education and the art of teaching have been practically pursued with serious and systematic attention, and that intelligent and enterprising men have applied themselves perseveringly to carry out the principles which have been theoretically established and elucidated. Such principles, the result of enlarged modern inquiry, conduct, I admit, to better and juster views than those proposed by Milton,-but his rebukes of the then existing system are severe and useful, and his reproof of "spending seven or eight years "in scraping together so much miserable Greek and Latin as might be learned otherwise in one year,” is, unfortunately, nearly as much deserved now as it was then, and in quarters where it ought long since to have been deprived of its force and sting. In the same year appeared the most beautiful of all his Prose works, to which it is impossible to do justice in this summary way. I allude to the "Treatise for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." This treatise was addressed to the Parliament; and its object was to procure what we have now the happiness to enjoy, viz. an unfettered press, by which I mean not the privilege which enables every malicious scribbler to abuse his neighbours or his betters in the columns ofa periodical, but the total destruction of the restriction which was formerly placed in the hands of an officer of the crown, and which required, before the publication of any book whatever, his license, or "imprimatur," as it was called, and which effectually stifled at its birth any production not agreeable to the humours, prejudices, or designs of the court. Such a power even Tiberus acknowledged to be improper-for we are informed by Suetonius,* that he refused to punish libelers, as "the tongue and mind in a free State ought, he said, to be free." In this treatise the reason and eloquence of Milton were employed to show the advantages which must follow to the English nation, from the total abolition of that restrictive power. Sir W. Blackstone, in much later days, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, says: "every "freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he "likes before the public; to forbid this is to destroy the * C. 28. "freedom of the press ; but if he publish what is improper or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own teme"rity. To subject the press to the restrictive power of a "licenser, as was formerly done, both before and since the "Revolution, is to subject all freedom of sentiment to the "prejudices of one man, and make him the arbitrary and "infallible judge of all controverted points in religion, learn ing, and government." And in a note he gives the history of the restrictions of the press, which, he says, "soon "after its introduction was looked upon as merely a matter "of state, and subject to the coercion of the crown."* Milton's treatise on this subject is better known than any other of his prose works. It has been referred to in public controversy, and not only in the eloquent speeches of Erskinet and Mackintosh at the bar, was often quoted and relied on, but has been even cited from the bench by the Judges.§ To select passages from this work is almost being guilty of the fault of the man who published the Beauties of Shakespeare in one volume, and who was justly reproved by Sheridan with the question-" and where are the other nine?" 1 shall endeavour, however, to give you a general view of the line of argument pursued in it, and of the lofty tone of its eloquence. He adopts his motto from Euripides "This is true liberty, when free-born men, The object of his argument is declared in this early sentence of the exordium. "For this is not the liberty which "we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the "Commonwealth; that let no man in this world expect ; "but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, * Vol.4. p. 152. + Passim. In his celebrated speech in defence of Pelletier-indicted for a libel on Napoleon. In the case of Millar v. Taylor (in the 4th volume of Burrow's Reports), the first case which raised the great question, afterwards settled by a majority of 8 judges to 3, in the case of Donaldson v. Beckett, that an author had a copyright, by the common law, before the statute of Anne. "and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil "liberty obtained that wise men look for"* This sentence is part of a noble exordium, breathing the lofty spirit of the author, and his deep sense of the importance of his subject, and the dignity of the Tribunal he was addressing. He relies with confidence on their impartial disposition to attend to his remonstrance, and refers to the example of antiquity, for a justification in coming forth as a private citizen, to persuade the highest assembly of the State to revoke its decree. He then sums up the course he intends to take "That clause of licensing I shall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay before ye, first the inventors of it, to be those whom ye will be loth to own; next, what is to be thought, in general, of reading, whatever sort the books be; and that this order avails nothing to the suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libelous books, which were mainly intended to be suppressed. Last, that it will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities, in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made, both in religious and civil wisdom." Then follows this lively description of the value of books, which might almost persuade the dullest to become readers "I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men, and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose, to a life beyond life. It is true no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution * Page 104, vol 1. we raise against the living labours of public men; how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the æthereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life."* He then proceeds to give an historical review of the course of the enlightened and powerful nations of antiquity, on the subject of licensing books, and shews that in Greece and Rome, no books were prohibited which did not blaspheme the Gods or were not libelous. And passing on through the times of the emperors, after Christianity had been publicly established, he finds a similar indulgence of all books, not blasphemous or calumnious; for even heretical works were not prohibited till they had been condemned by a General Council. But about the year 800, he finds this course altered, and the origin of the invention of licensing. "After which time the Popes of Rome engrossing what they pleased of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting to read what they fancied not; yet sparing in their censures, and the books not many which they so dealt with; till Martin the Fifth, by his Bull, not only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading of heretical books. For about that time Wicliff and Huss growing terrible, were they who first drew the papal court to a stricter policy of prohibiting; which course Leo X. and his successors followed, until the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition, engendering together, brought forth or perfected those catalogues, or expurging indexes, that rake through the entrails of many a good old author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical; but any subject that was not to their palate, they either condemned in a prohibition or had it straight in the new purgatory of an index. To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper, should be printed (as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also as well as of Paradise), unless it was approved and licensed under the hands of two or three gluttonous Friars."+ . . . . "And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book licensing, ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not (that can be heard of,) from any ancient state polity or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors, elder or later, nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the most anti-christian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition, that ever inquired."‡ Having thus shown the origin and "pedigree," as he calls it, of this "invention," he deals with its character and consequences: "But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing for all that may be good. It may so: yet if that thing be no such deep invention, but obvious and easy for any man to light on, and yet best and wisest commonwealths, through all ages and occasions, have forborne to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of reformation; I am of those who believe it will be a harder alchemy than Lullius ever knew to sublimate any good use out of such an invention." "'* His first argument is derived from the importance and value of general reading, as evidenced in the most illustrious. characters of the Sacred Volume; and alluding to St. Paul's expression," To the pure all things are pure," he says, "Not only meats and drinks, but all kinds of knowledge, whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the book, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said, without exception, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat ;" leaving the choice to each man's discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Whereof what better witness can ye expect I should produce, than one of your own now sitting in parliament; the chief of learned men reputed in this land, Mr. Selden, whose volume of natural laws proves not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems, almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea errours, known, read and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest. I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of man's body, (saving ever the rules of temperance,) he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his own leading capacity. How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man! Yet God commits the managing so great a trust, without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man."† "Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up to |