of his lieutenants for corruption or extortion of money by menaces.[127]
There was still another source of peril and annoyance to which scholars
were exposed. Their comrades, engaged in similar pursuits, not
unfrequently wreaked private spite by denouncing them to the
Congregation.[128] Van Linden indicated heresies in Osorius, Giovius,
Albertus Pighius. The Jesuit Francesco Torres accused Maes, and
threatened Latini. Sigonius obtained a license for his _History of
Bologna_, but could not print it, owing to the delation of secret
enemies. Baronius, when he had finished his Martyrology, found that a
cabal had raised insuperable obstacles in the way of its publication. I
have been careful to select only examples of notoriously Catholic
authors, men who were in the pay and under the special protection of the
Vatican. How it fared with less favored scholars, may be left to the
imagination. We are not astonished to find a man like Latini writing
thus from Rome to Maes during the pontificate of Paul IV.[129]

[Footnote 126: Discorso dell'Origine, etc. dell'Inquisizione,' _Opp._
vol. iv. p. 34.]

[Footnote 127: Mutinelli, _Storia Arcana_, vol. i. p. 277.]

[Footnote 128: Dejob, _op. cit._ pp. 53-57.]

[Footnote 129: Id. _op. cit._ p. 75.]

'Have you not heard of the peril which threatens the very existence of
books? What are you dreaming of, when now that almost every published
book is interdicted, you still think of making new ones? Here, as I
imagine, there is no one who for many years to come will dare to write
except on business or to distant friends. An Index has been issued of
the works which none may possess under pain of excommunication; and the
number of them is so great that very few indeed are left to us,
especially of those which have been published in Germany. This
shipwreck, this holocaust of books will stop the production of them in
your country also, if I do not err, and will teach editors to be upon
their guard. As you love me and yourself, sit and look at your bookcases
without opening their doors, and beware lest the very cracks let
emanations come to you from those forbidden fruits of learning.' This
letter was written in 1559, when Paul proscribed sixty-one presses, and
prohibited the perusal of any work that issued from them. He afterwards
withdrew this interdict. But the Index did not stop its work of
extirpation.

Another embarrassment which afflicted men of learning, was the danger of
possessing