“They represent to us a man preserving his speech many years after death, in order to confess his sins; another throwing himself from a high balcony without danger, that he might go to mass. A dreadful fire instantly extinguished by a scapulary of Estamene. They shew us the Virgin feeding a monk from her own bosom; angels habited like friars, chanting the matins of the convent, because the friars were asleep. They paint the meekest and holiest of men torturing and murdering the best and the wisest for professing a different religious creed. “We have indeed much _religion_, but no Christian charity. We hurry with our pecuniary offerings to advance any _pious work_, but we do not scruple to defraud our fellow-men. We confess every month, but our vices last us our lives. We insist (almost exclusively) on the name of Christians, while our conduct is worse than that of infidels. In one concluding word, we fear the dark dungeon of the inquisition, but not the awful—the tremendous tribunal of God!” {11a} This is the representation of a Spaniard. Though the colouring is high, it is a copy from nature, and the shades might have been heightened had he witnessed the conduct of numbers of the monastic orders during the late convulsions of Spain. There are, indeed, few examples of such infamous want of principle as was exhibited by many of them on the king’s return. Those who had gone about preaching the rights of man, proclaiming the wisdom and exalting the blessings of the new constitution; exhorting their hearers, often with a vehemence little becoming their situation, to live and die for its preservation, and hurling their bitterest anathemas against those who dared to question the wisdom of a single article,—when the king refused to sign that constitution, became the eulogists of every act of tyranny, the persecutors of the _liberales_, and the chosen friends of Ferdinand. {11b} They have had their reward: and though a few of them have occupied the vacant sees, and have been caressed and recompensed with no sparing hand, the finger of hatred and of scorn points them out to the execration of betrayed and suffering millions, while their names will go down to posterity, accompanied with reproaches, curses and infamy. If those be forgiven who have gone on in one consistent career of servitude and degradation; who have betrayed no cause of liberty—for they are by habit and by election slaves; who have sacrificed no manly principles—for manly principles they had none;—still no charity can wash away the stains of those traitors to freedom, to humanity, to Spain, who so atrociously deserted the banners of their country’s welfare, to range themselves around the standards of a profligate and unexampled tyranny.