Victor Hugo 
Torquemada 

Torquemada, a drama about the Spanish inquisition, is one of the greatest masterpieces of the master poet of the 19th century. The construction of this tragedy is absolutely original and unique: free and full of change as the wildest and loosest and roughest of dramatic structures ever flung together, and left to crumble or cohere at the pleasure of accident or of luck, by the rudest of primaeval playwrights : but perfect in harmonious unity of spirit, in symmetry or symphony of part with part, as the most finished and flawless creation of Sophocles or of Phidias. Torquemada is one of the sublimest, in all the illimitable world of dramatic imagination.