cited, till about the year four hundred, in a Carthaginian council, wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read the books of gentiles, but heresies they might read, while others long before them on the contrary scrupled more the books of heretics, than of gentiles. And that the primitive councils and bishops were wont only to declare what books were not commendable, passing no further, but leaving it to each one's conscience to read or to lay by, till after the year eight hundred, is observed already by Padre Paolo, the great unmasker of the Trentine council. After which time the popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting to be read what they fancied not, yet sparing in their censures, and the books not many which they so dealt with, till Martin the Fifth by his bull not only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading of heretical books; for about that time Wickliffe and Husse, growing terrible, 'were they who first drove the papal court to a stricter policy of prohibiting; which course Leo the Tenth and his successors followed, until the council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together, brought forth or perfected those catalogues and expurging indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical; but any subject that was not to their palate, they either condemned in a prohibition, or had it straight into the new purgatory of an index. To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper, should be printed, as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also as well as of paradise, unless it were approved and licensed

any

under the hands of two or three gluttonous friars. For example:

Let the chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present work be contained aught that may withstand the printing. Vincent Rabbata, vicar of Florence.

I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the catholic faith and good manners; in witness whereof I have given, &c.

Nicolo Cini, chancellor of Florence.

Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that

this present work of Davanzati may be printed.

It may be printed, July 15.

Vincent Rabbata, &c.

Friar Simon Mompei d' Amelia,

chancellor of the holy office in Florence.

Surely they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody, the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended, but went not through with. Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp;

*

Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend master of the holy palace, Belcastro, vicegerent.

Imprimatur,

Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, master of the holy palace.

Sometimes five imprimaturs are seen together dialoguewise in the piatza of one titlepage, complimenting and ducking each to other with their shaven

* Quo venian daret flatum crepitumque ventris in convivio emittendi. Sueton. in Claudio.

reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the spunge. These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies that so bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains, with the goodly echo they made, and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly imprimatur, one from Lambeth house, another from the west end of Paul's, so apishly Romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin, as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it, would cast no ink without Latin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit of an imprimatur; but rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption Englished.

And thus ye have the inventors, and the original of book licensing ripped up, and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity, or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad; but from the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquired. Till then, books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb; no envious Juno sat crosslegged over the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that a book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgment of Rhadamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backward

into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of reformation, sought out new limboes and new hells. wherein they might include our books also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatched up, and so illfavoredly imitated by our inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorities, their chaplains. That ye like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order, and that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts, when ye were importuned the passing it, all men who know the integrity of your actions, and how ye honor truth, will clear ye readily.

But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing, for all that, may be good. It may so; yet, if that thing be no such deep invention, but obvious and easy for any man to light on, and yet best and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forborne to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of reformation, I am of those who believe, it will be a harder alchymy than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the properties it has. /But I have first to finish, as was propounded, what is to be thought in general of reading books, whatever sort they be, and whether be more, the benefit or the harm that thence proceeds.

Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who were skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, which could not probably be without reading their books of all sorts,

in Paul especially, who thought it no defilement to insert into holy scripture the sentences of three Greek poets, and one of them a tragedian; the question was, notwithstanding, sometimes controverted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable, as was then evidently perceived, when Julian the Apostate, and subtlest enemy to our faith, made a decree, forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning; for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And, indeed, the Christians were put to their shifts by this crafty means, and so much in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the two Apollonarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new christian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, the providence of God provided better than the industry of Apollonarius and his son, by taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning; and thought it a persecution more undermining and secretly decaying the church, than the open cruelty of Decius, or Dioclesian. And perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devil whipped St Jerome in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero ; or else it was a phantasm, bred by the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much on Ciceronianisms, and had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly partial; first, to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading not long before; next, to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid