[Footnote 2:  Council Order Books of dates.  It is curious that Whitlocke, noting the new appointment of Meadows, under March 1655-6, enters it thus:  “Mr. Meadows was going for Denmark, agent for the Protector.”  Meadows did go to Denmark, but not till a good while afterwards; and the blunder of Denmark at this date for Portugal is one of the many proofs that Whitlocke’s memorials are not all strictly contemporary, but often combinations of reminiscences and afterthoughts with the materials of an actual diary.]

Among the matters that occupied the attention of the Protector’s Government about this time was the state of Popular Literature.

It is a fact, easily explained by the laws of human nature, and capable of being proved statistically, that since the strong government of Cromwell had come in, and something like calm and leisure had become possible, there had been a return of people’s fancies to the lighter Muses.  Nothing strikes one more, in turning over the Registers of the old London Book-trade, than the steady increase through the Protectorate of the proportion of books of secular and general interest to those of controversy and theology.  One feels oneself still in the age of Puritanism, it is true, but as if past the densest and most stringent years of Puritanism and coming once more into a freer and merrier air.  Poems, romances, books of humour, ballads and songs, reprints of Elizabethan tragedies and comedies, reprints of such pieces as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, collections of facetious extracts from the wits and poets of the reigns of James and Charles I., are now not uncommon.  Humphrey Moseley, Milton’s publisher of 1645, faithful to his old trade-instinct for poetry and the finer literature generally, was still at the head of the publishers in that line; but Henry Herringman, who had published Lord Broghill’s Parthenissa, had begun to rival Moseley, and there were other caterers of amusing and humorous books.  Publishers imply authors; and so in the London of the Protectorate, apart from stray survivors from among the wits of King Charles’s reign, there were men of a younger sort, bred amid the more recent Puritan conditions, but with literary zests that were Bohemian rather than Puritan, Among these, as we have hinted, and as we may now state more distinctly, were Milton’s nephews, Edward and John Phillips.[1]

[Footnote 1:  My notes from the Stationers’ Registers, from 1652 to 1656.]

Such Popular Literature as we have described had been left perfectly free.  Indeed Censorship or Licensing of books generally, as distinct from newspapers, had all but ceased.  Since Bradshaw’s Press-Act of 1649, it had been rather rare for an author or bookseller to take the trouble, in the case of a non-political book, to procure the imprimatur of any official licenser in addition to the ordinary trade-registration; and in this, as an established custom, Cromwell’s