lege had been made responsible for the good behavior of the printing-press set up in 1639, and for twenty-three years this seemed sufficient. Finally two official licensers were appointed, whose business was to read and pronounce a verdict either for or against everything proposed for publication. Anyone might consider these hindrances sufficient, but intolerance gained with every year of restriction, and when finally the officers were induced by arguments which must have been singularly powerful, to allow the printing of an edition of "Invitation of Christ," a howl arose from every council and general assembly, whether of laws of divinity, and the unlucky book was characterized as one written "by a popish minister, wherein is contained some things that are less safe to be infused amongst the people of this place"; and the authorities ordered not only a revisal of its contents but a cessation of all work on the printing-press. Common sense at length came to the rescue, but legal restraints on printing were not abolished in Massachusetts until twenty-one years before the Declaration of Independence.
As with Virginia the early years were most fertile in work of any interest to the present time, and naturally so. Fresh from the life not only of books but of knowledge of "the central currents of the world's best thinking," these influences could not die out in the generation nearest them. For every writer, some history of the Colony was the first instinct, and William Bradford holds the same relation to New England as Captain John Smith to Virginia—the racy, incisive, picturesque diction of the latter being a key-hole to their colonial life, as symbolical as the
