whole Italian sea-board, of which at Naples alone 20,000 persons died.  Flitting from shore to shore, these forlorn specters, the victims of bigotry and avarice, everywhere pillaged and everywhere rejected, dwindled away and disappeared.  Meanwhile the orthodox rejoiced.  Pico della Mirandola, who spent his life in reconciling Plato with the Cabala, finds nothing more to say than this:  ’The sufferings of the Jews, in which the glory of the Divine justice delighted, were so extreme as to fill us Christians with commiseration.’  With these words we may compare the following passage from Senarega:  ’The matter at first sight seemed praiseworthy, as regarding the honor done to our religion; yet it involved some amount of cruelty, if we look upon them, not as beasts, but as men, the handiwork of God.’  A critic of this century can only exclaim with stupefaction:  Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum! Thus Spain began to devour and depopulate herself.  The curse which fell upon the Jew and Moor descended next upon philosopher and patriot.  The very life of the nation, in its commerce, its industry, its free thought, its energy of character, was deliberately and steadily throttled.  And at no long interval of time the blight of Spain was destined to descend on Italy, paralyzing the fair movements of her manifold existence to a rigid uniformity, shrouding the light and color of her art and letters in the blackness of inquisitorial gloom.

[1] This number is perhaps exaggerated.  Limborch in his History of the Inquisition (p. 83) gives both 800,000 and 400,000; he also speaks of 170,000 families as one calculation.

[2] Senarega’s account of the entry of the Jews into Genoa is truly awful.  He was an eye-witness of what he relates.  The passage may be read in Prescott’s Ferdinand and Isabella, chapter 17.

Most singular is the attitude of a Sixtus—­indulging his lust and pride in the Vatican, adorning the chapel called after his name with masterpieces,[1] rending Italy with broils for the aggrandizement of favorites, haggling over the prices to be paid for bishoprics, extorting money from starved provinces, plotting murder against his enemies, hounding the semi-barbarous Swiss mountaineers on Milan by indulgences, refusing aid to Venice in her championship of Christendom against the Turk—­yet meanwhile thinking to please God by holocausts of Moors, by myriads of famished Jews, conferring on a faithless and avaricious Ferdinand the title of Catholic, endeavoring to wipe out his sins by the blood of others, to burn his own vices in the autos da fe of Seville, and by the foundation of that diabolical engine the Inquisition to secure the fabric his own infamy was undermining.[2] This is not the language of a Protestant denouncing the Pope.  With all respect for the Roman Church, that Alma Mater of the Middle Ages, that august and venerable monument of immemorial antiquity, we cannot close our eyes to the contradictions between practice and pretension upon which the History of the Italian Renaissance throws a light so lurid.