of Popular Literature.

It is a fact, easily explained by the laws of human nature, and
capable of being proved statistically, that since the strong
government of Cromwell had come in, and something like calm and
leisure had become possible, there had been a return of people's
fancies to the lighter Muses. Nothing strikes one more, in turning
over the Registers of the old London Book-trade, than the steady
increase through the Protectorate of the proportion of books of
secular and general interest to those of controversy and theology.
One feels oneself still in the age of Puritanism, it is true, but as
if past the densest and most stringent years of Puritanism and coming
once more into a freer and merrier air. Poems, romances, books of
humour, ballads and songs, reprints of Elizabethan tragedies and
comedies, reprints of such pieces as Shakespeare's _Venus and
Adonis_, collections of facetious extracts from the wits and poets
of the reigns of James and Charles I., are now not uncommon. Humphrey
Moseley, Milton's publisher of 1645, faithful to his old
trade-instinct for poetry and the finer literature generally, was
still at the head of the publishers in that line; but Henry
Herringman, who had published Lord Broghill's _Parthenissa_, had
begun to rival Moseley, and there were other caterers of amusing and
humorous books. Publishers imply authors; and so in the London of the
Protectorate, apart from stray survivors from among the wits of King
Charles's reign, there were men of a younger sort, bred amid the more
recent Puritan conditions, but with literary zests that were Bohemian
rather than Puritan, Among these, as we have hinted, and as we may
now state more distinctly, were Milton's nephews, Edward and John
Phillips.[1]

[Footnote 1: My notes from the Stationers' Registers, from 1652 to
1656.]

Such Popular Literature as we have described had been left perfectly
free. Indeed Censorship or Licensing of books generally, as distinct
from newspapers, had all but ceased. Since Bradshaw's Press-Act of
1649, it had been rather rare for an author or bookseller to take the
trouble, in the case of a non-political book, to procure the
imprimatur of any official licenser in addition to the ordinary
trade-registration; and in this, as an established custom, Cromwell's
Government had acquiesced. Only in one particular, apart from
politics, was there any disposition to interfere with the liberty of
printing. This was where popu