All of them alike--_fantoccini_, skeletons, and quick folk--were enveloped in the same grotesquely ghastly San Benito, with the same hideous yellow miters on their pasteboard, worm-eaten, or palpitating foreheads.

The procession presented an ingeniously picturesque discord of ugly shapes, an artistically loathsome dissonance of red and yellow hues, as it defiled, to the infernal music of growled psalms and screams and moanings, beneath the torrid blaze of Spanish sunlight.
[Footnote 84: The Supreme Council forbade the repetition of torture; but this hypocritical law was evaded in practice by declaring that the torture had been suspended.

Llorente, vol.i.p.

307.] Spaniards--such is the barbarism of the Latinized Iberian nature--delighted in these shows, as they did and do in bull-fights.
Butcheries of heretics formed the choicest spectacles at royal christenings and bridals.
At Seville the Quemadero was adorned with four colossal statues of prophets, to which some of the condemned were bound, so that they might burn to death in the flames arising from the human sacrifice between them.
In the autumn of 1484 the Inquisition was introduced into Aragon; and Saragossa became its headquarters in that State.

Though the Aragonese were accustomed to the institution in its earlier and milder form, they regarded the new Holy Office with just horror.