Curiosities of Literature Volume Ii Part 23

Yet all is not told of Whitelocke; and we have deeply to regret the loss, or at least the concealment, of a work addressed to his family, which apparently would be still more interesting, as exhibiting his domestic habits and feelings, and affording a model for those in public life who had the spirit to imitate such greatness of mind, of which we have not many examples.--Whitelocke had drawn up a great work, which he ent.i.tled, "_Remembrances of the Labours of Whitelocke in the Annales of his Life, for the instruction of his Children_." To Dr. Morton, the editor of Whitelocke's "Journal of the Swedish Amba.s.sy," we owe the notice of this work; and I shall transcribe his dignified feelings in regretting the want of these MSS. "Such a work, and by such a father, is become the inheritance of every child, whose abilities and station in life may at any time hereafter call upon him to deliberate for his country,--and for his family and person, as parts of the great whole; and I confess myself to be one of those who lament the suppression of that branch of the _Annales_ which relates to the author himself in his _private capacity_; they would have afforded great pleasure as well as instruction to the world in their entire form. The first volume, containing the first twenty years of his life, may one day see the light; but the greatest part has. .h.i.therto escaped my inquiries." This is all we know of a work of equal moral and philosophical curiosity. The preface, however, to these "Remembrances," has been fortunately preserved, and it is an extraordinary production. In this it appears that Whitelocke himself owed the first idea of his own work to one left by his father, which existed in the family, and to which he repeatedly refers his children. He says, "The memory and worth of your deceased grandfather deserves all honour and imitation, both from you and me; his 'Liber Famelicus,' his own story, written by himself, _will be left to you_, and was an encouragement and precedent to this larger work." Here is a family picture quite new to us; the heads of the house are its historians, and these records of the heart were animated by examples and precepts, drawn from their own bosoms; and, as Whitelocke feelingly expresses it, "all is recommended to the perusal and intended for the instruction of my own house; and almost in every page you will find a dedication to you, my dear children."

The habit of laborious studies, and a zealous attention to the history of his own times, produced the Register and Chronicle of Bishop Kennett.

"Containing matters of fact, delivered in the words of the most authentic papers and records, all daily entered and commented on:" it includes an account of all pamphlets as they appeared. This history, more valuable to us than to his own contemporaries, occupied two large folios, of which only one has been printed: a zealous labour, which could only have been carried on from a motive of pure patriotism. It is, however, but a small part of the diligence of the bishop, since his own ma.n.u.scripts form a small library of themselves.

The malignant vengeance of Prynne in exposing the diary of Laud to the public eye, lost all its purpose, for nothing appeared more favourable to Laud than this exposition of his private diary. We forget the harshness in the personal manners of Laud himself, and sympathise even with his errors, when we turn over the simple leaves of this diary, which obviously was not intended for any purpose but for his own private eye and collected meditations.[105] There his whole heart is laid open: his errors are not concealed, and the purity of his intentions is established. Laud, who too haughtily blended the prime minister with the archbishop, still, from conscientious motives, in the hurry of public duties, and in the pomp of public honours, could steal aside into solitude, to account to G.o.d and himself for every day, and "the evil thereof."

The diary of Henry Earl of Clarendon, who inherited the industry of his father, has partly escaped destruction; it presents us with a picture of the manners of the age, from whence, says Bishop Douglas, we may learn that at the close of the last century, a man of the first quality made it his constant practice to pa.s.s his time without shaking his arm at a gaming-table, a.s.sociating with jockeys at Newmarket, or murdering time by a constant round of giddy dissipation, if not of criminal indulgence.

Diaries were not uncommon in the last age: Lord Anglesea, who made so great a figure in the reign of Charles the Second, left one behind him; and one said to have been written by the Duke of Shrewsbury still exists.

But the most admirable example is Lord Clarendon's History of his own "Life," or rather of the court, and every event and person pa.s.sing before him. In this moving scene he copies nature with freedom, and has exquisitely touched the individual character. There that great statesman opens the most concealed transactions, and traces the views of the most opposite dispositions; and, though engaged, when in exile, in furthering the royal intercourse with the loyalists, and when, on the Restoration, conducting the difficult affairs of a great nation, a careless monarch, and a dissipated court, yet besides his immortal history of the civil wars, "the chancellor of human nature" pa.s.sed his life in habitual reflection, and his pen in daily employment. Such was the admirable industry of our later ancestors: their diaries and their memoirs are its monuments!

James the Second is an ill.u.s.trious instance of the admirable industry of our ancestors. With his own hand this prince wrote down the chief occurrences of his times, and often his instant reflections and conjectures. Perhaps no sovereign prince, said Macpherson, has been known to have left behind him better materials for history. We at length possess a considerable portion of his diary, which is that of a man of business and of honest intentions, containing many remarkable facts which had otherwise escaped from our historians.

The literary man has formed diaries purely of his studies, and the practice may he called _journalising the mind_, in a summary of studies, and a register of loose hints and _sbozzos_, that sometimes happily occur; and like Ringelbergius, that enthusiast for study, whose animated exhortations to young students have been aptly compared to the sound of a trumpet in the field of battle, marked down every night, before going to sleep, what had been done during the studious day. Of this cla.s.s of diaries, Gibbon has given us an ill.u.s.trious model: and there is an unpublished quarto of the late Barre Roberts, a young student of genius, devoted to curious researches, which deserves to meet the public eye.[106] I should like to see a little book published with this t.i.tle, "_Otium delitiosum in quo objecta vel in actione, vel in lectione, vel in visione ad singulos dies Anni 1629 observata representantur_." This writer was a German, who boldly published for the course of one year, whatever he read or had seen every day in that year. As an experiment, if honestly performed, this might be curious to the philosophical observer; but to write down everything, may end in something like nothing.

A great poetical contemporary of our own country does not think that even Dreams should pa.s.s away unnoticed; and he calls this register his _Nocturnals_. His dreams are a.s.suredly poetical; as Laud's, who journalised his, seem to have been made up of the affairs of state and religion;--the personages are his patrons, his enemies, and others; his dreams are scenical and dramatic. Works of this nature are not designed for the public eye; they are domestic annals, to be guarded in the little archives of a family; they are offerings cast before our Lares.

Pleasing, when youth is long expired, to trace The forms our pencil or our pen design'd; Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face, Such the soft image of our youthful mind.

SHENSTONE.

LICENSERS OF THE PRESS.

In the history of literature, and perhaps in that of the human mind, the inst.i.tution of the LICENSERS OF THE PRESS, and CENSORS OF BOOKS, was a bold invention, designed to counteract that of the Press itself; and even to convert this newly-discovered instrument of human freedom into one which might serve to perpetuate that system of pa.s.sive obedience which had so long enabled modern Rome to dictate her laws to the universe. It was thought possible in the subtlety of Italian _astuzia_ and Spanish monachism, to place a sentinel on the very thoughts as well as on the persons of authors; and in extreme cases, that books might be condemned to the flames as well as heretics.

Of this inst.i.tution, the beginnings are obscure, for it originated in caution and fear; but as the work betrays the workman, and the national physiognomy the native, it is evident that so inquisitorial an act could only have originated in the Inquisition itself. Feeble or partial attempts might previously have existed, for we learn that the monks had a part of their libraries called the _inferno_, which was not the part which they least visited, for it contained, or hid, all the prohibited books which they could smuggle into it. But this inquisitorial power a.s.sumed its most formidable shape in the council of Trent, when some gloomy spirits from Rome and Madrid foresaw the revolution of this new age of books. The triple-crowned pontiff had in vain rolled the thunders of the Vatican, to strike out of the hands of all men the volumes of Wickliffe, of Huss, and of Luther, and even menaced their eager readers with death. At this council Pius IV. was presented with a catalogue of books of which they denounced that the perusal ought to be forbidden; his bull not only confirmed this list of the condemned, but added rules how books should be judged. Subsequent popes enlarged these catalogues, and added to the rules, as the monstrous novelties started up.

Inquisitors of books were appointed; at Rome they consisted of certain cardinals and "the master of the holy palace;" and literary inquisitors were elected at Madrid, at Lisbon, at Naples, and for the Low Countries; they were watching the ubiquity of the human mind. These catalogues of prohibited books were called _Indexes_; and at Rome a body of these literary despots are still called "the Congregation of the Index." The simple _Index_ is a list of condemned books which are never to be opened; but the _Expurgatory Index_ indicates those only prohibited till they have undergone a purification. No book was allowed to be on any subject, or in any language, which contained a single position, an ambiguous sentence, even a word, which, in the most distant sense, could be construed opposite to the doctrines of the supreme authority of this council of Trent; where it seems to have been enacted, that all men, literate and illiterate, prince and peasant, the Italian, the Spaniard and the Netherlander, should take the mint-stamp of their thoughts from the council of Trent, and millions of souls be struck off at one blow, out of the same used mould.

The sages who compiled these Indexes, indeed, long had reason to imagine that pa.s.sive obedience was attached to the human character: and therefore they considered, that the publications of their adversaries required no other notice than a convenient insertion in their indexes.

But the heretics diligently reprinted them with ample prefaces and useful annotations; Dr. James, of Oxford, republished an Index with due animadversions. The parties made an opposite use of them: while the catholic crossed himself at every t.i.tle, the heretic would purchase no book which had not been indexed. One of their portions exposed a list of those authors whose heads were condemned as well as their books: it was a catalogue of men of genius.

The results of these indexes were somewhat curious. As they were formed in different countries, the opinions were often diametrically opposite to each other. The learned Arias Monta.n.u.s, who was a chief inquisitor in the Netherlands, and concerned in the Antwerp Index, lived to see his own works placed in the Roman Index; while the inquisitor of Naples was so displeased with the Spanish Index, that he persisted to a.s.sert that it had never been printed at Madrid! Men who began by insisting that all the world should not differ from their opinions, ended by not agreeing with themselves. A civil war raged among the Index-makers; and if one criminated, the other retaliated. If one discovered ten places necessary to be expurgated, another found thirty, and a third inclined to place the whole work in the condemned list. The inquisitors at length became so doubtful of their own opinions, that they sometimes expressed in their license for printing, that "they tolerated the reading, after the book had been corrected by themselves, till such time as the work should be considered worthy of some farther correction." The expurgatory Indexes excited louder complaints than those which simply condemned books; because the purgers and castrators, as they were termed, or as Milton calls them, "the executioners of books," by omitting, or interpolating pa.s.sages, made an author say, or unsay, what the inquisitors chose; and their editions, after the death of the authors, were compared to the erasures or forgeries in records: for the books which an author leaves behind him, with his last corrections, are like his last will and testament, and the public are the legitimate heirs of an author's opinions.

The whole process of these expurgatory Indexes, that "rakes through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb," as Milton says, must inevitably draw off the life-blood, and leave an author a mere spectre! A book in Spain and Portugal pa.s.ses through six or seven courts before it can be published, and is supposed to recommend itself by the information, that it is published with _all_ the necessary privileges. They would sometimes keep works from publication till they had "properly qualified them, _interemse calficam_," which in one case is said to have occupied them during forty years. Authors of genius have taken fright at the gripe of "the master of the holy palace," or the lacerating scratches of the "corrector-general por su magestad." At Madrid and Lisbon, and even at Rome, this licensing of books has confined most of their authors to the body of the good fathers themselves.

The Commentaries on the Lusiad, by Faria de Souza, had occupied his zealous labours for twenty-five years, and were favourably received by the learned. But the commentator was brought before this tribunal of criticism and religion, as suspected of heretical opinions; when the accuser did not succeed before the inquisitors of Madrid, he carried the charge to that of Lisbon: an injunction was immediately issued to forbid the sale of the Commentaries, and it cost the commentator an elaborate defence, to demonstrate the catholicism of the poet and himself. The Commentaries finally were released from perpetual imprisonment.

This system has prospered to admiration, in keeping public opinion down to a certain meanness of spirit, and happily preserved stationary the childish stupidity through the nation, on which so much depended.

Nani's History of Venice is allowed to be printed, because it contained _nothing against princes_. Princes then were either immaculate or historians false. The History of Guicciardini is still scarred with the merciless wound of the papistic censor; and a curious account of the origin and increase of papal power was long wanting in the third and fourth book of his history. Velly's History of France would have been an admirable work had it not been printed at Paris!

When the insertions in the Index were found of no other use than to bring the peccant volumes under the eyes of the curious, they employed the secular arm in burning them in public places. The history of these literary conflagrations has often been traced by writers of opposite parties; for the truth is, that both used them: zealots seem all formed of one material, whatever be their party. They had yet to learn, that burning was not confuting, and that these public fires were an advertis.e.m.e.nt by proclamation. The publisher of Erasmus's Colloquies intrigued to procure the burning of his book, which raised the sale to twenty-four thousand!

A curious literary anecdote has reached us of the times of Henry VIII.

Tonstall, Bishop of London, accused at that day for his moderation in preferring the burning of books to that of authors, which was then getting into practice, to testify his abhorrence of Tindal's principles, who had printed a translation of the New Testament, a sealed book for the mult.i.tude, thought of purchasing all the copies of Tindal's translation, and annihilating them in the common flame. This occurred to him when pa.s.sing through Antwerp in 1529, then a place of refuge for the Tindalists. He employed an English merchant there for this business, who happened to be a secret follower of Tindal, and acquainted him with the bishop's intention. Tindal was extremely glad to hear of the project, for he was desirous of printing a more correct edition of his version; the first impression still hung on his hands, and he was too poor to make a new one; he gladly furnished the English merchant with all his unsold copies, which the bishop as eagerly bought, and had them all publicly burnt in Cheapside. The people not only declared this was a "burning of the word of G.o.d," but it inflamed the desire of reading that volume; and the second edition was sought after at any price. When one of the Tindalists, who was sent here to sell them, was promised by the lord chancellor, in a private examination, that he should not suffer if he would reveal who encouraged and supported his party at Antwerp, the Tindalist immediately accepted the offer, and a.s.sured the lord chancellor that the greatest encouragement they had was from Tonstall, the Bishop of London, who had bought up half the impression, and enabled them to produce a second!

In the reign of Henry VIII. we seem to have burnt books on both sides; it was an age of unsettled opinions; in Edward's, the Catholic works were burnt; and Mary had her pyramids of Protestant volumes; in Elizabeth's, political pamphlets fed the flames; and libels in the reign of James I. and his sons.

Such was this black dwarf of literature, generated by Italian craft and Spanish monkery, which, however, was fondly adopted as it crept in among all the nations of Europe. France cannot exactly fix on the era of her _Censeurs de Livres_; and we ourselves, who gave it its death-blow, found the custom prevail without any authority from our statutes. The practice of licensing books was unquestionably derived from the Inquisition, and was applied here first to books of religion. Britain long groaned under the leaden stamp of an _Imprimatur_. Oxford and Cambridge still grasp at this shadow of departed literary despotism; they have their licensers and their _Imprimaturs_. Long, even in our land, men of genius were either suffering the vigorous limbs of their productions to be shamefully mutilated in public, or voluntarily committed a literary suicide in their own ma.n.u.scripts. Camden declared that he was not suffered to print all his Elizabeth, and sent those pa.s.sages over to De Thou, the French historian, who printed his history faithfully two years after Camden's first edition, 1615. The same happened to Lord Herbert's History of Henry VIII. which has never been given according to the original, which is still in existence. In the poems of Lord Brooke, we find a lacuna of the first twenty pages; it was a poem on Religion, cancelled by the order of Archbishop Laud. The great Sir Matthew Hale ordered that none of his works should be printed after his death; as he apprehended that, in the licensing of them, some things might be struck out or altered, which he had observed, not without some indignation, had been done to those of a learned friend; and he preferred bequeathing his uncorrupted MSS. to the Society of Lincoln's Inn, as their only guardians, hoping that they were a treasure worth keeping. Contemporary authors have frequent allusions to such books, imperfect and mutilated at the caprice or the violence of a licenser.

The laws of England have never violated the freedom and the dignity of its press. "There is no law to prevent the printing of any book in England, only a decree in the Star-chamber," said the learned Selden.[107] Proclamations were occasionally issued against authors and books; and foreign works were, at times, prohibited. The freedom of the press was rather circ.u.mvented, than openly attacked, in the reign of Elizabeth, who dreaded the Roman Catholics, who were at once disputing her right to the throne, and the religion of the state. Foreign publications, or "books from any parts beyond the seas," were therefore prohibited.[108] The press, however, was not free under the reign of a sovereign, whose high-toned feelings, and the exigencies of the times, rendered as despotic in _deeds_, as the pacific James was in _words_.

Although the press had then no restrictions, an author was always at the mercy of the government. Elizabeth too had a keen scent after what she called treason, which she allowed to take in a large compa.s.s. She condemned one author (with his publisher) to have the hand cut off which wrote his book; and she hanged another.[109] It was Sir Francis Bacon, or his father, who once pleasantly turned aside the keen edge of her regal vindictiveness; for when Elizabeth was inquiring whether an author, whose book she had given him to examine, was not guilty of treason, he replied, "Not of treason, madam, but of robbery, if you please; for he has taken all that is worth noticing in him from Tacitus and Sall.u.s.t." With the fear of Elizabeth before his eyes, Holinshed castrated the volumes of his History. When Giles Fletcher, after his Russian emba.s.sy, congratulated himself with having escaped with his head, and on his return wrote a book called "The Russian Commonwealth,"

describing its tyranny, Elizabeth forbad the publis.h.i.+ng of the work. Our Russian merchants were frightened, for they pet.i.tioned the queen to suppress the work; the original pet.i.tion, with the offensive pa.s.sages, exists among the Lansdowne ma.n.u.scripts. It is curious to contrast this fact with another better known, under the reign of William the Third; then the press had obtained its perfect freedom, and even the shadow of the sovereign could not pa.s.s between an author and his work. When the Danish amba.s.sador complained to the king of the freedom which Lord Molesworth had exercised on his master's government, in his Account of Denmark, and hinted that, if a Dane had done the same with a King of England, he would, on complaint, have taken the author's head off--"That I cannot do," replied the sovereign of a free people; "but if you please, I will tell him what you say, and he shall put it into the next edition of his book." What an immense interval between the feelings of Elizabeth and William, with hardly a century betwixt them!

James the First proclaimed Buchanan's history, and a political tract of his, at "the Mercat Cross;" and every one was to bring his copy "to be perusit and purgit of the offensive and extraordinare materis," under a heavy penalty. Knox, whom Milton calls "the Reformer of a Kingdom," was also curtailed; and "the sense of that great man shall, to all posterity, be lost for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a perfunctory licenser."

The regular establishment of licensers of the press appeared under Charles the First. It must be placed among the projects of Laud, and the king, I suspect, inclined to it; for by a pa.s.sage in a ma.n.u.script letter of the times, I find, that when Charles printed his speech on the dissolution of the parliament, which excited such general discontent, some one printed Queen Elizabeth's last speech as a companion-piece.

This was presented to the king by his own printer, John Bill, not from a political motive, but merely by way of complaint that another had printed, without leave or license, that which, as the king's printer, he a.s.serted was his own copyright. Charles does not seem to have been pleased with the gift, and observed, "You printers print anything."

Three gentlemen of the bed-chamber, continues the writer, standing by, commended Mr. Bill very much, and prayed him to come oftener with such rarities to the king, because they might do some good.[110]

One of the consequences of this persecution of the press was, the raising up of a new cla.s.s of publishers, under the government of Charles I., those who became noted for what was then called "unlawful and unlicensed books." Sparkes, the publisher of Prynne's "Histriomastix,"

was of this cla.s.s. I have elsewhere entered more particularly into this subject.[111] The Presbyterian party in parliament, who thus found the press closed on them, vehemently cried out for its freedom: and it was imagined, that when they had ascended into power, the odious office of a licenser of the press would have been abolished; but these pretended friends of freedom, on the contrary, discovered themselves as tenderly alive to the office as the old government, and maintained it with the extremest vigour. Such is the political history of mankind.

The literary fate of Milton was remarkable: his genius was castrated alike by the monarchical and the republican government. The royal licenser expunged several pa.s.sages from Milton's history, in which Milton had painted the superst.i.tion, the pride, and the cunning of the Saxon monks, which the sagacious licenser applied to Charles II. and the bishops; but Milton had before suffered as merciless a mutilation from his old friends the republicans; who suppressed a bold picture, taken from life, which he had introduced into his History of the Long Parliament and a.s.sembly of Divines. Milton gave the unlicensed pa.s.sages to the Earl of Anglesea, a literary n.o.bleman, the editor of Whitelocke's Memorials; and the castrated pa.s.sage, which could not be licensed in 1670, was received with peculiar interest when separately published in 1681.[112] "If there be found in an author's book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the height of zeal, and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit, yet not suiting every low decrepit humour of their own, they will not pardon him their dash."

This office seems to have lain dormant a short time under Cromwell, from the scruples of a conscientious licenser, who desired the council of state, in 1649, for reasons given, to be discharged from that employment. This Mabot, the licenser, was evidently deeply touched by Milton's address for "The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." The office was, however, revived on the restoration of Charles II.; and through the reign of James II. the abuses of licensers were unquestionably not discouraged: their castrations of books reprinted appear to have been very artful; for in reprinting Gage's "Survey of the West Indies," which originally consisted of twenty-two chapters, in 1648 and 1657, with a dedication to Sir Thomas Fairfax,--in 1677, after expunging the pa.s.sages in honour of Fairfax, the dedication is dexterously turned into a preface; and the twenty-second chapter being obnoxious for containing particulars of the artifices of "the papalins," as Milton calls the Papists, in converting the author, was entirely chopped away by the licenser's hatchet. The castrated chapter, as usual, was preserved afterwards separately. Literary despotism at least is short-sighted in its views, for the expedients it employs are certain of overturning themselves.

On this subject we must not omit noticing one of the n.o.blest and most eloquent prose compositions of Milton; "the Areopagitica; a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." It is a work of love and inspiration, and breathing the most enlarged spirit of literature; separating, at an awful distance from the mult.i.tude, that character "who was born to study and to love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any other end, but, perhaps, for that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise, which G.o.d and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind."

One part of this unparalleled effusion turns on "the quality which ought to be in every licenser." It will suit our new licensers of public opinion, a laborious corps well known, who const.i.tute themselves without an act of Star-chamber. I shall pick out but a few sentences, that I may add some little facts, casually preserved, of the inept.i.tude of such an officer.

"He who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be else no mean mistakes in his censure.

If he be of such worth as behoves him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets. There is no book acceptable, unless at certain seasons; but to be enjoyned the reading of that at all times, whereof three pages would not down at any time, is an imposition which I cannot believe how he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a sensible nostril, should be able to endure.--What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only 'scaped the ferula to come under the fescue of an _Imprimatur_?--if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporising licenser?

When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to a.s.sist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends, as well as any that writ before him; if in this, the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that state of maturity as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings, and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book writing; and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear in print like a Punie with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his t.i.tle to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning."

The reader may now follow the stream in the great original; I must, however, preserve one image of exquisite sarcasm.

"Debtors and delinquents walk about without a keeper; but inoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailor in their t.i.tle; nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we dare not trust them with an English pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vitious, and ungrounded people, in such a sick and weak state of faith and discretion, as to be able to take nothing but thro' the glister-pipe of a licenser!"

The ignorance and stupidity of these censors were often, indeed, as remarkable as their exterminating spirit. The n.o.ble simile of Milton, of Satan with the rising sun, in the first book of the Paradise Lost, had nearly occasioned the suppression of our national epic: it was supposed to contain a treasonable allusion. The tragedy of Arminius, by one Paterson, who was an amanuensis of the poet Thomson, was intended for representation, but the dramatic censor refused a license: as Edward and Eleanora was not permitted to be performed, being considered a party work, our sagacious state-critic imagined that Paterson's _own_ play was in the same predicament by being in the same hand-writing! Malebranche said, that he could never obtain an approbation for his "Research after Truth," because it was unintelligible to his censors; at length Mezeray, the historian, approved of it as a book of geometry. Latterly, in France, it is said that the greatest geniuses were obliged to submit their works to the critical understanding of persons who had formerly been low dependents on some man of quality, and who appear to have brought the same servility of mind to the examination of works of genius. There is something, which, on the principle of incongruity and contrast, becomes exquisitely ludicrous, in observing the works of men of genius allowed to be printed, and even commended, by certain persons who have never printed their names but to their licenses. One of these gentlemen suppressed a work, because it contained principles of government which appeared to him not conformable to the laws of Moses.

Another said to a geometrician--"I cannot permit the publication of your book: you dare to say, that, between two given points, the shortest line is the straight line. Do you think me such an idiot as not to perceive your allusion? If your work appeared, I should make enemies of all those who find, by crooked ways, an easier admittance into court, than by a straight line. Consider their number!" This seems, however, to be an excellent joke. At this moment the censors in Austria appear singularly inept; for, not long ago, they condemned as heretical, two books; one of which, ent.i.tled "_Principes de la Trigonometrie_," the censor would not allow to be printed, because the _Trinity_, which he imagined to be included in trigonometry, was not permitted to be discussed: and the other, on the "Destruction of Insects," he insisted had a covert allusion to the _Jesuits_, who, he conceived, were thus malignantly designated.

A curious literary anecdote has been recorded of the learned Richard Simon. Compelled to insert in one of his works the qualifying opinions of the censor of the Sorbonne, he inserted them within crotchets. But a strange misfortune attended this contrivance. The printer, who was not let into the secret, printed the work without these essential marks: by which means the enraged author saw his own peculiar opinions overturned in the very work written to maintain them!

These appear trifling minutiae; and yet, like a hair in a watch, which utterly destroys its progress, these little ineptiae obliged writers to have recourse to foreign presses; compelled a Montesquieu to write with concealed ambiguity, and many to sign a recantation of principles which they could never change. The recantation of Selden, extorted from his hand on his suppressed "Historie of t.i.thes," humiliated a great mind; but it could not remove a particle from the ma.s.ses of his learning, nor darken the luminous conviction of his reasonings; nor did it diminish the number of those who a.s.sented and now a.s.sent to his principles.

Recantations usually prove the force of authority rather than the change of opinion. When a Dr. Pocklington was condemned to make a recantation, he hit the etymology of the word, while he caught at the spirit--he began thus: "If _canto_ be to sing, _recanto_ is to sing again." So that he rechanted his offending opinions, by repeating them in his _recantation_.

At the Revolution in England, licenses for the press ceased; but its liberty did not commence till 1694, when every restraint was taken off by the firm and decisive tone of the Commons. It was granted, says our philosophic Hume, "to the great displeasure of the king and his ministers, who, seeing nowhere in any government, during present or past ages, any example of such unlimited freedom, doubted much of its salutary effects; and probably thought that no books or writings would ever so much improve the general understanding of men, as to render it safe to entrust them with an indulgence so easily abused."

And the present moment verifies the prescient conjecture of the philosopher. Such is the licentiousness of our press, that some, not perhaps the most hostile to the cause of freedom, would not be averse to manacle authors once more with an IMPRIMATUR. It will not be denied that Erasmus was a friend to the freedom of the press; yet he was so shocked at the licentiousness of Luther's pen, that there was a time when he considered it necessary to restrain its liberty. It was then as now.

Erasmus had, indeed, been miserably calumniated, and expected future libels. I am glad, however, to observe, that he afterwards, on a more impartial investigation, confessed that such a remedy was much more dangerous than the disease. To restrain the liberty of the press, can only be the interest of the individual, never that of the public; one must be a patriot here: we must stand in the field with an uns.h.i.+elded breast, since the safety of the people is the supreme law. There were, in Milton's days, some who said of this inst.i.tution, that, although the inventors were bad, the thing, for all that, might be good. "This may be so," replies the vehement advocate for "unlicensed printing." But as the commonwealths have existed through all ages, and have forborne to use it, he sees no necessity for the invention; and held it as a dangerous and suspicious fruit from the tree which bore it. The ages of the wisest commonwealths, Milton seems not to have recollected, were not diseased with the popular infection of publications, issuing at all hours, and propagated with a celerity on which the ancients could not calculate.

The learned Dr. _James_, who has denounced the invention of the _Indexes_, confesses, however, that it was not unuseful when it restrained the publications of atheistic and immoral works. But it is our lot to bear with all the consequent evils, that we may preserve the good inviolate; since, as the profound Hume has declared, "The LIBERTY OF BRITAIN IS GONE FOR EVER, when such attempts shall succeed."

A const.i.tutional sovereign will consider the freedom of the press as the sole organ of the feelings of the people. Calumniators he will leave to the fate of calumny; a fate similar to those who, having overcharged their arms with the fellest intentions, find that the death which they intended for others, in bursting, only annihilates themselves.