orum_, that "Nature makes
ever the dullest beasts most laborious, and the greatest feeders;" and
Prynne has been reproached with a weak digestion, for "returning
things unaltered, which is a symptom of a feeble stomach."

When we examine this volume, often alluded to, the birth of the
monster seems prodigious and mysterious; it combines two opposite
qualities; it is so elaborate in its researches among the thousand
authors quoted, that these required years to accumulate, and yet the
matter is often temporary, and levelled at fugitive events and
particular persons; thus the very formation of this mighty volume
seems paradoxical. The secret history of this book is as extraordinary
as the book itself, and is a remarkable evidence how, in a work of
immense erudition, the arts of a wily sage involved himself, and
whoever was concerned in his book, in total ruin. The author was
pilloried, fined, and imprisoned; his publisher condemned in the
penalty of five hundred pounds, and barred for ever from printing and
selling books, and the licenser removed and punished. Such was the
fatality attending the book of a man whose literary voracity produced
one of the most tremendous indigestions, in a malady of writing.

It was on examining Prynne's trial I discovered the secret history of
the "Histriomastix." Prynne was seven years in writing this work, and,
what is almost incredible, it was near four years passing through the
press. During that interval the eternal scribbler was daily gorging
himself with voluminous food, and daily fattening his cooped-up capon.
The temporary sedition and libels were the gradual Mosaic inlayings
through this shapeless mass.

It appears that the volume of 1100 quarto pages originally consisted
of little more than a quire of paper; but Prynne found insuperable
difficulties in procuring a licenser, even for this infant Hercules.
Dr. Goode deposed that--

"About eight years ago Mr. Prynne brought to him a quire of paper to
license, which he refused; and he recollected the circumstance by
having held an argument with Prynne on his severe reprehension on the
unlawfulness of a man to put on women's apparel, which, the
good-humoured doctor asserted was not always unlawful; for suppose Mr.
Prynne yourself, as a Christian, was persecuted by pagans, think you
not if you disguised yourself in your maid's apparel, you did well?
Prynne sternly answered that he thought himself bound rather to yield
to death than