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OUR BELIEF IN BOOKS
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of a political or diplomatic character. With broad-minded impartiality she burned all books and pamphlets which presumed to deal—no matter in what spirit—with subjects she did not wish discussed. Like the old Tory lady who objected to her Tory butler's sentiments, seeing no reason why butlers should have sentiments at all, Elizabeth punished the too effusive piety and patriotism of her subjects as severely as she punished their discontent. The hall kitchen of the Stationers' Company witnessed many a bonfire of books during her reign; and many an incautious author discovered with poor Peter Wentworth that "the anger of a Prince is as the roaring of a Lyon, and even as the messenger of Death." James I favoured St. Paul's churchyard as a spot singularly suitable for the cremation of books; and Oxford and Cambridge had their own exclusive auto-da-fés for two centuries and more. Edinburgh, with fine national feeling, burned Drake's "Historia Anglo-Scotica," because its English tone offended Scottish pride; and England burned the Rev. Arthur Bury's "Naked Gospel" in 1690, because she conceived that