ung Prince, and estimated too highly the promise
of liberty which he had wrung from his father.

It took James some time to discover that this grave Rabbinical
miscellany, inspired by Siracides and Goropius Becanus, was not
wholesome reading for his subjects. On January 5, 1615, after the book
had been selling slowly, the King gave an order commanding the
suppression of the remainder of the edition, giving as his reason that
'it is too saucy in censuring the acts of kings.' It is said that some
favoured person at Court pushed inquiry further, and extracted from
James the explanation that the censure of Henry VIII. was the real cause
of the suppression. Contemporary anecdote, however, has reported that
the defamation of the Tudors in the Preface to the _History of the
World_ might have passed without reproof, if the King had not discovered
in the very body of the book several passages so ambiguously worded that
he could not but suspect the writer of intentional satire. According to
this story, he was startled at Raleigh's account of Naboth's Vineyard,
and scandalised at the description of the impeachment of the Admiral of
France; but what finally drew him up, and made him decide that the book
must perish, was the character of King Ninias, son of Queen Semiramis.
This passage, then, may serve us as an example of the _History of the
World_:

Ninus being the first whom the madness of boundless dominion
transported, invaded his neighbour princes, and became
victorious over them; a man violent, insolent, and cruel.
Semiramis taking the opportunity, and being more proud,
adventurous, and ambitious than her paramour, enlarged the
Babylonian empire, and beautified many places therein with
buildings unexampled. But her son having changed nature and
condition with his mother, proved no less feminine than she was
masculine. And as wounds and wrongs, by their continual smart,
put the patient in mind how to cure the one and revenge the
other, so those kings adjoining (whose subjection and calamities
incident were but new, and therefore the more grievous) could
not sleep, when the advantage was offered by such a successor.
For _in regno Babylonico hic parum resplenduit_: 'This king
shined little,' saith Nauclerus of Ninias, 'in the Babylonian
kingdom.' And likely it is, that the necks of mortal men having
been never before galled with the yoke of foreign dominion, n