“The condemned were immersed in a bath of slaked lime, gradually filled up to their necks.  The lime by little and little enclosed the sufferers, or walled them up alive.  The torment was extreme but slow.  As the lime rose higher and higher, the respiration became more and more painful, because more difficult.  So that what with the suffocation of the smoke, and the anguish of the compressed breathing, they died in a manner most horrible and desperate.  Some time after their death the heads would naturally separate from the bodies, and roll away into the hollows made by the shrinking of the lime.  Any other explanation of the feet that may be attempted will be found improbable and unnatural.  You may make what use you please of these notes of mine, since I can warrant their truth.  I wish that writers, speaking of this infamous tribunal of the Inquisition, would derive their information from pure history, unmingled with romance; for so great and so many the historical atrocities of the Inquisition, that they would more than suffice to arouse the detestation of a thousand worlds.  I know that the popish impostor-priests go about saying that the Inquisition was never an ecclesiastical tribunal, but a laic.  But you will have shown the contrary in your work, and may also add, in order quite to unmask these lying preachers, that the palace of the Inquisition at Rome is under the shadow of the palace of the Vatican; that the keepers are to this day, Dominican friars; and that the prefect of the Inquisition at Rome is the Pope in person.

“I have the honor to be your affectionate Servant,

“Alessandra Gavazzi.”

“The Roman parliament decreed the erection of a pillar opposite the palace of the Inquisition, to perpetuate the memory of the destruction of that nest of abominations; but before that or any other monument could be raised, the French army besieged and took the city, restored the Pope, and with him the tribunal of the faith.  Not only was Dr. Achilli thrown into one of its old prisons, on the 29th of July 1849, but the violence of the people having made the building less adequate to the purpose of safe keeping, he was transferred to the castle of St. Angelo, which had often been employed for the custody of similar delinquents, and there he lay in close confinement until the 9th of January, 1850, when the French authorities, yielding to influential representations from this country assisted him to escape in disguise as a soldier, thus removing an occasion of scandal, but carefully leaving the authority of the congregation of cardinals undisputed.  Indeed they first obtained the verbal sanction of the commissary, who saw it expedient to let his victim go, and hush an outcry.

“Yet some have the hardihood to affirm that there is no longer any Inquisition; and as the Inquisitors were instructed to suppress the truth, to deny their knowledge of cases actually passing through their hands, and to fabricate falsehoods for the sake of preserving the secret, because the secret was absolutely necessary to the preservation of their office, so do the Inquisitors in partibus falsify and illude without the least scruple of conscience, in order to put the people of this country off their guard.