The fate of Servetus has always excited the deepest commiseration. His death was a judicial crime, the rank offence of religious pride, personal hatred, and religious fanaticism. It borrowed from superstition its worst features, and offered necessity the tyrant's plea for its excuse. Every detail of such events is of great interest. For by that immortality of mind which exists for ever as History, or through the agency of those successive causes which still link us to it by their effects, we are never separated from the Past. There is also an eloquence in immaterial things which appeals to the heart through all ages. Is there a man who would enter unmoved the room in which Shakspeare was born, in which Dante dwelt, or see with indifference the desk at which Luther wrote, the porch beneath which Milton sat, or Sir Isaac Newton's study? So also the possession of a book once their own, still more of the MS. of a work by which great men won enduring fame, written in a great cause, for which they struggled and for which they suffered, seems to efface the lapse of centuries. We feel present before them. They are before us as living witnesses. Thus we see Servetus as, alone and on foot, he arrived at Geneva in 1553; the lake and the little inn, the "Auberge de la Rose," at which he stopped, reappear pictured by the influence of local memory and imagination. From his confinement in the old prison near St. Peter's, to the court where he was accused, during the long and cruel trial, until the fatal eminence of Champel, every event arises before us, and the air is peopled with thick coming visions of the actors and sufferer in the dreadful scene. Who that has read the account of his death has not heard, or seemed to hear, that shriek, so high, so wild, alike for mercy and of dread despair, which when the fire was kindled burst above through smoke and flame,--"that the crowd fell back with a shudder!" Now it strikes me, an original MS. of the work for which he was condemned still exists; and I, thinking that others may feel the interest I have tried to sketch in its existence, will now state the facts of the case, and lay my authorities before your readers. "We condemn you, said the council, Michael Servetus, to be bound and led to Champel, where you are to be fastened to a stake, and burnt alive together with your book, as well the printed as the MS." "About midday he was led to the stake. An iron chain encompassed his body; on his head was placed a crown of plaited straw and leaves strewed with sulphur, to assist in suffocating him. At his girdle were suspended his printed books; and the MS. he had sent to Calvin." This MS. had been completed in 1546, and sent to Geneva for his opinion. Calvin, in a letter to Farel says: "Servetus wrote to me lately, and accompanied his letter with a long volume _of his insanities_."