These appear trifling minutiæ; and yet, like a hair in a watch, which utterly destroys its progress, these little ineptiæ obliged writers to have recourse to foreign presses; compelled a Montesquieu to write with concealed ambiguity, and many to sign a recantation of principles which they could never change. The recantation of Selden, extorted from his hand on his suppressed "Historie of Tithes," humiliated a great mind; but it could not remove a particle from the masses of his learning, nor darken the luminous conviction of his reasonings; nor did it diminish the number of those who assented and now assent to his principles. Recantations usually prove the force of authority rather than the change of opinion. When a Dr. Pocklington was condemned to make a recantation, he hit the etymology of the word, while he caught at the spirit—he began thus: "If canto be to sing, recanto is to sing again." So that he rechanted his offending opinions, by repeating them in his recantation.
At the Revolution in England, licenses for the press ceased; but its liberty did not commence till 1694, when every restraint was taken off by the firm and decisive tone of the Commons. It was granted, says our philosophic Hume, "to the great displeasure of the king and his ministers, who, seeing nowhere in any government, during present or past ages, any example of such unlimited freedom, doubted much of its salutary effects; and probably thought that no books or writings would ever so much improve the general understanding of men, as to render it safe to entrust them with an indulgence so easily abused."
And the present moment verifies the prescient conjecture of the philosopher. Such is the licentiousness of our press, that some, not perhaps the most hostile to the cause of freedom, would not be averse to manacle authors once more with an IMPRIMATUR. It will not be denied that Erasmus was a friend to the freedom of the press; yet he was so shocked at the licentiousness of Luther's pen, that there was a time when he considered it necessary to restrain its liberty. It was then as now. Erasmus had, indeed, been miserably calumniated, and expected future libels. I am glad, however, to observe, that he afterwards, on a more impartial investigation, confessed that such a remedy was much more dangerous than the disease. To restrain the liberty of the press, can only be the interest of the individual, never that of the public; one must be a patriot here: we must stand in the field with an unshielded breast, since the safety of the people is the supreme law. There were, in Milton's days, some who said of this institution, that, although the inventors were bad, the thing, for all that, might be good. "This may be so," replies the vehement advocate for "unlicensed printing." But as the commonwealths have existed through all ages, and have forborne to use it, he sees no necessity for the invention; and held it as a dangerous and suspicious fruit from the tree which bore it. The ages of the wisest commonwealths, Milton seems not to have recollected, were not diseased with the popular infection of publications, issuing at all hours, and propagated with a celerity on which the ancients could not calculate. The learned Dr. James, who has denounced the invention of the Indexes, confesses, however, that it was not unuseful when it restrained the publications of atheistic and immoral works. But it is our lot to bear with all the consequent evils, that we may preserve the good inviolate; since, as the profound Hume has declared, "The LIBERTY OF BRITAIN IS GONE FOR EVER, when such attempts shall succeed."
A constitutional sovereign will consider the freedom of the press as the sole organ of the feelings of the people. Calumniators he will leave to the fate of calumny; a fate similar to those who, having overcharged their arms with the fellest intentions, find that the death which they intended for others, in bursting, only annihilates themselves.
OF ANAGRAMS AND ECHO VERSES.
The "true" modern critics on our elder writers are apt to thunder their anathemas on innocent heads: little versed in the eras of our literature, and the fashions of our wit, popular criticism must submit to be guided by the literary historian.
Kippis condemns Sir Symonds D'Ewes for his admiration of two anagrams, expressive of the feelings of the times. It required the valour of Falstaff to attack extinct anagrams; and our pretended English Bayle thought himself secure in pronouncing all anagrammatists to be wanting in judgment and taste: yet, if this mechanical critic did not know something of the state and nature of anagrams in Sir Symonds' day, he was more deficient in that curiosity of literature which his work required, than plain honest Sir Symonds in the taste and judgment of which he is so contemptuously deprived. The author who thus decides on the tastes of another age by those of his own day, and whose knowledge of the national literature does not extend beyond his own century, is neither historian nor critic. The truth is, that ANAGRAMS were then the fashionable amusements of the wittiest and the most learned.
Kippis says, and others have repeated, "That Sir Symonds D'Ewes's judgment and taste, with regard to wit, were as contemptible as can well be imagined, will be evident from the following passage taken from his account of Carr Earl of Somerset, and his wife: 'This discontent gave many satirical wits occasion to vent themselves into stingie [stinging] libels, in which they spared neither the persons nor families of that unfortunate pair. There came also two anagrams to my hands, not unworthy to be owned by the rarest wits of this age.' These were, one very descriptive of the lady, and the other, of an incident in which this infamous woman was so deeply criminated.