flected in its burnt literature, and so little has the public
fire been any respecter of class or dignity, that no branch of
intellectual activity has failed to contribute some author whose
work, or works, has been consigned to the flames. Our greatest
poets, philosophers, bishops, lawyers, novelists, heads of
colleges, are all represented in my collection, forming indeed a
motley but no insipid society, wherein the gravest questions of
government and the deepest problems of speculation are handled
with freedom, and men who were most divided in their lives meet
at last in a common bond of harmony. Cowell, the friend of
prerogative, finds himself here side by side with Milton, the
republican; and Sacheverell, the high churchman, in close company
with Tindal and Defoe.

For nearly 300 years the rude censorship of fire was applied to
literature in England, beginning naturally in that fierce
religious war we call the Reformation, which practically
constitutes the history of England for some two centuries. The
first grand occasion of book-burning was in response to the
Pope's sentence against Martin Luther, when Wolsey went in state
to St. Paul's, and many of Luther's publications were burned in
the churchyard during a sermon against them by Fisher, Bishop of
Rochester (1521).

But the first printed work by an Englishman that was so treated
was actually the Gospel. The story is too familiar to repeat, of
the two occasions on which Tyndale's New Testament in English was
burnt before Old St. Paul's; but in pausing to reflect that the
book which met with this fiery fate, and whose author ultimately
met with the same, is now sold in England by the million (for our
received version is substantially Tyndale's), one can only stand
aghast at the irony of the fearful contrast, which so widely
separated the labourer from his triumph. But perhaps we can
scarcely wonder that our ancestors, after centuries of mental
blindness, should have tried to burn the light they were unable
to bear, causing it thereby only to shine the brighter.

It certainly spread with remarkable celerity; for in 1546 it
became necessary to command all persons possessing them to
deliver to the bishop, or sheriff, to be openly burnt, all works
in English purporting to be written by Frith, Tyndale, Wicliff,
Joye, Basil, Bale, Barnes, Coverdale, Turner, or Tracy. The
extreme rarity and costliness of the works of these men are the
measure of the completeness wit