portrait of Hobbes on the wall of his bed room, in reverence of his aristocratical prin ciples, the bishops were strongly urging the necessity of burning him, in abhorrence of his religious doctrines. For writing " An Appeal to Parliament, or Zion's Plea against the Prelacy "( 1628), Dr. Alexander Leighton was twice publicly whipped and pilloried in Cheapside, his ears cut off, his nose twice slit, his cheeks branded with red-hot iron, and he was also eleven years imprisoned in a filthy dungeon in the Fleet. William Piynne lost his cars for writing " Histrio-Mastix; the Player's Scourge, or Actor's Tragedie" (1633), a scarce and famous work in two volumes. The recent recommendation of his works in the " Oxford Tracts " has brought them again into considerable demand. Queen Elizabeth being enraged at a book that was written against her, and which she did not believe was penned by the person whose name appeared on the titlepage, declared that she would have him racked to discover its real author, " Nay, madam," said Bacon, " he is a doctor; never rack his person, rack his style. Let this pretended author have pen, ink, and paper, and help of books, and be enjoined to continue his story; and I will undertake, by collating the styles, to judge whether he were the author or not." Voltaire, when at Berlin, wrote an epigram on his patron and host, the King of Prussia, for which he was rewarded with a flogging on his bare back, administered by the sergeant-at-arms, and was compelled to sign the following curious receipt for the same : "Received from the right hand of Conrad Bachoffner, thirty lashes on my bare back, being in full for an epigram on Frederick the Third, king of Prussia. Vive le Roi." The present King of Prussia conversing with George Kerwegh, a ccL-brated poet of very liberal opinions, said, " I have to be faithful to my mission as a king, and I de sire that you may be faithful to yours as a poet, for I do not like want of character. A warm opposition, founded upon convic-
j tion, pleases me; and I therefore like your I poetry, although it sometimes contains a bitter dose for me." Milton, in his " Treatise for Unlicensed Printing," shows that in Greece and Rome no books were prohibited which did not blaspheme the gods or were not libellous. And passing on through the times of the Emperors, after Christianity had been pub licly established, he finds a similar indul gence of all books not blasphemous or calumnious; for even heretical works were not prohibited till they had been condemned by a general council. But about the year 800 he finds this course altered, and the origin of the invention of licensing books. Atone period in France it seems that works on any subject, no matter what, were obliged to be written in a religious strain, to insure j the quiet publication of them. Addison, ! writing from Paris in 1699, remarks that "as for the state of learning here, there is no book that comes out that has not something in it of an air of devotion. Dancier has been forced to prove his Plato a very good Christian before he ventures upon his trans lation; and has so far complied with the taste of the age, that his whole work is over run with texts of Scripture, and the notion of pre-existence supposed to be stolen from two verses of the prophets." Dr. Johnson justly observes, that " if nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, Power must always be the standard of Truth." It is rather re markable, however, that the Doctor never theless advocates the punishment by law of authors who murmur at the government, or are sceptical in theology. A modern writer very truly remarks that,. "notwithstanding the vast increase of knowl edge in the departments of physical science, and the partial demolition and decay of some ethical errors (the causes of great practical unhappiness), the cause of intellectual inde pendence is not yet gained. The right of free thought is not so firmly established, that we have nothing more to learn or to suffer in
