to extort money from publishers, because it empowers the agents of the government to search houses under the authority of general warrants, because it confines the foreign book trade to the port of London; because it detains valuable packages of books at the Custom House till the pages are mildewed.  The Commons complain that the amount of the fee which the licenser may demand is not fixed.  They complain that it is made penal in an officer of the Customs to open a box of books from abroad, except in the presence of one of the censors of the press.  How, it is very sensibly asked, is the officer to know that there are books in the box till he has opened it?  Such were the arguments which did what Milton’s Areopagitica had failed to do.

The Lords yielded without a contest.  They probably expected that some less objectionable bill for the regulation of the press would soon be sent up to them; and in fact such a bill was brought into the House of Commons, read twice, and referred to a select committee.  But the session closed before the committee had reported; and English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government.563 This great event passed almost unnoticed.  Evelyn and Luttrell did not think it worth mentioning in their diaries.  The Dutch minister did not think it worth mentioning in his despatches.  No allusion to it is to be found in the Monthly Mercuries.  The public attention was occupied by other and far more exciting subjects.

One of those subjects was the death of the most accomplished, the most enlightened, and, in spite of great faults, the most estimable of the statesmen who were formed in the corrupt and licentious Whitehall of the Restoration.  About a month after the splendid obsequies of Mary, a funeral procession of almost ostentatious simplicity passed round the shrine of Edward the Confessor to the Chapel of Henry the Seventh.  There, at the distance of a few feet from her coffin, lies the coffin of George Savile, Marquess of Halifax.

Halifax and Nottingham had long been friends; and Lord Eland, now Halifax’s only son, had been affianced to the Lady Mary Finch, Nottingham’s daughter.  The day of the nuptials was fixed; a joyous company assembled at Burley on the Hill, the mansion of the bride’s father, which, from one of the noblest terraces in the island, looks down on magnificent woods of beech and oak, on the rich valley of Catmos, and on the spire of Oakham.  The father of the bridegroom was detained to London by indisposition, which was not supposed to be dangerous.  On a sudden his malady took an alarming form.  He was told that he had but a few hours to live.  He received the intimation with tranquil fortitude.  It was proposed to send off an express to summon his son to town.  But Halifax, good natured to the last, would not disturb the felicity of the wedding day.  He gave strict orders that his interment should be private, prepared himself for the great change