Note 91 — LETTER I.

Jacobins, another name for the Dominicans in France, where they were so called from the street in Paris, Rue de St. Jacques, where their first convent was erected, in the year 1218. In England they were called Black Friars. Their founder was Dominick, a Spaniard. His mother, it is said, dreamt, before his birth, that she was to be delivered of a wolf with a torch in his mouth. The augury was realized in the barbarous humor of Dominick, and the massacres which he occasioned in various parts of the world, by preaching up crusades against the heretics. He was the founder of the Inquisition, and his order was, before the Reformation, what the Jesuits were after it—the soul of the Romish hierarchy, and the bitterest enemies of the truth.