en reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at
the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge. These
are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies, that so
bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo
they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur,
one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly
Romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin; as
if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without
Latin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy
to express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope, for
that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the
achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow to
spell such a dictatory presumption English.

And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped
up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can
be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by any
statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern
custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the most
anti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever
inquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world
as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the
issue of the womb: no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity
of any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who
denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that a
book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before
a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the
judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry
backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious
iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation,
sought out new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our books
also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel
so officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated by our
inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites their chaplains.
That ye like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order,
and that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts, when
ye were importuned the passing it, all men who