a work, because it contained principles of government which appeared to him not conformable to the laws of Moses.  Another said to a geometrician—­“I cannot permit the publication of your book:  you dare to say, that, between two given points, the shortest line is the straight line.  Do you think me such an idiot as not to perceive your allusion?  If your work appeared, I should make enemies of all those who find, by crooked ways, an easier admittance into court, than by a straight line.  Consider their number!” This seems, however, to be an excellent joke.  At this moment the censors in Austria appear singularly inept; for, not long ago, they condemned as heretical, two books; one of which, entitled “Principes de la Trigonometrie,” the censor would not allow to be printed, because the Trinity, which he imagined to be included in trigonometry, was not permitted to be discussed:  and the other, on the “Destruction of Insects,” he insisted had a covert allusion to the Jesuits, who, he conceived, were thus malignantly designated.

A curious literary anecdote has been recorded of the learned Richard Simon.  Compelled to insert in one of his works the qualifying opinions of the censor of the Sorbonne, he inserted them within crotchets.  But a strange misfortune attended this contrivance.  The printer, who was not let into the secret, printed the work without these essential marks:  by which means the enraged author saw his own peculiar opinions overturned in the very work written to maintain them!

These appear trifling minutiae; and yet, like a hair in a watch, which utterly destroys its progress, these little ineptiae obliged writers to have recourse to foreign presses; compelled a Montesquieu to write with concealed ambiguity, and many to sign a recantation of principles which they could never change.  The recantation of Selden, extorted from his hand on his suppressed “Historie of Tithes,” humiliated a great mind; but it could not remove a particle from the masses of his learning, nor darken the luminous conviction of his reasonings; nor did it diminish the number of those who assented and now assent to his principles.  Recantations usually prove the force of authority rather than the change of opinion.  When a Dr. Pocklington was condemned to make a recantation, he hit the etymology of the word, while he caught at the spirit—­he began thus:  “If canto be to sing, recanto is to sing again.”  So that he rechanted his offending opinions, by repeating them in his recantation.

At the Revolution in England, licenses for the press ceased; but its liberty did not commence till 1694, when every restraint was taken off by the firm and decisive tone of the Commons.  It was granted, says our philosophic Hume, “to the great displeasure of the king and his ministers, who, seeing nowhere in any government, during present or past ages, any example of such unlimited freedom, doubted much of its salutary effects; and probably thought that no books or writings would ever so much improve the general understanding of men, as to render it safe to entrust them with an indulgence so easily abused.”