“Next you descend into the vaults by very narrow stairs. A narrow corridor leads you to the several cells which for smallness and for stench are a hundred times more horrible than the dens of lions and tigers in the Colosseum. Wandering in this labyrinth of most fearful prisons, which may be called ‘graves for the living,’ I came to a cell full of skeletons without skulls, buried in lime. The skulls detached from the bodies had been collected in a hamper by the first visitors. Whose were those skeletons? And why were they buried in that place and in that manner? I have heard some zealous ecclesiastics, trying to defend the Inquisition from the charge of having condemned its victims to a secret death, say that the palace of the Inquisition was built on a burial ground belonging anciently to a hospital for pilgrims, and that the skeletons found were none other than those of pilgrims who had died in that hospital. But everything contradicts this specious defence. Suppose that there had been a cemetery there; it could not have had subterranean galleries and cells laid out with so great regularity; and even if there had been such--against all probability--the remains of bodies would have been removed on laying the foundations of the palace, to leave the space free for the subterranean part of the Inquisition. Besides, it is contrary to the use of common tombs to bury the dead by carrying them through a door at the side; for the mouth of the sepulchre is always at the top. And again it has never been the custom in Italy to bury the dead, singly, in quicklime; but in time of plague, the dead bodies have been usually laid in a grave until it was sufficiently full, and then quicklime has been laid over them to prevent pestilential exhalations, by hastening the decomposition of the infected corpses. This custom was continued some years ago in the cemeteries of Naples and especially in the daily burial of the poor. Therefore the skeletons found in the Inquisition of Rome could not belong to persons who had died a natural death in a hospital; nor could any one under such a supposition explain the mystery of all the bodies being buried in lime, with exception of the head. It remains then beyond doubt that the subterranean vault contained the victims of one of the many secret martyrdoms of the tribunal. The following is a most probable opinion, if it be not rather the history of a fact: