Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/520

492 492 FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. PART tling like a foul mist on the goodly promise of the land, closed up the fair buds of science and civil ization ere thej were fully opened. Alas ! that such a blight should have fallen on so gallant and generous a people ! That it should have been brought on it too by one of such unblemished pa- triotism and purity of motive, as Isabella ! How must her virtuous spirit, if it be permitted the de parted good to look down on the scene of their earthly labors, mourn over the misery and moral degradation, entailed on her country by this one act ! So true is it, that the measures of this great queen have had a permanent influence, whether for good or for evil, on the destinies of her country. The immediate injury inflicted on the nation by the spirit of bigotry in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, although greatly exaggerated, ^^^ was doubt- Beneficent impulse. up the fires for the heretics, in which, with good reason, they have hurnt, and shall continue to burn, so long- as a soul of them re- mains " ! (Reyes Catolicos, MS., cap. 7.) It becomes more per- ceptible in the literature of later times, and, what is singular, most of all in the lighter departments of poetry and fiction, which seem naturally devoted to purposes of pleasure. No one can estimate the full influence of the Inquisition in perverting moral sense, and in- fusing the deadly venom of misan- thropy into the heart, who has not perused the works of the great Casfilian poets, of Lope de Vega, Ercilla, above all Calderon, whose lips seem to have been touched with fire from tiie very altars of this accursed tribunal. 1^ The late secretary of the In- quisition has made an elaborate computation of the number of its victims. According to him, 13,000 were publicly burned by the seve- ral tribunals of Castile and Aragon, and 191,413 suffered other punish- ments, between 1481, the date of the commencement of the modern institution, and 1518. (Hist, de rinquisition, tom. iv. chap. 46.) Llorente appears to have come to these appalling results by a very plausible process of calculation, and without any design to exag- gerate. Nevertheless, his data are exceedingly imperfect, and he has himself, on a revision, consider- ably reduced, in his fourth volume, the original estimates in the first. I find good grounds for reducing them still further. 1. He quotes Mariana, for the fact, that 2000 suffered martyrdom at Seville, in 1481, and makes this the basis of his calculations for the other tribu- nals of the kingdom. Marineo, a contemporary, on the other hand,