unworldly man manifestly took it for granted that witnesses who harboured any such grudge against him would willingly admit it, if pressed on the point.