ought 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 manuscripts. Camden declared
that he was not suffered to print all his Elizabeth, and sent those
passages 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 i