resumed its sittings. Here is the particular passage in the Sermon:

"But against a Toleration in general even the COVENANT itself, in that very Article [Article II.], hath a reason suitable to the Text [Psalm xcix. 8]. 'Lest we partake of other men's sins, and be in danger to receive of their plagues,' saith the Covenant; which in the language of the Text is 'Lest God take vengeance on their inventions' and ours together. It is true that the name of Conscience hath an awful sound unto a conscientious ear. But, I pray, judge but in a few instances whether all pretence of Conscience ought to be a sufficient plea for Toleration and Liberty:-1. There be those that say their conscience is against all taking of an oath before a magistrate. Will you allow an universal liberty of this? What then will become of all our legal and judicial proceedings which are confined to this way of proof: and so it was by God appointed, and hath been by all nations practised. 2. There be some that pretend Liberty of Conscience to equivocate in an oath even before a magistrate, and to elude all examinations by mental reservations. Will you grant them this liberty; or can you, without destroying all bonds of civil converse, and wholly overthrowing of all human judicature? 3. If any plead Conscience for the lawfulness of Polygamy; or for Divorce for other causes than Christ and His Apostles mention (of which a wicked book is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his name to it and dedicate it to yourselves); or for liberty to marry incestuously will you grant a toleration for all this?"

Palmer goes on to instance four other opinions which might ask for toleration, but which are in their nature so subversive of all authority and all civil order that the bare imagination of their being tolerated is, he thinks, a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of a Universal Toleration. What has been quoted, however, will show whereabouts among the Sectaries he placed Milton. He cited him as the advocate of an opinion so monstrous that no sane person could think of tolerating it. And it is to be noted that, though he gives other instances of such monstrous opinions tending to practical anarchy, Milton is the only person openly referred to in this extreme category, and his book the only book. On the same day, Mr. Hill, Palmer's fellow-preacher before

Parliament, referred by implication to Roger Williams's Bloody Tenent, which had been burnt by the hangman a day or two before; and here was Palmer mentioning, with less reserve, Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as richly deserving the same fate. Williams, we know, was happily on his way back to America at the time; but Milton was at hand, in his house in Aldersgate Street, whenever he should be wanted.

To be preached at before the two Houses of Parliament, on a solemn Fast Day, by an eminent Divine of the Westminster Assembly, was, I should say, a ten times greater trial of a man's equanimity in those days than it would be in these to waken one morning and find oneself the subject of a scathing onslaught in the columns of the leading newspaper. It was positively the worst blast from the black trumpet of the wind-god olus then possible for any inhabitant of England; and not even that poor company of suitors to whom, in Chaucer's poem, fickle Queen Fame awarded this black blast from the wind-god, instead of the blast of praise from his golden trumpet which they were expecting, can have been more discomfited than most persons would have been had they been in Milton's place a day or two after Palmer's sermon.1

What did this olus, but he

Took out his blacke trumpe of brass,
That fouler than the Devil was,
And gan this trumpe for to blow

As all the world should overthrow.
Throughout every regioun
Went this foule trumpe's soun,
As swift as pellet out of gun
When fire. is in the powder run ;
And such a smoke gan outwend
Out of the foule trumpe's end,
Black, blue, greenish, swartish, red,
As doth where that men melt lead,
Lo! all on high from the tewelle.
And thereto one thing saw I well—

1 Cromwell was away with the Army; but Vane may have heard Palmer's sermon. Baillie was certainly present,

with the other Scottish Commissioners; and he was delighted with Palmer's outspokenness. See ante, p. 162.

That, the farther that it ran,
The greater waxen it began,
As doth the river from a well;

And it stank as the pit of Hell.'

THE STATIONERS' COMPANY AND ENGLISH BOOK-CENSORSHIP: THE PRINTING ORDINANCE OF JUNE 1643: MILTON COMPLAINED OF TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS FOR BREACH OF THE SAME.

Among the haunts and corners of London into which the smoke of Mr. Palmer's pulpit-blast against Milton had penetrated, and where it had whirled and eddied most persistently, was the Hall of the Stationers' Company, the centre of the London book-trade. Actually, as the reader has been informed (antè pp. 164-5), Palmer's sermon, and the general frenzy of the Assembly on the subject of the increase of heresy and schism, had so perturbed the whole society of booksellers that, on Saturday the 24th of August, the eleventh day after the sermon, they presented a petition to the Commons, exonerating themselves from all responsibility in the growing evil, and pointing out that the blasphemous and pernicious opinions complained of were ventilated in unlicensed and unregistered pamphlets, grievous to the soul of the regular book-trade, injurious to its pockets, and contrary to the express ordinance of Parliament. That such was the tenor of the Petition of the Stationers, and that they gave instances of illegal pamphlets of the kind described, and laid stress on Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as one most flagrant instance, appears from the action of the House of Commons in consequence. Without a day's delay (Aug. 26), the Commons referred the Petition to "the Committee for Printing," with instructions to hear parties, consider the whole business, consult the existing Parliamentary Ordinance for the regulation of Printing, and bring in a new or supplementary Ordinance with all convenient speed. They were likewise diligently to inquire out" the authors,

1 Chaucer's "House of Fame," III. 546-564. Tewelle is the trumpet's mouth (French tuyau, pipe or nozzle).

printers, and publishers of the Divorce Pamphlet, and of another, then in circulation, against the Immortality of the Soul. That the Committee might have fresh energy in it for the purpose, four new members were added, viz. Sir Philip Stapleton, Sir Thomas Widdrington, Mr. Stephens, and Mr. Baynton.1

Here then, in the end of August 1644, Milton was not only within the smoke of infamy blown upon him by Palmer's sermon, but also within the clutches of a Parliamentary Committee. They might call him to account not only for publishing dangerous and unusual opinions, but also for having broken the Parliamentary Ordinance for the regulation of Printing. We must now explain distinctly what that Ordinance was.

From the beginning of the Long Parliament, as we know sufficiently by this time, there had been a relaxation, or rather a total break-down, of the former laws for the regulation of the Press. In the newly-found liberty of the nation to think and to speak, all bonds of censorship were burst, and books of all kinds, but especially pamphlets on the current questions, were sent forth by their authors very much at their own discretion. The proportion of those that went through the legal ceremonial of being authorized by an appointed licenser, and registered in the Stationers' books by the Company's clerk under farther order from one of the Company's wardens, must, I should say, have been quite inconsiderable in comparison with the number that flew about printed anywhere and anyhow. Milton had been conspicuously careless or bold in this respect. Not one of his five Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, published in 1641 and 1642, had been licensed or registered; nor did any one of them bear his name, though he made no real concealment of that, and though each of them bore the printer's or publisher's name, or the address of the shop where it was on sale. Milton's friends, the Smectymnuans, had attended to the legal punctualities in some of their publications; but Milton's practice

1 See the text of the order, antè, pp. 164-5; I now add the names of the new

members of Committee from the Commons Journals, Aug. 26, 1644.

seems to have been the more general one among authors and pamphleteers. Nor did they need to resort any longer to clandestine presses, or to printers and booksellers who, not being members of the Stationers' Company, had no title to engage in such book-commerce at all, and were liable to prosecution for doing so. Even regular booksellers and printers who were freemen of the Stationers' Company had been infected by the general lawlessness, and had fallen into the habit of publishing books and pamphlets without caring whether they were licensed, and without taking the trouble of registering their copyright; which, indeed, they could hardly do if the books were unlicensed. All Milton's AntiEpiscopal pamphlets, I think, were published by such regular printers or booksellers. But worse and worse. Some of the less scrupulous members of the Stationers' Company had found an undue advantage in this lax conduct of the bookbusiness, and had begun to reprint and vend books the copyright in which belonged to their brethren in the trade. This last being the sorest evil, it was perhaps as much in consequence of repeated representations of its prevalence by the authorities of the Stationers' Company as on any grounds of public damage by the circulation of political libels and false opinions, that the Parliament still kept up the fiction of a law, and made attempt after attempt to regain the control of the Press. That they did so is the fact. Entries on the subject -sometimes in the form of notices of petitions from the Stationers' Company, sometimes in that of injunctions by Parliament to the Stationers' Company to be more vigilantare found at intervals in the Journals of both Houses through 1641 and 1642. Particular books were condemned, and their authors inquired after or called to account, and offending printers and publishers were also brought to trouble. The Parliament had even tried to institute a new agency of censorship in the form of Committees for Printing, and licensers appointed by these Committees. Such licensers were either members of Parliament selected for the duty, or Parliamentary officials, or persons out-of-doors in whom Parliament could trust. Through 1641 and 1642 I find the following per