78
tion of 1612,) and from a passage of C.
d'Espense, which will be produced^ that these
books were made no matter of secrecy, but
were publicly and openly exposed to sale.
But we may, and have been, told, that these
works have been formally and publicly con-
demned by papal authority in the Indices Pro-
hibitorii. This is a matter worth inquiring
into : it is both a literary and a papal curiosity.
By the year 1564^ when the Trent index was
compiled and published, (to say nothing of
preceding Indexes^) twenty-seven of the edi-
tions of the TaxsB, above enumerated, had
appeared^ and there were probably more^ now
unknown — and yet no notice whatever was taken
of them, not of a single instance 1 The £rst
notice which ttw» taken of them, or rather of
something like one of them, was in the year
1570^ just a century after the appearance of
the first edition, and thaty not in a Roman
Index, but in an Appendix to the Roman one,
published by the authority of the King of Spain.
And in what terms does it there appear?
Praxis et Taxa officinso pcEuitentiariae Papae (p.
76)*^ work, which, if it ever existed under
that title, was probably never, and is certainly
