Gregory XIII., the successor of Pius V., carried on the anti-Jewish programme of his predecessors. He renewed the canonical law which forbade Jewish physicians to attend on Christian patients, punishing transgressors on both sides. Jews suspected of holding intercourse with heretics, of harbouring refugees from Spain, or of otherwise helping the enemies and the victims of the Church, were dragged before the Inquisition and condemned to loss of goods, to slavery in the galleys, or to death. The Talmud and other Hebrew writings were again hunted out and burnt. Gregory also encouraged the Jesuits in their work of conversion, and the Jews were compelled, by a Papal Bull of 1584, to listen to sermons at the church of St. Angelo, near the Ghetto, and to pay the preachers employed to pervert them. Many of the wretches, yielding to fear or to temptation, embraced Christianity; many more left Rome. ♦1585–1592♦ Sixtus V., actuated by a broader and humaner spirit and by a more enlightened thirst for gold than had animated any of his antecessors or contemporaries, abolished these cruel decrees, ♦1586♦ pulled down the barriers which circumscribed the judicial and financial status of the Jews, forbade the gallant knights of Malta to enslave the Jews whom they met on the high seas in their voyages to and from the Levant, granted to the Jews perfect liberty of conscience, residence and commerce in his dominions, and, in lieu of the unlimited rapacity of former Popes, substituted a fixed capitation tax of twelve Giulii on all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. This revolution tempted many Jews to return to Rome. Sixtus crowned his liberality by allowing the printing of the Talmud and of other Hebrew books, after previous subjection to censorship. ♦1592–1605♦ But the relief was only temporary. Under Clement VIII., otherwise an excellent man and an able statesman, the reign of intolerance was revived. ♦1593♦ He expelled the Jews from the States of the Church, except Rome and Ancona, and forbade the use of Hebrew books. ♦1597♦ A few years later he ordered their expulsion from the Milan district, and they barely escaped a similar sentence at Ferrara, which, upon the failure of the line of Este, had recently been added to the Pope’s dominions. In the seventeenth century we hear of more Papal Bulls, barring the Italian Jews from all honourable professions and limiting their commercial activity to trade in cast-off clothes. It was during this black period of Jewish history that an English gentleman came to Rome. He was a traveller who had an eye for other things than picturesque ruins, and a heart in which there was room for other people than those whom chance had made his compatriots and co-religionists. His name was John Evelyn. Among the things which he saw in Rome was the Jewish quarter, and he records his impressions in the following words, under date January 7, 1645: