suppressed, _all the archives were placed at my disposal_; and from 1809 to 1812, I collected everything that appeared to me to be of consequence in the registers of the council of the Inquisition, and in the provincial tribunals, for the purpose of compiling this history. Never has a prisoner of the Inquisition seen either the accusation against himself, or any other. No one was ever permitted to know more of his own cause than he could learn of it by the interrogations and accusations to which he was obliged to reply, and by the extracts from the declarations of the witnesses, which were communicated to him, while not only their names were carefully concealed, and every circumstance relating to time, place, and person, by which he might obtain a clue to discover his denouncers, but even if the depositions contained any thing favourable to the defence of the prisoner. The maxim on which this was founded, is, that the accused ought not to occupy himself but in replying to the chief points of his accusation, and that it was the province of the judge afterwards to compare the answers that he had made with those which had been given favourable to his acquittal. Philip Limborch, and many more of veracity, have erred in their histories, from their ignorance of the method of conducting an inquisitorial trial. Those authors relied wholly on the accounts of prisoners, who knew nothing of the groundwork of their own case; and the details in Eymerick, Paramo, Pegna, Carena, and some other inquisitors, are too limited to yield the necessary information. These facts make me hope that I shall not transgress the bounds of propriety when I say, that I only can give a true history of the Inquisition, as I only possess the materials necessary for the undertaking. I have read the most celebrated trials of the modern Inquisition, and the details given by me differ essentially from those of other historians, not excepting those of Limborch, who is the most exact of them. The trials of Don Carlos of Austria, prince of the Asturias, of Don Bartholomew Carranza, archbishop of Toledo, and of Antony Perez, the first minister and secretary of Philip II., have been greatly illustrated in many important particulars.