one of the methods used by Papists for converting refractory heretics, and bringing them within the pale of the true church.

The following method of dragooning the French Protestants, after the revocation of the edit of Nantz, under Louis XIV. is taken from a French work translated in 1686.

"The troopers, soldiers, and dragoons, went into the Protestant houses, where they marred and defaced their household stuff, broke their looking glasses, and other utensils and ornaments, let their wine run about their cellars, and threw about their corn and spoiled it. And as to those things which they could not destroy in this manner, such as furniture of beds, linen, wearing apparel, plate, &c. they carried them to the market place, and sold them to the Jesuits and other Roman Catholics. By these means the Protestants in Montauban alone were, in four or five days, stripped of above a million of money. But this was not the worst.

"They turned the dining rooms of gentlemen into stables for their horses; and treated the owners of the houses where they quartered with the highest indignity and cruelty, lashing them about from one to another, day and night, without intermission, not suffering them to eat or drink; and when they began to sink under the fatigue and pains they had undergone, they laid them on a bed, and when they thought them somewhat recovered, made them rise, and repeated the same tortures. When they saw the blood and sweat run down their faces and other parts of their bodies, they floured them with water, and putting over their heads kettle drums, turned upside down, they made a continual din upon them till these unhappy creatures lost their senses. When one party of these tormentors mentors were weary, they were relieved by another, who practised the same cruelties with fresh vigour.

"At Negropilfe, a town near Montaubon, they hung up Isaac Favin, a Protestant citizen of that place, by his armpits, and tormented him a whole night by pinching and tearing off his flesh with pincers. They made a great fire round a boy of about 12 years old, who with his hands and eyes lifted up to heaven cried out 'My God, help me!' And when they found the youth resolved to die rather than renounce his religion, they snatched him from the fire just as he was on the point of being burnt.

"In several places the soldiers applied red-hot irons to the hands and feet of men and breasts of women. At Nantz they hung up several women and maids by their feet, and others by their armpits, and thus exposed them to public view stark naked. They bound to posts mothers that gave suck, and let their sucking infants lie languishing in their sight for several days and nights, crying, mourning, and gasping for life. Some they bound before a great fire, and being half roasted, let them go; a punishment worse than death. Amidst a thousand hideous cries and a thousand blasphemies, they hung up men and women by the hair, and some by their feet, on hooks in chimneys, and smoked them with wiffs of wet hay till they were suffocated. They tied some under the arms with ropes, and plunged them again and again into wells; they bound others like criminals, put them to the torture, and with a funnel filled them with wine till the fumes of it took away their reason, when they made them say, they consented to be Catholics. They stripped them naked, and after a thousand indignities, stuck them with pins and needles from head to foot. They cut and slashed them with knives; and sometimes with red-hot pincers took hold of them by the nose and other parts of the body, and dragged them about the rooms till they made them promise to be Catholics, or till the cries of these miserable wretches, calling upon God for help, forced them to let them go. They beat them with flames, and thus bruised, and with broken bones, dragged them to church, where their forced presence was taken for an abjuration. In some places they tied fathers and husbands to their bed-posts, and before their eyes ravished their wives and daughters with impunity. They blew up men and women with bellows till they burst them. If any to escape these barbarities endeavoured to save themselves by flight, they pursued them into the fields and woods, where they shot at them like wild beasts, and prohibited them from departing the kingdom (a cruelty never practised by Nero or Diocletian) upon pain of confiscation of effects; the galleys, the lash, and perpetual imprisonment; insomuch that the prisons of the seaport towns were crammed with men, women, and children, who endeavoured to save themselves by flight from their dreadful persecution. With these scenes of desolation and horror, the Popish clergy feasted their eyes, and made them only a matter of laughter and sport.

"Though my heart aches (says the writer of the piece from which we are transcribing) whilst I am relating these barbarities, yet for a perpetual memorial of the infernal cruelty practised by these monsters, I beg the reader's patience to lay before him two other instances, which, if he hath a heart like mine, he will not be able to read without watering these sheets with his tears.

"The first is of a young woman, who being brought before the council, upon refusing to abjure her religion, was ordered to prison. There they shaved her head, singed off the hair from other parts of her body; and having stripped her stark naked, led her through the streets of the city, where many a blow was given her, and stones flung at her; then they set her up to the neck in a tub full of water, where, after she had been for a while, they took her out, and put on her a shift dipt in wine, which, as it dried and fluck to her sore and bruised body, they snatched off again, and then had another ready dipt in wine to clap on her. This they repeated fix times, thereby making her body exceeding raw and sore. When all these cruelties could not shake her constancy, they fastened her by her feet in a kind of gibbet, and let her hang in that posture, with her head downward, till she expired.

"The other is of a man in whose house were quartered some of these missionary dragoons. One day, having drank plentifully of his wine, and broken their glasses at every health, they filled the floor with the fragments, and by often walking over them reduced them to very small pieces. This done, in the insolence of their mirth, they resolved on a dance, and told their Protestant host that he must be one of their company; but as he would not be one of their religion, he must dance quite barefoot; and thus barefoot they drove him about the room, treading on the sharp points of the broken glasses. When he was no longer able to stand, they laid him on a bed, and, in a short time, gripped him stark naked, and rolled him from one end of the room to the other, till every part of his body was full of the fragments of glass. After this they dragged him to his bed, and having sent for a surgeon, obliged him to cut out the pieces of glass with his instruments, thereby putting him to the most exquisite and horrible pains that can possibly be conceived.

"These, fellow Protestants, were the methods used by the most Christian king's apostolic dragoons to convert his heretical subjects to the Roman Catholic faith! These, and many other of the like nature, were the torments to which Louis XIV. delivered them over to bring them to his own church! and as Popery is unchangeably the same, these are the tortures prepared for you, if ever that religion should be permitted to become settled amongst you; the consideration of which made Luther say of it, what every man that knows anything of Christianity must agree with him in, 'If you had no other reason to go out of the Roman church, this alone would suffice, that you see and hear, how contrary to the law of God, they shed innocent blood.' This single circumstance shall, God willing, ever separate me from the Papacy. And if I was now subject to it, and could blame nothing in any of their doctrines; yet for this crime of cruelty, I would fly from her communion, as from a den of thieves and murderers."