"After this, ruin overwhelmed us; after the great
Caesars, so fatal to Spain, came the little ones —
Philip III., who gave the final blow by expelling tiic
Moors; Philip IV., a degenerate with literary fancies,
who wrote verses and courted nuns, and the miserable
Charles II.
"Spain had never been so religious, Don Antolin,**
said Luna. "The Church was mistress of every-
thing; the ecclesiastical tribunals judged even the



THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL 191

himself, but secular justice could not touch even the hem
of a garment of the lowest sacristan, even though he
conmiitted the greatest crimes in the public streets.
Only the Church could judge its own; as Barrioncuva
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 them-
selves 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 ....
