interpolating passages, made an author say, or unsay, what the
inquisitors chose; and their editions, after the death of the authors,
were compared to the erasures or forgeries in records: for the books
which an author leaves behind him, with his last corrections, are like
his last will and testament, and the public are the legitimate heirs of
an author's opinions.

The whole process of these expurgatory Indexes, that "rakes through the
entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any
could be offered to his tomb," as Milton says, must inevitably draw off
the life-blood, and leave an author a mere spectre! A book in Spain and
Portugal passes through six or seven courts before it can be published,
and is supposed to recommend itself by the information, that it is
published with _all_ the necessary privileges. They would sometimes keep
works from publication till they had "properly qualified them,
_interemse calficam_," which in one case is said to have occupied them
during forty years. Authors of genius have taken fright at the gripe of
"the master of the holy palace," or the lacerating scratches of the
"corrector-general por su magestad." At Madrid and Lisbon, and even at
Rome, this licensing of books has confined most of their authors to the
body of the good fathers themselves.

The Commentaries on the Lusiad, by Faria de Souza, had occupied his
zealous labours for twenty-five years, and were favourably received by
the learned. But the commentator was brought before this tribunal of
criticism and religion, as suspected of heretical opinions; when the
accuser did not succeed before the inquisitors of Madrid, he carried the
charge to that of Lisbon: an injunction was immediately issued to forbid
the sale of the Commentaries, and it cost the commentator an elaborate
defence, to demonstrate the catholicism of the poet and himself. The
Commentaries finally were released from perpetual imprisonment.

This system has prospered to admiration, in keeping public opinion down
to a certain meanness of spirit, and happily preserved stationary the
childish stupidity through the nation, on which so much depended.

Nani's History of Venice is allowed to be printed, because it contained
_nothing against princes_. Princes then were either immaculate or
historians false. The History of Guicciardini is still scarred with the
merciless wound of the papistic censor; and a curious account of the
origin and increase of