and again raised literal crusades against women, torturing, exposing, burning, young and old, not merely in the witch-mania of the 17th century, but through the whole middle age. It is a detestable page of history. I ask those who may think my statement exaggerated, to consult the original authorities. Let them contrast Rothar's law about the impossibility of witchcraft, with the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum, Nider's Fornicarium, or Delrio the Jesuit, and see for themselves who were the false teachers. And if they be told, that the cruelties of the Inquisition were only those in vogue according to the secular law of the day, let them recollect that the formulizers of that law were none other than the celibate Roman clergy. I do not deny that there was in all this a just, though a terrible, Nemesis. What was the essential fault of these Lombard laws--indeed of all the Teutonic codes? This--that there was one law for the free man, another for the slave. Ecclesiastical dominion was necessary, to make one law for all classes, even though it were a law of common slavery. As the free had done to the slave, even so, and far worse, would the Roman clergy do to them. The Albigense persecutors, burning sixty ladies in one day; Conrad of Marpurg scourging his own sovereign, St. Elizabeth; shaving the Count of Saiym's head; and burning noble ladies almost without trial; Sprenger and his compeers, offering up female hecatombs of the highest blood thoughout Germany; English bishops burning in Smithfield Anne Askew, the hapless court-beauty, and her fellow-courtier Mr. Lascelles, just as if they had been Essex or Berkshire peasants;--all these evildoers were welding the different classes of the European nations, by a community of suffering, into nations; into the belief that free and slave had one blood, one humanity, one conscience, one capacity of suffering; and at last, one capacity of rebelling, and making common cause, high and low alike, against him who reigned in Italy under the 'Romani nominis umbram.' And if our English law, our English ideas of justice and mercy, have retained, more than most European codes, the freedom, the truthfulness, the kindliness, of the old Teutonic laws, we owe it to the fact, that England escaped, more than any other land, the taint of effete Roman civilization; that she therefore first of the lands, in the 12th century, rebelled against, and first of them, in the 16th century, threw off, the Ultramontane yoke.