blic streets. Only the Church could judge its
own; as Barrioneuva relates in his memoirs, friars armed to the teeth
wrested from the king's justice at the foot of the scaffold, in broad
daylight in the midst of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, one of their own
brothers condemned for murder. The Inquisition, not satisfied with
burning heretics, judged and punished gangs of cattle-lifters. Men of
letters, terrified, took refuge in ornamental literature as the last
refuge of thought, confining themselves to the production of witty
novels or plays, in which a fantastic honour was exalted which only
existed in poets' imagination, while the greatest corruption of morals
reigned. The great Spanish genius ignored or feigned to ignore what
the religious revolution beyond the frontiers was saying. Quevedo
only, who was the most daring, ventured to say:

'With the Inquisition....
Hush! Silence!'

the sad epitaph of Spanish thought which preferred to perish as it
could not speak the truth. In order to live quietly and support
themselves in those days of ignorance, many poets sought the shadow
of the Church and wore its vestments. Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode
Molina, Miradamerscua, Tarriga, Argensola, Gongora, Rioja, and others
were priests, many of them after stormy lives. Montalban was a priest
and employed in the Inquisition, and even the poor Cervantes, in
his old age, had to take the habit of St. Francis. Spain had eleven
thousand convents, more than a hundred thousand friars, and forty
thousand nuns, and to these must be added seventy-eight thousand
priests and the innumerable servitors and dependents of the Church,
such as alguaciles, familiars, jailors, and notaries of the
Inquisition, sacristans, stewards, buleros,[1] convent door-porters,
choristers, singers, lay brothers, novices--and I know not how many
other people. In exchange, the nation from a population of thirty
millions had shrunk to seven millions in less than two hundred
years. The expulsion of Jews and Moors by religious intolerance, the
continual foreign wars, the emigration to America in the hopes of
growing rich without work, hunger, the lack of sanitation, and the
abandonment of agriculture, had brought about this rapid depopulation.
The revenues of Spain had fallen to fourteen million ducats, whereas
the clerical revenue had risen to eight millions; the Church possessed
more than half the national fortune! What times! Eh, Don Antolin?"

[Footnote 1: _