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Updated: May 13, 2025
And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching; how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or else had better be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal licenser to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the hidebound humour which he calls his judgment?
It may perhaps not be impossible, even at this distance of time, to put together dispersed fragments of evidence in such a manner as to produce an authentic narrative which would have astonished the unfortunate licenser himself. There was then about town a man of good family, of some reading, and of some small literary talent, named Charles Blount.
In 1662 an act was passed 'for preventing the frequent abuses in printing seditious, treasonable, and unlicensed books and pamphlets, and for regulating of printing and printing presses. It also divided the duties of the licenser, and the supervision of newspapers passed into the hands of the Secretary of State.
The result of this letter which is remarkable, by the way, for its mention of the licenser was that the House of Lords issued an edict to forbid any such publications except with the license of one or both Houses of Parliament, and with the name of the author, printer, and licenser attached.
The powers of the licenser were now much more strictly exercised, and the Mercuries gave up the ghost in shoals.
But on the other side that infection which is from books of controversy in religion is more doubtful and dangerous to the learned than to the ignorant; and yet those books must be permitted untouched by the licenser.
The new licenser, Edmond Bohun, happened in fact to be a Jacobite, and though he professed to conform to the Revolution Settlement, his sympathies with the exiled house disabled him from detecting disaffection skilfully smothered, and the House of Commons, in a rage, abolished his office by refusing to renew the Licensing Act.
While things are yet not constituted in religion, that freedom of writing should be restrained by a discipline imitated from the prelates and learnt by them from the Inquisition, to shut us up all again into the breast of a licenser, must needs give cause of doubt and discouragement to all learned and religious men.
With still greater difficulty can we carry our notions to church, and conceive of Liston kneeling upon a hassock, or Munden uttering a pious ejaculation, 'making mouths at the invisible event. But the times are fast improving; and if the process of sanctity begun under the happy auspices of the present licenser go on to its completion, it will be as necessary for a comedian to give an account of his faith as of his conduct.
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