and to have had them on the tip of
his own. He wrote 104 works, apparently of the violent sort, so
that Casaubon called him, according to the style of learned men
in those days, "the most cruel of all wild beasts," whilst the
Jesuits called him "the public pest of letters and society."

The Senate of Venice caused to be burnt the _Della Liberta
Veneta_, by a man who called himself Squitinio (1612), because it
denied the independence of the Republic, and asserted that the
Emperor had rightful claims over it; and about the same time
(1617) the Parlement of Paris consigned to the same penalty
D'Aubigne's _Histoire Universelle_ for the freedom of its satire
on Charles IX., Henri III., Henri IV., and other French royal
personages of the time. The second edition of D'Aubigne (1626) is
the poorer for being shorn of these caustic passages.

The Jesuit Keller's _Admonitio ad Ludovicum XIII._ (1625), and
the same author's Mysteria Politica, (1625), were both sentenced
to be burnt; also the Jesuit Sanctarel's _Tractatus de Haeresi_
(1625), which claimed for the Pope the right to dispose, not only
of the thrones, but also of the lives of princes. This doctrine
was approved by the General of the Jesuits, but, under threat of
being accounted guilty of treason, expressly disclaimed by the
Jesuits as a body. In resisting such pretensions, the Sorbonne
deserved well of France and of humanity. In 1665, the Chatelet
ordered to be burnt Claude Joly's _Recueil des Maximes veritables
et importantes pour l'Institution du Roi, contre la fausse et
pernicieuse politique de Cardinal pretendu surintendant de
l'education de Louis XIV._ (1652); a book which, if it had been
regarded instead of being burnt, might have altered the character
of that pernicious devastator, and therefore of history itself,
very much for the better. About the same time, Milton's _Pro
Populo Anglicano Defensio_, not to be burnt in England till the
Restoration, had a foretaste in Paris of its ultimate fate.
Eustache le Noble's satire against the Dutch, _Dialogue d'Esope
et de Mercure_, and burnt by the executioner at Amsterdam, may
complete the list of political works that paid for their
offences by fire in the seventeenth century.

The first to notice in the next century is Giannone's _Historia
Civile de Regno di Napoli_ (1723), in five volumes, burnt by the
Inquisition, which, but for his escape, would have suppressed the
author as well as his book, for his free crit