the wanton epigrams and dialogues which he made, and his perpetual
reading of Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, books of grossest infamy,
and also for commending the latter of them, though he were the
malicious libeller of his chief friends, to be read by the tyrant
Dionysius, who had little need of such trash to spend his time on? But
that he knew this licensing of poems had reference and dependence to
many other provisos there set down in his fancied republic, which in
this world could have no place: and so neither he himself, nor any
magistrate, or city ever imitated that course, which, taken apart from
those other collateral injunctions, must needs be vain and
fruitless. For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless
their care were equal to regulate an other things of like aptness to
corrupt the mind, that single endeavour they knew would be but a
fond labour; to shut and fortify one gate against corruption, and be
necessitated to leave others round about wide open.

  If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we
must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful
to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is
grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture,
motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their
allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was provided of;
it will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all
the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house; they must
not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what
they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that
whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies must
be thought on; there are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces,
set to sale; who shall prohibit them, shall twenty licensers? The
villages also must have their visitors to inquire what lectures the
bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to the ballatry and the gamut of
every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman's Arcadias,
and his Monte Mayors.

  Next, what more national corruption, for which England hears ill
abroad, than household gluttony: who shall be the rectors of our daily
rioting? And what shall be done to inhibit the multitudes that
frequent those houses where drunkenness is sold and harboured? Our
garments also should be referred to the licensing of some more sober
workmasters to see them cut into a less wanton garb. Who shall
regulate all the mixed conversation of our youth, male and female
together, as is the fashion of this country? Who shall still appoint
what shall be discoursed what presumed, and no further? Lastly, who
shall forbid and separate all idle resort, all evil company? These
things will be, and must be; but how they shall be least hurtful,
how least enticing, herein consists the grave and governing wisdom
of a state.

  To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities
which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to
ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God
hath placed us unavoidably. Nor is it Plato's licensing of books
will do this, which necessarily pulls along with it so many other
kinds of licensing, as will make us all both ridiculous and weary, and
yet frustrate; but those unwritten, or at least unconstraining, laws
of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture, which Plato
there mentions as the bonds and ligaments of the commonwealth, the
pillars and the sustainers of every written statute; these they be
which will bear chief sway in such matters as these, when all
licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and remissness, for certain,
are the bane of a commonwealth; but here the great art lies, to
discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in
what things persuasion only is to work.

  If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were to
be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue
but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy
to be sober, just, or continent? Many there be that complain of Divine
Providence for suffering Adam to transgress; foolish tongues! When God
gave him reason, He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but
choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as
he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or
love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set
before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein
consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his
abstinence. Wherefore did He create passions within us, pleasures
round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very
ingredients of virtue?

  They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to
remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a
huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some
part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot
from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when this is
done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man
all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left, ye cannot bereave him
of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth
into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage,
ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so: such great
care and wisdom is required to the right managing of this point.
Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus
expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them
both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike.

  This justifies the high providence of God, who, though He commands
us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to a
profuseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can
wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a
rigour contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or
scanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to the