No better man could have been found in Europe for the post to which he was thus elevated.  To shed human blood was, in his opinion, the only important business and the only exhilarating pastime of life.  His youth had been stained with other crimes.  He had been obliged to retire from Spain, because of his violation of an orphan child to whom he was guardian, but, in his manhood, he found no pleasure but in murder.  He executed Alva’s bloody work with an industry which was almost superhuman, and with a merriment which would have shamed a demon.  His execrable jests ring through the blood and smoke and death-cries of those days of perpetual sacrifice.  He was proud to be the double of the iron-hearted Duke, and acted so uniformly in accordance with his views, that the right of revision remained but nominal.  There could be no possibility of collision where the subaltern was only anxious to surpass an incomparable superior.  The figure of Vargas rises upon us through the mist of three centuries with terrible distinctness.  Even his barbarous grammar has not been forgotten, and his crimes against syntax and against humanity have acquired the same immortality.  “Heretici fraxerunt templa, boni nihili faxerunt contra, ergo debent omnes patibulare,” was the comprehensive but barbarous formula of a man who murdered the Latin language as ruthlessly as he slaughtered his contemporaries.

Among the ciphers who composed the rest of the board, the Flemish Councillor Hessels was the one whom the Duke most respected.  He was not without talent or learning, but the Duke only valued him for his cruelty.  Being allowed to take but little share in the deliberations, Hessels was accustomed to doze away his afternoon hours at the council table, and when awakened from his nap in order that he might express an opinion on the case then before the court, was wont to rub his eyes and to call out “Ad patibulum, ad patibulum,” ("to the gallows with him, to the gallows with him,”) with great fervor, but in entire ignorance of the culprit’s name or the merits of the case.  His wife, naturally disturbed that her husband’s waking and sleeping hours were alike absorbed with this hangman’s work, more than once ominously expressed her hope to him, that he, whose head and heart were thus engrossed with the gibbet, might not one day come to hang upon it himself; a gloomy prophecy which the Future most terribly fulfilled.

The Council of Blood, thus constituted, held its first session on the 20th September, at the lodgings of Alva.  Springing completely grown and armed to the teeth from the head of its inventor, the new tribunal—­at the very outset in possession of all its vigor—­forthwith began to manifest a terrible activity in accomplishing the objects of its existence.  The councillors having been sworn to “eternal secrecy as to any thing which should be transacted at the board, and having likewise made oath to denounce any one of their number who should violate the pledge,”