d the sovereign of a free people; "but if you
please, I will tell him what you say, and he shall put it into the next
edition of his book." What an immense interval between the feelings of
Elizabeth and William, with hardly a century betwixt them!

James the First proclaimed Buchanan's history, and a political tract of
his, at "the Mercat Cross;" and every one was to bring his copy "to be
perusit and purgit of the offensive and extraordinare materis," under a
heavy penalty. Knox, whom Milton calls "the Reformer of a Kingdom," was
also curtailed; and "the sense of that great man shall, to all
posterity, be lost for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a
perfunctory licenser."

The regular establishment of licensers of the press appeared under
Charles the First. It must be placed among the projects of Laud, and the
king, I suspect, inclined to it; for by a passage in a manuscript letter
of the times, I find, that when Charles printed his speech on the
dissolution of the parliament, which excited such general discontent,
some one printed Queen Elizabeth's last speech as a companion-piece.
This was presented to the king by his own printer, John Bill, not from a
political motive, but merely by way of complaint that another had
printed, without leave or license, that which, as the king's printer, he
asserted was his own copyright. Charles does not seem to have been
pleased with the gift, and observed, "You printers print anything."
Three gentlemen of the bed-chamber, continues the writer, standing by,
commended Mr. Bill very much, and prayed him to come oftener with such
rarities to the king, because they might do some good.[110]

One of the consequences of this persecution of the press was, the
raising up of a new class of publishers, under the government of Charles
I., those who became noted for what was then called "unlawful and
unlicensed books." Sparkes, the publisher of Prynne's "Histriomastix,"
was of this class. I have elsewhere entered more particularly into this
subject.[111] The Presbyterian party in parliament, who thus found the
press closed on them, vehemently cried out for its freedom: and it was
imagined, that when they had ascended into power, the odious office of a
licenser of the press would have been abolished; but these pretended
friends of freedom, on the contrary, discovered themselves as tenderly
alive to the office as the old government, and maintained it with the
extremest vigour. Such i