sed printing be, on the whole, a blessing or a curse to society,
not a word is said. The Licensing Act is condemned, not as a thing
essentially evil, but on account of the petty grievances, the exactions,
the jobs, the commercial restrictions, the domiciliary visits which were
incidental to it. It is pronounced mischievous because it enables
the Company of Stationers to extort money from publishers, because
it empowers the agents of the government to search houses under the
authority of general warrants, because it confines the foreign book
trade to the port of London; because it detains valuable packages of
books at the Custom House till the pages are mildewed. The Commons
complain that the amount of the fee which the licenser may demand is not
fixed. They complain that it is made penal in an officer of the Customs
to open a box of books from abroad, except in the presence of one of the
censors of the press. How, it is very sensibly asked, is the officer to
know that there are books in the box till he has opened it? Such were
the arguments which did what Milton's Areopagitica had failed to do.

The Lords yielded without a contest. They probably expected that some
less objectionable bill for the regulation of the press would soon be
sent up to them; and in fact such a bill was brought into the House of
Commons, read twice, and referred to a select committee. But the session
closed before the committee had reported; and English literature
was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the
government. [563] This great event passed almost unnoticed. Evelyn and
Luttrell did not think it worth mentioning in their diaries. The
Dutch minister did not think it worth mentioning in his despatches.
No allusion to it is to be found in the Monthly Mercuries. The public
attention was occupied by other and far more exciting subjects.

One of those subjects was the death of the most accomplished, the most
enlightened, and, in spite of great faults, the most estimable of the
statesmen who were formed in the corrupt and licentious Whitehall of
the Restoration. About a month after the splendid obsequies of Mary, a
funeral procession of almost ostentatious simplicity passed round the
shrine of Edward the Confessor to the Chapel of Henry the Seventh.
There, at the distance of a few feet from her coffin, lies the coffin of
George Savile, Marquess of Halifax.

Halifax and Nottingham had long been friends; and Lord Eland, now