Tyndale, who, deeming it desirable that his countrymen should
possess in their own language the book on which their religion
was founded, took the infinite trouble of translating the
Scriptures into English. His New Testament was forthwith burnt in
London, and himself after some years strangled and burnt at
Antwerp (1536).

The same literary persecution continued in the next century, the
seventeenth. Bissendorf perished at the hands of the executioner
at the same time that his books, _Nodi gordii resolutio_ (on the
priestly calling), 1624, and _The Jesuits_, were burnt by the
same agent. In the case of the _De Republica Ecclesiastica_
(1617) by De Dominis, Christian savagery surpassed itself, for
not only was it burnt by sentence of the Inquisition, but also
the dead body of its author was exhumed for the purpose. Dominis
had been a Jesuit for twenty years, then a bishop, and finally
Archbishop of Spalatro. This office he gave up, and retired to
England, where he might write with greater freedom than in Italy.
There he wrote this work and a history of the Council of Trent.
His chief offence was his advocacy of the unchristian principles
of toleration; he wished to reunite and reconcile the Christian
communions. But alas for human frailty! he retracted his errors,
many of them most sensible opinions, in London, and again at
Rome, whither he returned. Pope Urban VIII., however, imprisoned
him in the Castle of St. Angelo, where he is said to have died of
poison, so that only his dead body was available to burn with his
book the same year (1625). Literary lives were tragic in those
times.

Simon Morin was burnt with all the copies of his _Pensees_ that
could be found, on the Place de Greve, at Paris, March 14th,
1663. Morin called himself the Son of Man, and such thoughts of
his as survived the fire do not lead us in his case to grudge the
flames their literary fuel. But it is curious to think that we
are only two centuries from the time when the Parlement of Paris
could pass such a sentence on such a sufferer.

The Parlement of Dijon condemned to be burnt by the executioner
Morisot's _Ahitophili Veritatis Lacrymae_ (July 4th, 1625), but
though this work was a violent satire upon the Jesuits, Morisot
survived his book thirty-six years, the Jesuits revenging
themselves with nothing worse than an epitaph, containing a bad
pun, to the effect that their enemy, after a life not spent in
wisdom, preferred to die as a fool (