slightest disapprobation of the act, assured him that by removing his rivals he had been a providential agent in preserving the happiness of his people.(482) The bishoprics were filled by men of notorious debauchery, or by grasping misers.(483) The priests sometimes celebrated the sacred mysteries “gorged with food and dull with wine.”(484) They had already begun to carry arms, and Gregory tells of two bishops of the sixth century who had killed many enemies with their own hands.(485) There was scarcely a reign that was not marked by some atrocious domestic tragedy. There were few sovereigns who were not guilty of at least one deliberate murder. Never, perhaps, was the infliction of mutilation, and prolonged and agonising forms of death, more common. We read, among other atrocities, of a bishop being driven to a distant place of exile upon a bed of thorns;(486) of a king burning together his rebellious son, his daughter-in-law, and their daughters;(487) of a queen condemning a daughter she had had by a former marriage to be drowned, lest her beauty should excite the passions of her husband;(488) of another queen endeavouring to strangle her daughter with her own hands;(489) of an abbot, compelling a poor man to abandon his house, that he might commit adultery with his wife, and being murdered, together with his partner, in the act;(490) of a prince who made it an habitual amusement to torture his slaves with fire, and who buried two of them alive, because they had married without his permission;(491) of a bishop’s wife, who, besides other crimes, was accustomed to mutilate men and to torture women, by applying red-hot irons to the most sensitive parts of their bodies;(492) of great numbers who were deprived of their ears and noses, tortured through several days, and at last burnt alive or broken slowly on the wheel. Brunehaut, at the close of her long and in some respects great though guilty career, fell into the hands of Clotaire, and the old queen, having been subjected for three days to various kinds of torture, was led out on a camel for the derision of the army, and at last bound to the tail of a furious horse, and dashed to pieces in its course.(493) And yet this age was, in a certain sense, eminently religious. All literature had become sacred. Heresy of every kind was rapidly expiring. The priests and monks had acquired enormous power, and their wealth was inordinately increasing.(494) Several sovereigns voluntarily abandoned their thrones for the monastic life.(495) The seventh century, which, together with the eighth, forms the darkest period of the dark ages, is famous in the hagiology as having produced more saints than any other century, except that of the martyrs.(496)