In the reign of Henry VIII. we seem to have burnt books on both sides; it was an age of unsettled opinions; in Edward’s, the Catholic works were burnt; and Mary had her pyramids of Protestant volumes; in Elizabeth’s, political pamphlets fed the flames; and libels in the reign of James I. and his sons.

Such was this black dwarf of literature, generated by Italian craft and Spanish monkery, which, however, was fondly adopted as it crept in among all the nations of Europe.  France cannot exactly fix on the era of her Censeurs de Livres; and we ourselves, who gave it its death-blow, found the custom prevail without any authority from our statutes.  The practice of licensing books was unquestionably derived from the Inquisition, and was applied here first to books of religion.  Britain long groaned under the leaden stamp of an Imprimatur.  Oxford and Cambridge still grasp at this shadow of departed literary despotism; they have their licensers and their Imprimaturs.  Long, even in our land, men of genius were either suffering the vigorous limbs of their productions to be shamefully mutilated in public, or voluntarily committed a literary suicide in their own manuscripts.  Camden declared that he was not suffered to print all his Elizabeth, and sent those passages over to De Thou, the French historian, who printed his history faithfully two years after Camden’s first edition, 1615.  The same happened to Lord Herbert’s History of Henry VIII. which has never been given according to the original, which is still in existence.  In the poems of Lord Brooke, we find a lacuna of the first twenty pages; it was a poem on Religion, cancelled by the order of Archbishop Laud.  The great Sir Matthew Hale ordered that none of his works should be printed after his death; as he apprehended that, in the licensing of them, some things might be struck out or altered, which he had observed, not without some indignation, had been done to those of a learned friend; and he preferred bequeathing his uncorrupted MSS. to the Society of Lincoln’s Inn, as their only guardians, hoping that they were a treasure worth keeping.  Contemporary authors have frequent allusions to such books, imperfect and mutilated at the caprice or the violence of a licenser.

The laws of England have never violated the freedom and the dignity of its press.  “There is no law to prevent the printing of any book in England, only a decree in the Star-chamber,” said the learned Selden.[107] Proclamations were occasionally issued against authors and books; and foreign works were, at times, prohibited.  The freedom of the press was rather circumvented, than openly attacked, in the reign of Elizabeth, who dreaded the Roman Catholics, who were at once disputing her right to the throne, and the religion of the state.  Foreign publications, or “books from any parts beyond the seas,” were therefore prohibited.[108] The press, however, was not free under the reign of a sovereign, whose