"Attending the preceding relation, it is allowed that this present work of Davanzati may be printed,"

Vincent Rabatta, &c. "It may be printed, July 15." Friar Simon Mompei d'Amelia, Chancellor of the holy office in

Florence,

Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended* but went not through with. Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp; Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend master of the holy palace, Belcastro, Vicegerent. "Imprimatur."

Friar Nicholo Rodolphi, master

of the holy palace. Sometimes five imprimaturs are seen together dialogue wise in the piatza of one titlepage, compliment ing and ducking each to other with their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the spunge. These are the pretty responsorics, these are the dear antiphonies, that so bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains, with the goodly echo they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly imprimatur, one from Lambeth-house, another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin; as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; ́or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit of an imprimatur; but rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous and * Quo veniam daret flatum crepitumque ventris in convivio emittendi. Sueton, in Claudio.

foremost in the achievments of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption englished. 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 cf, from any ancient state, or 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 antichristian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition, that ever inquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb; no envious Juno sat crosslegged over the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that a book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of reformation, sought out new limboes and new hells wherein they might include our books also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatched up, and so illfavouredly imitated by our inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorities, their chaplains. That ye like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order, and that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts, when ye were importuned the passing it, all men who know the integrity of your actions, and how ye honour truth, will clear ye readily.

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 forborn 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 alchymy than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves, for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the properties it has. But I have first to finish, as was propounded, what is to be though in general of reading books, whatever sort they be, and whether be more the benefit or the harm that thence proceeds.

Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who were skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, which could not probably be without reading their books of all sorts, in Paul especially, who thought it no defilement to insert into holy scripture the sentences of three Greek poets, and one of them a tragedian; the question was notwithstanding sometimes controverted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable, as was then evidently perceived, when Julian the Apostate, and subtlest enemy to our faith, made a decree forbidding christians the study of heathen learning; for said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed the christians were put so to their shifts by this crafty means, and so much in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the two Apollinarii were fain, as a

man may say, to coin all the seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into diverse forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new christian grammar. But saith the historian Socrates, the providence of God provided better than the industry of Appollinarius and his son, by taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning; and thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the church, than the open cruelty of Decius or Dioclesian. And perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devil whipped St. Jerom in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or else it was a phantasm, bred by the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much on Ciceronianisms, and had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly partial; first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading not long before; next to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies without the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made of Margites a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of Morgante an Italian romance much to the same purpose? But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a vision recorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerom, to the nun Eustochium, and besides, has nothing of a fever in it. Dionysius Alexandrius was about the year 240, a person of great name in the church, for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much against heretics, by being conversant in their books; until a certain presbyter laid it scrupu lously to his conscience, how he

durst venture himself among those defiling volumes. The worthy man, loth to give offence, fell into a new debate with himself, what was to be thought; when suddenly a vision sent from God, (it is his own epistle that so avers it,) confirmed him in these words: "Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter." To this revelation he assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it was answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians; "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." And he might have added another remarkable saying of the same au thor: "To the pure, all things are pure" not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge, whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, 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 with out exception, "Rise Peter kill and eat;" leaving the choice to cach 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 and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated,

VOL. IX.

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 ca pacity. 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. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jews from Heaven, that omer, which was every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to have been more than might have well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For these actions which enter into a man, rather than issue out of him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation. Solomon informs us, that " much reading is a weariness to the flesh;" but neither he, nor other inspired author tells us that such or such reading is unlawful; yet certainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it had been much more expedient to have told us what was unlawful, than what was wearisome. the burning of those Ephesian books. by St. Paul's converts; it is replied, the books were magic, the Syriac so renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a voluntary imitation; the men in remorse burnt those books which were their own; the magistrate by this example is not appointed; these men practised the books, another

As for

might perhaps have read them in some sort usefully. Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances bardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Pysche as an incessant labour to cull out,

and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins. cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.

[To be continued.]

In all governments there are, either expressly or tacitly, certam conditions between the people and their rulers, which in conscience they are both bound to preserve. In the more arbitrary kingdoms, the traces of an original compact are less discernible; and by length of time, destruction of records, or the artifice of princes, the monuments of ancient liberty may be destroyed; or, which is worse, the minds of the people prepared to imagine that either they never had a right to liberty, or that it hath been cancelled by prescription. These doctrines have been always inculcated, with great art by designing princes; and upon the strength of the invasion of their predecessors, most kings afterwards think themselves justly entitled to the same powers, which those who, went before them, had notoriously usurped. In order to preserve their arbitrary sway, they are reduced to maintain an opinion, which draws after it great danger, and is the strongest invitation to the attempts of their ambitious subjects. This opinion is, that princes are in themselves SACRED, when once they mount the

throne, though the means by which they rose to it, were ever so flagitious.

The princes of antiquity, particularly the heathen emperors, used to deify themselves, with a view of obliging the people, from a religious reverence, to submit patiently to their extravagancies. The jus divinum, and sanctity of person, which some of our late monarchs have ascribed to themselves, were but copies of this original, and calculated to the same views; but the people have been wise enough in these kingdoms, to explode such dangerous and inquisitous superstitions. It is, indeed, amazing that they could ever have prevailed at all amongst us.

Nobody can be so weak, or so wicked, as to deny that the prosperity of mankind is one of the great ends of government. We are all obliged to promote it in our private capacities; but it is a duty more peculiarly incumbent on the governor of a people. If he therefore should play the tyrant, and pervert his power to the destruction or misery of a whole nation, his crime is infinitely great, even much the greatest, that man is capable of committing; and