After this, the secretary of the tribunal read aloud an instrument reciting the grounds for the conviction of the prisoners, and the respective sentences pronounced against them. Those who were to be admitted to penitence, each, as his sentence was proclaimed, knelt down, and, with his hands on the missal, solemnly abjured his errors, and was absolved by the grand-inquisitor. The absolution, however, was not so entire as to relieve the offender from the penalty of his transgressions in this world. Some were doomed to perpetual imprisonment in the cells of the Inquisition, others to lighter penances. All were doomed to the confiscation of their property,--a point of too great moment to the welfare of the tribunal ever to be omitted. Besides this, in many cases the offender, and, by a glaring perversion of justice, his immediate descendants, were rendered for ever ineligible to public office of any kind, and their names branded with perpetual infamy. Thus blighted in fortune and in character, they were said, in the soft language of the Inquisition, to be _reconciled_. As these unfortunate persons were remanded, under a strong guard, to their prisons, all eyes were turned on the little company of martyrs, who, clothed in the ignominious garb of the _san benito_, stood waiting the sentence of the judges,--with cords round their necks, and in their hands a cross, or sometimes an inverted torch, typical of their own speedy dissolution. The interest of the spectators was still further excited, in the present instance, by the fact that several of these victims were not only illustrious for their rank, but yet more so for their talents and virtues. In their haggard looks, their emaciated forms, and too often, alas! their distorted limbs, it was easy to read the story of their sufferings in their long imprisonment, for some of them had been confined in the dark cells of the Inquisition much more than a year. Yet their countenances, though haggard, far from showing any sign of weakness or fear, were lighted up with a glow of holy enthusiasm, as of men prepared to seal their testimony with their blood. When that part of the process showing the grounds of their conviction had been read, the grand-inquisitor consigned them to the hands of the corregidor of the city, beseeching him to deal with the prisoners _in all kindness and mercy_;[442] a honeyed, but most hypocritical phrase, since no choice was left to the civil magistrate, but to execute the terrible sentence of the law against heretics, the preparations for which had been made by him a week before.[443]