In the year preceding the appearance of the tales we find him in a new character. A miserable man, a Franciscan monk, from Catalonia, was suspected of heresy; and the suspicion fell on him the more heavily because his mother was of the Jewish faith. Having been, in consequence of this, expelled successively from two religious houses of which he had been a member, he seems to have become disturbed in his mind, and at last he grew so frantic, that, while mass was celebrating in open church, he seized the consecrated host from the hands of the officiating priest and violently destroyed it. He was at once arrested and given up to the Inquisition. The Inquisition, finding him obstinate, declared him to be a Lutheran and a Calvinist, and, adding to this the crime of his Hebrew descent, delivered him over to the secular arm for punishment. He was, almost as a matter of course, ordered to be burned alive; and in January, 1623, the sentence was literally executed outside the gate of Alcalá at Madrid. The excitement was great, as it always was on such occasions. An immense concourse of people was gathered to witness the edifying spectacle; the court was present; the theatres and public shows were suspended for a fortnight; and we are told that Lope de Vega, who, in some parts of his “Dragontea,” shows a spirit not unworthy of such an office, was one of those who presided at the loathsome sacrifice and directed its ceremonies.[266] [266] The account is found in a MS. history of Madrid, by Leon Pinelo, in the King’s Library; and so much as relates to this subject I possess, as well as a notice of Lope himself, given in the same MS. under the date of his death. It is cited, and an abstract of it given, in Casiano Pellicer, “Orígen de las Comedias,” (Madrid, 1804, 12mo), Tom. I. pp. 104, 105. His fanaticism, however, in no degree diminished his zeal for poetry. In 1625, he published his “Divine Triumphs,” a poem in five cantos, in the measure and the manner of Petrarch, beginning with the triumphs of “the Divine Pan” and ending with those of Religion and the Cross.[267] It was a failure, and the more obviously so, because its very title placed it in direct contrast with the “Trionfi” of the great Italian master. It was accompanied, in the same volume, by a small collection of sacred poetry, which was increased in later editions until it became a large one. Some of it is truly tender and solemn, as, for instance, the _cancion_ on the death of his son,[268] and the sonnet on his own death, beginning, “I must lie down and slumber in the dust”; while other parts, like the _villancicos_ to the Holy Sacrament, are written with unseemly levity, and are even sometimes coarse and sensual.[269] All, however, are specimens of what respectable and cultivated Spaniards in that age called religion. [267] Obras Sueltas, Tom. XIII. [268] A la Muerte de Carlos Felix, Obras, Tom. XIII. p. 365.