lar wit, humour, or poetry might pass
into the ribald, profane, or indecent. Vigilance against open
immorality had from the first appeared to Cromwell one of the chief
duties of his Government; and he seems to have been unusually
attentive to this duty in 1655-6, when he had just put the country
under the military police of his Major-Generals and their
subordinates. Then it is that we hear most of the suppressing of
horse-races and the like, and that we are least surprised at
encountering such a piece of information as that "players were taken
in Newcastle and whipped for rogues." Now, though by this time there
had already, by previous care on the part of Government, been a
considerable cleansing of the Popular Literature of London, yet
something or other in the state of the book-world about 1655-6 seems
to have occasioned new and more special interference. I believe it to
have been the increased frequency of ballads, facetiae, and reprints,
of higher literary character than the coarse pamphlets that had been
suppressed, but objectionable on the same moral grounds. At all
events, all but simultaneously with the Order of the Protector and
his Council, of Sept. 5, 1655, concentrating the whole newspaper
press in the hands of Needham and Thurloe (see ante pp. 51-52), there
had been a new general Ordinance "against Scandalous Books and
Pamphlets and for the Regulation of Printing" (Aug. 18, 1655), and it
was not long before this Ordinance was put in operation in one or two
cases of the kind indicated. Here are some extracts from the Order
Books of the Council in April and May 1656:--

_Tuesday, April_ 1656:--"That it be referred to the Earl of
Mulgrave, Colonel Jones, and Lord Strickland, or any two of them,
to examine the business touching the book entitled _Sportive Wit
or the Muses' Merriment_, and to send for the author and
printer, and report the same to the Council."

_Friday, April_ 25, 1656:--Present: the Lord President
Lawrence, the Earl of Mulgrave, Lord Lambert, Sir Gilbert
Pickering, Colonel Sydenham, Colonel Jones, the Lord Deputy of
Ireland (Fleetwood), Lord Viscount Lisle, Mr. Rous, Major-General
Skippon, and Lord Strickland. "Colonel Jones reports from the
Committee of the Council to whom was referred the consideration of
a book entitled _Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment_, that
the said book contains in it much scandalous, lascivious,
scurrilous, and profane matter. _Ordere