With the difficulty, delay, expense and frequent impossibility of obtaining a licence for the publication of any valuable work, may be well contrasted the ridiculous trash which daily issues from the Spanish press. Accounts of miracles wrought by the different virgins, {8c} lives of holy friars and sainted nuns, romances of marvellous conversions, libels against Jews {8d} and heretics and Freemasons, histories of apparitions, and so forth, are generally introduced, not by a mere licence of the inquisitor, but by long and laboured eulogiums. It is no novel observation, that the most cruel and intolerant persecutors have often been men wholly devoid of religious principle; men, who consider the religion of the state only as a part of its civil policy, and who treat the denial of a national creed with the same severity as the infraction of an established law, or rather as a species of treason against the supreme authority. No plea of modest inquiry, of conscientious doubt, or honest difference of opinion, is allowed to oppose for a moment their sanguinary and despotic sway. There are no terms of safety but those of unresisting, instant, absolute prostration. Such men are generally the prime movers of the gagging engine of religious intolerance; and such men are to be found too abundantly in Spain. Others there are who imagine they see in the pomp and parade of the Romish ritual, a system of delusion admirably adapted to beguile, or even to bless the ignorant. They fancy themselves beings of a higher and nobler order, and that, while they bask in the sunshine of intellect and knowledge, they may be well content that the uninstructed mass should trudge on in darkness below. Why should they throw their pearls to senseless swine; or shower down truth and virtue on those who fatten on vice and error?