these affairs to individuals without occupation, and whose mean estate renders them proud of their official position.’[126] It was not to be expected that such people should discharge their duties with intelligence and scrupulous equity.  Pius V., himself an incorruptible Inquisitor, had to condemn one 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.