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In 1647, Sir Thomas Fairfax called the attention of the House of Lords, by letter, to the great number of unlicensed newspapers, with a view to their suppression; but he adds, in mitigation of his attack: 'That the kingdom's expectation may be satisfied in relation to intelligence till a firm peace be settled, considering the mischiefs that will happen by the poisonous writings of evil men sent abroad daily to abuse and deceive the people, that if the House shall see it fit, some two or three sheets may be permitted to come forth weekly, which may be licensed, and have some stamp of authoritie with them, and in respect of the former licenser, Mr.
Caryl:"A Licenser is not contented now to give his single "Imprimatur," but brings his chair into the title-leaf; there sits and judges up or judges down what book he pleases.
Its full title was as follows; "Colasterion: A Reply to a Nameles Answer against 'The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Wherein the trivial Author of that Answer is discovver'd, the licenser conferr'd with, and the Opinion which they traduce defended. By the former author, J. M. Prov. xxvi. 5. Answer a Fool according to his folly, lest hee bee wise in his own conceit. Printed in the year 1645."
Second, that the prohibition of bold books led to mental indolence and stagnant formalism both in teachers and congregations, producing the 'laziness of a licensing church. Third, that it 'hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth; for the commission of the licenser enjoins him to let nothing pass which is not vulgarly received already, and 'if it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself, whose first appearance to our eyes, bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors, even as the person is of many a great man slight and contemptible to see to. Fourth, that freedom is in itself an ingredient of true virtue, and 'they are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; that virtue therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her virtue is but an excremental virtue, which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the form of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the tower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know and yet abstain.
But the real author was that very Blount who was, at that very time, labouring to inflame the public both against the Licensing Act and the licenser. Blount's motives may easily be divined. His own opinions were diametrically opposed to those which, on this occasion, he put forward in the most offensive manner. It is therefore impossible to doubt that his object was to ensnare and to ruin Bohun.
"Catalogue" Fraser lost his office for daring to license Walker's book on the Eikon Basilike, which asserted that Gauden and not Charles I. was the author. His successor Bohun was deprived of his orffice as licenser and sent to prison for allowing a pamphlet to be printed entitled King William and Queen Mary, Conquerors.
Since the Macdonalds did not complain, a prudent man might naturally be unwilling to incur the displeasure of the King, of the ministers, and of the most powerful family in Scotland, by bringing forward an accusation grounded on nothing but reports wandering from mouth to mouth, or pamphlets which no licenser had approved, to which no author had put his name, and which no bookseller ventured to place in his shop-window.
"Our poet's performance," said he, "must undergo a process truly chemical before it is presented to the public. It must be tried in the manager's fire; strained through a licenser, suffer from repeated corrections, till it may be a mere caput mortuum when it arrives before the public." Again.
The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little inclination to peruse it as he had.
Masson conjectures, with some probability, that the leading articles of the Mercurius, during part of the year 1651, received touches from Milton's hand. But this was, after all, rather in the character of editor, whose business it is to see that nothing improper goes into the paper, than in that of press licenser in the sense in which the Areopagitica had denounced it.
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