risk
that a man who was constantly violating those statutes would not be a
man of high honour and rigid uprightness. An author who was determined
to print, and could not obtain the sanction of the licenser, must employ
the services of needy and desperate outcasts, who, hunted by the peace
officers, and forced to assume every week new aliases and new disguises,
hid their paper and their types in those dens of vice which are the pest
and the shame of great capitals. Such wretches as these he must bribe to
keep his secret and to run the chance of having their backs flayed and
their ears clipped in his stead. A man stooping to such companions and
to such expedients could hardly retain unimpaired the delicacy of his
sense of what was right and becoming. The emancipation of the press
produced a great and salutary change. The best and wisest men in the
ranks of the opposition now assumed an office which had hitherto been
abandoned to the unprincipled or the hotheaded. Tracts against the
government were written in a style not misbecoming statesmen and
gentlemen; and even the compositions of the lower and fiercer class of
malecontents became somewhat less brutal and less ribald than in the
days of the licensers.

Some weak men had imagined that religion and morality stood in need of
the protection of the licenser. The event signally proved that they
were in error. In truth the censorship had scarcely put any restraint
on licentiousness or profaneness. The Paradise Lost had narrowly escaped
mutilation; for the Paradise Lost was the work of a man whose politics
were hateful to the ruling powers. But Etherege's She Would If She
Could, Wycherley's Country Wife, Dryden's Translations from the Fourth
Book of Lucretius, obtained the Imprimatur without difficulty; for
Dryden, Etherege and Wycherley were courtiers. From the day on which the
emancipation of our literature was accomplished, the purification of
our literature began. That purification was effected, not by the
intervention of senates or magistrates, but by the opinion of the great
body of educated Englishmen, before whom good and evil were set, and who
were left free to make their choice. During a hundred and sixty years
the liberty of our press has been constantly becoming more and more
entire; and during those hundred and sixty years the restraint imposed
on writers by the general feeling of readers has been constantly
becoming more and more strict. At length even that cla