Government had acquiesced.  Only in one particular, apart from politics, was there any disposition to interfere with the liberty of printing.  This was where popular wit, humour, or poetry might pass into the ribald, profane, or indecent.  Vigilance against open immorality had from the first appeared to Cromwell one of the chief duties of his Government; and he seems to have been unusually attentive to this duty in 1655-6, when he had just put the country under the military police of his Major-Generals and their subordinates.  Then it is that we hear most of the suppressing of horse-races and the like, and that we are least surprised at encountering such a piece of information as that “players were taken in Newcastle and whipped for rogues.”  Now, though by this time there had already, by previous care on the part of Government, been a considerable cleansing of the Popular Literature of London, yet something or other in the state of the book-world about 1655-6 seems to have occasioned new and more special interference.  I believe it to have been the increased frequency of ballads, facetiae, and reprints, of higher literary character than the coarse pamphlets that had been suppressed, but objectionable on the same moral grounds.  At all events, all but simultaneously with the Order of the Protector and his Council, of Sept. 5, 1655, concentrating the whole newspaper press in the hands of Needham and Thurloe (see ante pp. 51-52), there had been a new general Ordinance “against Scandalous Books and Pamphlets and for the Regulation of Printing” (Aug. 18, 1655), and it was not long before this Ordinance was put in operation in one or two cases of the kind indicated.  Here are some extracts from the Order Books of the Council in April and May 1656:—­

Tuesday, April 1656:—­“That it be referred to the Earl of Mulgrave, Colonel Jones, and Lord Strickland, or any two of them, to examine the business touching the book entitled Sportive Wit or the Muses’ Merriment, and to send for the author and printer, and report the same to the Council.”

Friday, April 25, 1656:—­Present:  the Lord President Lawrence, the Earl of Mulgrave, Lord Lambert, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Colonel Sydenham, Colonel Jones, the Lord Deputy of Ireland (Fleetwood), Lord Viscount Lisle, Mr. Rous, Major-General Skippon, and Lord Strickland.  “Colonel Jones reports from the Committee of the Council to whom was referred the consideration of a book entitled Sportive Wit or the Muses’ Merriment, that the said book contains in it much scandalous, lascivious, scurrilous, and profane matter. Ordered by his Highness the Lord Protector, by and with the advice of the Council, That the Lord Mayor of the City of London and the rest of the Committee for the regulation of Printing do cause all such [copies] of the said book as are not already seized to be forthwith seized on, wherever they shall be found, and cause the same, together with those already seized, to