fit to print his mind without tutor and examiner, lest he should
drop a schism, or something of corruption, is the greatest displeasure
and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him.

  What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school,
if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue of an
Imprimatur, if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more
than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue, must not be
uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporising and extemporising
licenser? He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not
being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty,
has no great argument to think himself reputed in the Commonwealth,
wherein he was born, for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a
man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation
to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely
consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which
done he takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any
that writ before him. If, in this the most consummate act of his
fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his
abilities can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be
still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate
diligence, all his midnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to
the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger,
perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the
labour of bookwriting, and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must
appear in print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand
on the back of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot
or seducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author,
to the book, to the privilege and dignity of Learning.

  And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy, as to
have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after
licensing, while the book is yet under the press, which not seldom
happens to the best and diligentest writers; and that perhaps a
dozen times in one book? The printer dares not go beyond his
licensed copy; so often then must the author trudge to his
leave-giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many a
jaunt will be made, ere that licenser, for it must be the same man,
can either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the press
must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author lose his
accuratest thoughts, and send the book forth worse than he had made
it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholy and vexation
that can befall.

  And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of
teaching, how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or
else had better be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers,
is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal
licenser to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the
hidebound humour which he calls his judgment? When every acute reader,
upon the first sight of a pedantic licence, will be ready with these
like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him: I hate a
pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me under the
wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of the licenser, but
that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; who shall warrant
me his judgment? The State, sir, replies the stationer, but has a
quick return: The State shall be my governors, but not my critics;
they may be mistaken in the choice of a licenser, as easily as this
licenser may be mistaken in an author; this is some common stuff;
and he might add from Sir Francis Bacon, That such authorised books
are but the language of the times. For though a licenser should happen
to be judicious more than ordinary, which will be a great jeopardy
of the next succession, yet his very office and his commission enjoins
him to let pass nothing but what is vulgarly received already.

  Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceased author,
though never so famous in his lifetime and even to this day, come to
their hands for licence to be printed, or reprinted, if there be found
in his book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the height of
zeal and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine
spirit, yet not suiting with every low decrepit humour of their own,
though it were Knox himself, the Reformer of a Kingdom, that spake it,
they will not pardon him their dash: the sense of that great man shall
to all posterity be lost, for the fearfulness or the presumptuous
rashness of a perfunctory licenser. And to what an author this
violence hath been late done, and in what book of greatest consequence
to be faithfully published, I could now instance, but shall forbear
till a more convenient season.

  Yet if these things be not resented seriously and timely by them who
have the remedy in their power, but that such iron moulds as these
shall have authority to gnaw out the choicest periods of exquisitest
books, and to commit such a treacherous fraud against the orphan
remainders of worthiest men after death, the more sorrow will belong
to that hapless race of men, whose misfortune it is to have
understanding. Henceforth let no man care to learn, or care to be more
than worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters to be ignorant
and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the only
pleasant life, and only in request.

  And as it is a particular disesteem of every knowing person alive,
and most injurious to the written labours and monuments of the dead,
so to me it seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole Nation. I
cannot set so light by all the invention, the art, the wit, the
grave and solid judgment which is in England, as that it can be
comprehended in any twenty capacities how good soever, much less
that it should not pass except their superintendence be over it,
except it be sifted and strained with their strainers, that it
should be uncurrent without their manual stamp. Truth and
understanding are not such wares as to be monopolised and traded in by