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 The American Jesuits were sent from Cadiz to Italy, where Faenza and Ravenna were assigned for their places of abode. Most of the Paraguay brethren settled at Faenza. There they employed the melancholy hours of age and exile in preserving, as far as they could from memory alone (for they had been deprived of all their papers), the knowledge which they had so painfully acquired of strange countries, strange manners, savage languages, and savage man. The Company originated in extravagance and madness; in its progress it was supported and aggrandized by fraud and falsehood; and its history is stained by actions of the darkest dye. But it fell with honour. No men ever behaved with greater equanimity, under undeserved disgrace, than the last of the Jesuits; and the extinction of the order was a heavy loss to literature, a great evil to the Catholic world, and an irreparable injury to the tribes of South America.

"Bucarelli replaced the exiled missionaries by priests from the different Mendicant orders; but the temporal authority was not vested in their hands—this was vested in lay-administrators. …… Here ended the prosperity of these celebrated communities—here ended the tranquillity and welfare of the Guaranies. The administrators, hungry ruffians from the Plata, or fresh from Spain, neither knew the language nor had patience to acquire it. It sufficed for them that they could make their commands intelligible by the whip. The priests had no authority to check the enormities of these wretches; nor were they always irreproachable themselves. A year had scarce elapsed before the Viceroy discovered that the Guaranies, for the sake of escaping from this