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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

entreprise à peu près chimérique." It will be interesting to learn whether the opinion of so good a judge has been altered or confirmed. The book begins with a survey of all that led to the growth of heresy, and to the creation, in the thirteenth century, of exceptional tribunals for its suppression. There can be no doubt that this is the least satisfactory portion of the whole. I t is followed by a singularly careful account of the steps, legislative and administrative, by which Church and State combined to organise the intermediate institution, and of the manner in which its methods were formed by practice. Nothing in European literature can compete with this, the centre and substance of Mr. Lea's great history. In the remaining volumes he summons his witnesses, calls on the nations to declare their experience, and tells how the new force acted upon society to the end of the Middle Ages. History of this undefined and international cast, which shows the same \vave breaking upon many shores, is always difficult, from the want of visible unity and progression, and has seldom succeeded so well as in this rich but unequal and dis- jointed narrative. On the most significant of all the trials, those of the Templars and of Hus, the author spends his best research; and the strife between A vignon and the Franciscans, thanks to the propitious aid of Father Ehrle, is better still. Joan of Arc prosper,s less than the disciples of Perfect Poverty; and after Joan of Arc many pages are allotted, rather profusely, to her companion in arms, who survives in the disguise of Bluebeard. The series of dissolving scenes ends, in order of time, at Savonarola; and with that limit the work is complete. The later Inquisition, starting with the Spanish and de- veloping into the Roman, is not so much a prolongation or a revival as a new creation. The mediæval Inquisition strove to control states, and \vas an engine of government. The modern strove to coerce the Protestants, and was an engine of war. One was subordinate, local, having a kind of headquarters in the house of Saint Dominic at Toulouse. The other was sovereign, universal, centred in the Pope,