Don Juan Antonio Llorente, a Spanish author, born near Calahorra, March 30, 1756, died in Madrid, Feb. 5, 1823. He studied at Tarragona and Madrid, in 1779 was ordained priest, and in 1782 became vicar general of the bishop of Calahorra. In 1784, as he says, he had arrived at the conclusion "that there is no authority outside of us which has the right to subjugate our reason." Notwithstanding these views, he accepted in 1785 a situation as commissary, and in 1789 as secretary general of the inquisition. By the liberal inquisitor general Manuel A bad de Sierra he was intrusted with the task of drawing up a plan of a total reformation of the inquisition, but this attempt failed. A second attempt, made by Llorente in union with the bishop of Calahorra and the minister of justice Jovellanos, was no more successful, and ended in the exile of Jovellanos and the arrest of Llorente. He was, however, recalled to Madrid in 1806 by Godoy, who commissioned him to write, in favor of a greater centralization, a work against the old liberties of the Basque provinces (Noticias his-toricas sobre las tres provincias Bascongadas, 3 vols., Madrid, 1806-'8). Several lucrative offices were the reward of this work.

After the invasion in 1808 Llorente became one of the most devoted partisans of the French. King Joseph made him a state councillor, and on the suppression of the inquisition placed all the papers of that tribunal at his disposal, and charged him with writing its history. For two years Llorente was occupied, aided by several assistants, in copying the most important documents. At the same time he was charged with the execution of the decree which abolished all convents, and also accepted the supreme administration of the so-called national property. He was accused of having embezzled 11,000,000 reals, and lost his offices for a time; but as the accusation could not be proved, he was restored. Being exiled as an adherent of the French by Ferdinand VII. in 1814, he went to Paris, where, after a short journey to England, lie took up his permanent abode. Here he finished his " History of the Spanish Inquisition," published in Spanish, but at the same time translated into French under his superintendence by A. Pellier (Histoire critique de l'inquisition d'Espagne, 4 vols., 1817-'18). The accuracy of his citations from the documents of the inquisition has been disputed by modern Catholic writers, especially Hefele in his "Life of Ximenes;" but Protestant historians are generally of opinion that no sufficient reason has yet been adduced to doubt it.

Immediately after the publication of this work he was suspended from ecclesiastical functions. He then endeavored to support himself by giving instruction at a literary institution in Paris, but this also was soon forbidden by the Paris university. In 1822 he published his Portraits politiques des papes, and being ordered by the government to leave France, he returned to Madrid, where he found a cordial reception, but died soon afterward. Besides the works already mentioned, he published Me-moires pour servir a l'histoire de la revolution d'Espagne, par Nellerto, an anagram of his name (3 vols., Paris, 1815-'19); Discours sur une constitution religieuse (2 vols., 1819); (Euvres completes de Barth, de Las Casas (2 vols., 1822); and Observations critiques sur le roman de Gil Blas (1822), in which he sought to prove that Le Sage took his celebrated work from a Spanish manuscript. He wrote an autobiography, Noticia biografica (Paris, 1818), which was reprinted in full in Mahul's An-nuaire necrologique (1824).