ing in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental
student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the
Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible.
Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing
the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger,
until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop
to this," passed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading
immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General Noy, who asked
the Star-Chamber what it had to do with the immorality of stage-plays to
exclaim that church-music is not the noise of men, but rather "a
bleating of brute beasts--choristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen,
bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a set of
bulls, grunt out a bass as it were a number of hogs." But Mr Attorney
took surely a more nice distinction when he made a charge against the
author in these terms: "All stage-players he terms them rogues: in this
he doth falsify the very Act of Parliament; for _unless they go abroad_,
they are not rogues."

In the very difficulties in the way of framing a conclusive and
exhaustive title, there is a principle of compensation. It clears
literature of walls and hedgerows, and makes it a sort of free forest.
To the desultory reader, not following up any special inquiry, there are
delights in store in a devious rummage through miscellaneous volumes, as
there are to the lovers of adventure and the picturesque in any district
of country not desecrated by the tourist's guide-books. Many readers
will remember the pleasant little narrative appended to Croker's edition
of Boswell, of Johnson's talk at Cambridge with that extensive
book-hunter, Dr Richard Farmer, who boasted of the possession of "plenty
of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by
quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the
technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of
Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind
of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No
doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which
they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native
wilderness, yet, like the specimens in a conservatory or a museum, they
are examples of what may be found in the place they have come fr