NO MONOPOLY OF WIT OR INVENTION.

AND as this licensing is a particular disesteem of every knowing person alive, and most injurious to the written labours and monuments of the dead, so to me it seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation. I cannot set so light by all the invention, the art, the wit, the grace, and solid judgment which is in England, as that it can be comprehended in any twenty capacities how good soever; much less that it should not pass except their superintendence be over it, except it be sifted and strained with their strainers, that it should be uncurrent without their manual stamp.

What

Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolised and traded in by tickets, and statutes, and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge of the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks. is it but a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowed the sharpening of our axes and coulters, but we must repair from all quarters to twenty licensing forges.

Had any one written and divulged erroneous things and scandalous to honest life, misusing and forfeiting the esteem had of his reason among men, if after conviction this only censure were adjudged him, that he should never henceforth write, but what was first examined by an appointed officer, whose hand should be annexed that now he might safely be read, it could not be less than a disgraceful punishment. Whence to include the whole nation and those that never thus offended under such a diffident and suspectful prohibition, may plainly be understood what a disparagement it is. So much the more when debtors and delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but inoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title,

LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCOURSE A SIGN OF A PROSPEROUS COMMONWEALTH.

WHEN a city shall be, as it were, besieged and blocked about, her navigable rivers invested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up even to her walls and suburb trenches; that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reasoned, should be disputing, arguing, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of, argues first a singular good will, contentedness, and confidence in your prudent foresight and safe government, Lords and Commons; and from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well grounded contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us as his was, who, being in the city, when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment.

Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory. For as in a body when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but, by casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption, to outlive these pangs, and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages.

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and

shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle, mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.

TRUTH.

THOUGH all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.

He who hears what praying there is for light and clear knowledge to be sent down among us, would think of other matters to be constituted beyond the discipline of Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands. Yet when the new life which we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envy and oppose if it come not first in at their casements. What a collusion is this, when, as we are exhorted by the wise men to use diligence, to "seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures," early and late, that another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute!

When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out all his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his reasons, as it were a battle ranged, scattered and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument;-for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth.

For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, no stratagems, no licensings, to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power; give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps.

THOMAS FULLER.

THOMAS FULLER was born in Northamptonshire, A.D. 1608, son of a clergyman, and educated for the church; held in succession several honourable appointments as public lecturer, and probably would have dignified the Episcopate, but for his premature death in 1661. Of his many works, the best known are The Holy State, The Profane State, The Worthies of England, Church History of Britain, History of the Holy War.

THE GOOD YEOMAN.

THE Good Yeoman is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined, and is the wax capable of a gentle impression, when the prince shall stamp it. Wise Solon, who accounted Tellus, the Athenian, the most happy man for living privately on his own lands, would surely have pronounced the English yeomanry a fortunate condition living in the temperate zone, betwixt greatness and want, an estate of people almost peculiar to England.

Their

France and Italy are like a die which hath no points between six and ace, nobility and peasantry. walls, though high, must needs be hollow, wanting filling stones. Indeed, Germany hath her boors like our yeomen, but by a tyrannical appropriation of nobility to some few ancient families, their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher to clarify their blood.

In England, the temple of honour is bolted against none who have passed through the temple of virtue; nor is a capacity to be genteel denied to our yeoman who

thus behaves himself.

He wears russet clothes, but makes golden payments,

having tin in his buttons, but silver in his pocket. If he chance to appear in clothes above his rank, it is to grace some great man with his service, and then he blusheth at his own bravery. Otherwise he is the surest landmark, whence foreigners may take aim of the ancient English customs, the gentry more floating after foreign fashions.

In his house he is bountiful both to strangers and to poor people. Some hold when hospitality died in England, she gave her last groan among the yeomen of Kent. And still, at our yeoman's table you shall have as many joints as dishes; no meat disguised with strange sauces; no straggling joint of a sheep in the midst of a pasture of grass beset with salads on every side; but solid substantial food; no servitors more nimble with their hands than the guests with their teeth, take away meat before stomachs are taken away. Here you have that which in itself is good made better by the store of it, and best by the welcome of it.

He seldom goes far abroad, and his credit stretcheth further than his travel. He goes not to London, but se defendendo to save himself of a fine, being returned of a jury, where seeing the king once, he prays for him ever afterwards.

In his own country he is main man in juries. Where if the judge please to open his eyes in matters of law, he needs not to be led by the nose in matters of fact. He is very observant of the judge's item when it follows the truth's imprimis; otherwise, though not mutinous in a jury, he cares not whom he displeaseth as he pleaseth his own conscience.

He improveth his land to a double value by his good husbandry. Some grounds that wept with water, or frowned with thorns, by draining the one and clearing the other, he makes both to laugh and sing with corn. By marl and lime stones burnt he bettereth his ground, and his industry worketh miracles by turning stones into bread. Conquest and good husbandry both enlarge the king's dominions; the one by the sword