“I was chiefly interested in tracing the influence of censorship on the intellectual and political development of Spain, but in many instances a side light is thrown upon the resultant injury to the commercial interests involved,--as for instance the ruin of Portonares, the greatest Spanish printer, as a result of the censorship (_i. e._ the condemnation of the Vatable Bible.) The business of bookselling was in fact crippled in every way. I have met with one case in which a bookseller humbly petitions the Inquisition to come to a decision in regard to certain books which he had imported and which had been in the hands of the _Calificadores_ (examiners) for four years. “The _prima facies_ was against all books; their innocence had to be proved before their circulation could be allowed and even after this they were still liable at any time to an adverse judgment. Under these circumstances, commerce in books was necessarily crippled and the diffusion of intelligence was reduced to a minimum.” The books that were published during the 16th century, and indeed for a century later, bore everywhere marks of the subjection to which the press and those who wrote for the press were alike reduced. From the abject title-pages and dedications of the authors themselves through the series of certificates collected from their friends to establish the orthodoxy of works that were often as little connected with religion as fairy tales, down to the colophon supplicating pardon for any unconscious neglect of the authority of the Church or for any too free use of classical mythology, we are continually impressed with painful proofs, not only how completely the human mind was enslaved in Spain, but how grievously it had become cramped and crippled by what it had so long borne.[120] Of the few dramatic pieces written in the earlier part of the reign of Charles V, nearly all except those on strictly religious subjects were laid under the ban of the Church; several in fact being now known to have existed only because their names appear in the _Index expurgatorius_; and others, like the _Amadis de Gaula_ of Gil Vicente, though printed and published, being subsequently forbidden to be represented.[121] Ticknor writes (with reference to the trial of Luis de Leon, in December, 1576): “The very loyalty with which Luis bowed himself down before the dark and unrelenting tribunal into whose presence he had been summoned, sincerely acknowledging its right to all the powers it claimed, and submitting faithfully to all its decrees, is the saddest proof that can be given of the subjection to which intellects the most lofty and the most cultivated had been reduced by sinful tyranny, and the most discouraging augury of the degradation of the national character that was sure to follow.”[122]