[137:1] In Notes and Queries for March 11th, 1854, Mr. James Graves, of Kilkenny, mentions as in his possession a copy of Molyneux, considerable portions of which had been consumed by fire.
[150:1] In a letter in his Vindicius Liberius he says: "As for the Christian religion in general, that book is so far from calling it in question that it was purposely written for its service, to defend it against the imputations of contradiction and obscurity which are frequently objected by its opposers."
[154:1] Wilson's Defoe, iii. 52.
[160:1] See Somers' Tracts (1748), VII., 223, and the Entire Confutation of Mr. Hoadley's Book, for the decree itself, and the authors condemned. After the Rye House Plot, which caused this decree, Oxford addressed Charles II. as "the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord"; Cambridge called him "the Darling of Heaven!" Could the servility of ultra-loyalty go further?
CHAPTER VII.
Our Last Book-Fires.
THE eighteenth century, which saw the abolition, or the beginning of the abolition, of so many bad customs of the most respectable lineage and antiquity, saw also the hangman employed for the last time for the punishment of books. The custom of book-burning, never formally abolished, died out at last from a gradual decline of public belief in its efficacy; just as tortures died out, and judicial ordeals died out, and, as we may hope, even war will die out, before the silent, disintegrating forces of increasing intelligence. As our history goes on, one becomes more struck by the many books which escape burning than by the few which incur it. The tale of some of those which were publicly burnt during the eighteenth century has already been told; so that it only remains to bring together, under their various heads, the different literary productions which complete the record of British works thus associated with the memory of the hangman.
