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 title 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 title; 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 noble 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 qual