lishing in the English domains was conferred upon the London company and its successors by regular apprenticeship. The object of the government in creating this gigantic monopoly, the centralization of literature in one spot, where it could be under the immediate eye of the court, was thus gained. The company could lawfully search for and seize any books printed against its privilege, and such illegal printing was punishable by fine and imprisonment.

When Elizabeth assumed the crown, so stood the law; but that the determination of what should be published might not be wholly at the discretion of the Stationers' Company, she decreed by the fifty-first of the Injunctions concerning Religion, promulgated in 1559, that no book, school-books and recognized classics excepted, should be published in any language in her domains henceforward, but with the previous license of the queen or six of her privy counsellors, or by the chancellors of the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, or by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, or by the bishop of London, or by the bishop

being ordinary and the archdeacon of the place of publication.

The privilege which the universities naturally claimed as seats of learning to print at their option, had caused a long dispute between themselves and the London company, which was finally decided by a Star Chamber decree. It was settled that, in addition to the printingpresses under the control of the stationers of the metropolis, there might be one press at each university; the owners of these however, to have but one apprentice at a time, and to employ London journeymen when they required extra service.*

These laws, so capable of being made the engine of intolerable oppression, had been so used by Archbishop Laud and his satellites; and that too at a time when it was felt as a peculiar hardship. That was a period of remarkable intellectual activity. 'Every man," says Clarendon, "had written or expected to write a book;" and Coleridge has assured us that the store of pamphlets left us by the age of Milton is as rich in thought and as multitudinous in

*Cooper's Annals of Cambridge, Vol. II., p. 424.

number as any issued from the press in later days.

People then complained of the plethora of books, precisely as they do now. "In this scribbling age," says Burton in the preface to his "Anatomy of Melancholy," "the number of books is without number. What a company of poets hath this year brought out; as Pliny complains to Sosius Senecio. What a catalogue of new books all this year, all this age, I say, have our Franklin marts, our domestic marts, brought out. Who can read them? We are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning."

Of course at such a time the indispensable imprimatur of the licensers came to be regarded by writers as a nuisance; and by the Puritans it was especially objected to, because they often could not secure for their tracts the necessary license, while the prelates with the press for a fulcrum turned their tenets upside down. Yet, not taught toleration by their own suffering, they had no sooner deposed the bishops than they appointed new licensers, and continued

the whole tyrannical system under the new dispensation.

It was against the principle of the license code that Milton, in the "Areopagitica," trained his intellectual battery, and fired that tremendous broadside which reverberated then, and still reverberates throughout the world.

The "Areopagitica" is opened with masterly art; in conciliatory finesse, the exordium equals any thing in Greek or Roman oratory. "Truth is armed, by reason and by fancy, with weapons which are effective by their weight and edge, while they dazzle us by their brightness." Milton's arguments, which are individually strong, derive additional force from their mutual support and admirable arrangement; so that at the climax they compel with imperious power unhesitating conviction.

Showing at the outset that fetters for the press were first contrived by the papal tyranny, and perfected by the Spanish inquisition,

*

* Dr. Symmons, in his Life of Milton, appends this note to his description of the "Areopagitica" "The turbulent and profligate Sextus IV., whose enormities were exceeded only by those of Alexander VI., was the first who placed the press under the control of a state inquisitor. He died in 1484, after having disgraced the

he next proceeds to prove that these gags are injurious to civil progress and religious truth. He affirms that the circulation of flagitious writings cannot be restrained by shackling the press; while the suspicion which falls upon works, suppressed often by the ignorance of licensers, or by their spite, is an insult to authors, and a discouragement to the learned. Even admitting that the entire control of the press could be attained, as it certainly never has been, still no good would result to morals, as the avenues of corrupt communication would be always numerous; while, after all, not ignorance of vice, but its rejection, constitutes virtue. 'Adam's doom seems to have been that of knowing good by evil. A fugitive and cloistered virtue is not to be praised-a virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

Milton scouts the idea of any one class undertaking to decide for mankind what truth is.

Roman see and disturbed Italy during thirteen years. This is not specified by Milton, but is the fact."