The state of the theatre, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, can be well seen in the “Teatro Nuevo Español,” (Madrid, 1800-1, 5 tom. 12mo,) filled with the plays, original and translated, that were then in fashion. It contains a list of such as were forbidden; imperfect, but still embracing between five and six hundred, among which are Calderon’s “Life is a Dream,” Alarcon’s “Weaver of Segovia,” and many more of the best dramas of the old school. Duran, in a note to his Preface to Ramon de la Cruz, (Tom. I. p. v.,) intimates that this ostracism was in some degree the result of the influence of those who sustained the French doctrines. The number of plays acted or published between 1700 and 1825, if not to be compared with that of the corresponding period preceding 1700, is still large. I think that, in the list given by Moratin, there are about fourteen hundred; nearly all after 1750. CHAPTER VII. REIGN OF CHARLES THE FOURTH.--FRENCH REVOLUTION.--INQUISITION.--PLOT OF THE ESCURIAL.--FERDINAND THE SEVENTH.--BONAPARTE.--THE FRENCH INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF THE COUNTRY.--RESTORATION OF FERDINAND THE SEVENTH.--HIS DESPOTISM.--AN INTERREGNUM IN LETTERS.--REACTION.--CONCLUSION. The reign of Charles the Fourth was not one in which a literary contest could be carried on with the freedom that alone can render such contests the means of intellectual progress. His profligate favorite, the Prince of the Peace, during a long administration of the affairs of the country, overshadowed every thing with an influence hardly less fatal to what he patronized than to what he oppressed. The revolution in France, first resisted, as it was elsewhere, and then corruptly conciliated, struck the same terror at Madrid that it did at Rome and Naples; and, while its open defiance of every thing Christian filled the hearts of a large majority of the Spanish people with a horror greater than it inspired even in Italy, not a few were led away by it from their time-honored feelings of religion and loyalty, and prepared for changes like those that were already overturning the thrones of half Europe. Amidst this confusion, and taking advantage of it, the Inquisition, grown flexible in the hands of the government as a political machine, but still renouncing none of its religious pretensions, came forth with its last “Index Expurgatorius” to meet the invasion of French philosophy and insubordination.[390] Acting under express instructions from the powers of the state it received against men of letters, and especially those connected with the universities, an immense number of denunciations, which, though rarely prosecuted to conviction and punishment, were still formidable enough to prevent the public expression of opinions on any subject that could endanger the social condition of the individual who ventured to entertain them. In all its worst forms, therefore, oppression, civil, political, and