public; the other, called after Victor Emmanuel, is a vast collection of
books gathered together by plundering the monastic institutions of Italy
at the time of the disestablishment. The booty--for it was nothing
else--was brought in carts, mostly in a state of the utmost confusion,
and the books and manuscripts were roughly stacked in vacant rooms on
the ground floor of the Collegio Romano, in charge of a porter. Not
until a poor scholar, having bought himself two ounces of butter in the
Piazza Navona, found the greasy stuff wrapped in an autograph letter of
Christopher Columbus, did it dawn upon the authorities that the porter
was deliberately selling priceless books and manuscripts as waste paper,
by the hundredweight, to provide himself with the means of getting
drunk. That was about the year 1880. The scandal was enormous, a strict
inquiry was made, justice was done as far as possible, and an official
account of the affair was published in a 'Green Book'; but the amount of
the loss was unknown, it may have been incalculable, and it was
undeniably great.

The names visibly recorded in the Region have vast suggestions in
them,--Ignatius Loyola, the Dominicans, Venice, Doria, Agrippa, and the
buildings themselves, which are the record, will last for ages; the
opposition of Jesuit and Inquisitor, under one name or another, and of
both by the people, will live as long as humanity itself.

The crisis in the history of the Inquisition in Rome followed closely
upon the first institution of the Tribunal, and seventeen years after
Paul the Fourth had created the Court, by a Papal Bull of July
twenty-first, 1542, the people burned the Palace of the Inquisition and
threatened to destroy the Dominicans and their monastery.

[Illustration: THE PANTHEON]

So far as it is possible to judge the character of the famous Carafa
Pope, he was ardent under a melancholic exterior, rigid but ambitious,
utterly blind to everything except the matter he had in hand, proud to
folly, and severe to cruelty. A chronicler says of him, that his head
'might be compared to the Vesuvius of his native city, since he was
ardent in all his actions, wrathful, hard and inflexible, undoubtedly
moved by an incredible zeal for religion, but a zeal often lacking in
prudence, and breaking out in eruptions of excessive severity.' On the
other hand, his lack of perception was such that he remained in complete
ignorance of the outrageous deeds done in his name