piety, and after bearing the attack for some time his pride drove him to reply. In a letter to the cardinal patriarch of Lisbon entitled Eu e o Clero (1850), he denounced the fanaticism and ignorance of the clergy in plain terms, and this provoked a fierce pamphlet war marked by much personal abuse. A professor of Arabic in Lisbon intervened to sustain the accepted view of the battle, and charged Herculano and his supporter, Pascual de Gayangos with ignorance of the Arab historians and of their language. The conduct of the controversy, which lasted some years, did credit to none of the contending parties, but Herculano's statement of the facts was eventually universally accepted as correct. History of the Inquisition In his youth, the excesses of absolutism had made Herculano a Liberal, and the attacks on his history turned this man, full of sentiment and deep religious conviction, into an anti-clerical who began to distinguish between political Catholicism and Christianity. His "History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal" (1854–1855), relating the thirty years' struggle between King John III and the Jews—he to establish the tribunal and they to prevent him—was compiled, as the preface showed, to stem the ultramontane reaction, but nonetheless carried weight because it was a recital of events with little or no comment or evidence of passion in its author. Next to these two books ("History of Portugal from the beginning of the monarchy to the end of the reign of Afonso III" and "History of the origin and establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal"), his study, "Condition of the working classes on the peninsula from the seventh to the twelfth century" ("Do Estado das classes servas na Peninsula desde o VII. até o XII. seculo"), was Herculano's most valuable contribution to history. Retirement In 1856 Herculano began editing a series of Portugalliae monumenta historica, but personal differences between him and the keeper of the Archives, which he necessarily frequented, interrupted his historical studies. On the death of his friend King Pedro V, Herculano left the Ajuda and retired to a country house near Santarém. The alliance of Liberalism and Catholicism, represented by Herculano and his fellow poetic historians Chateaubriand and Lamartine had ended as the movement known as Ultramontanism grew within the Catholic hierarchy after the Revolutions of 1848. Disillusioned with mankind and despairing of the future of his country, Herculano