prepare these working minerals, well may be exhorted to forbear, but hindered forcibly they cannot be by all the 620 licensing that Sainted Inquisition could ever yet contrive; which is what I promised to deliver next: That this order of licensing conduces nothing to the end for which it was framed; and hath almost prevented me by being clear already while thus much hath been explaining. See the ingenuity of Truth, who, when she gets a free and willing hand, opens herself faster than the pace of method and discourse can overtake her. It was the task which I began with, To show that no nation, or well instituted state, if they valued books at all, did ever use this way of licensing; and it might be answered, that this is a 630 piece of prudence lately discovered. To which I return, that as it was a thing slight and obvious to think on, so if it had been difficult to find out, there wanted not among them long since, who suggested such a course; which they not following, leave us a pattern of their judgment, that it was not the not knowing, but the not approving, which was the cause of their not using it. Plato, a man of high authority, indeed, but least of all for his Commonwealth, in the Book of his Laws, which no city ever yet received, fed his fancy with making many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him 640 wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of

an Academic night sitting. By which laws he seems to tolerate no kind of learning, but by unalterable decree, consisting most of practical traditions, to the attainment whereof a library of smaller bulk than his own dialogues would be abundant. And there also enacts, that no poet should so much as read to any private man what he had written, until the judges and lawkeepers had seen it and allowed it: But that Plato meant this True law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he had imagined, and 650 to no other, is evident. Why was he not else a lawgiver to himself, but a transgressor, and to be expelled by his own magistrates, both for the wanton epigrams and dialogues which he made, and his perpetual reading of Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, books of grossest infamy, and also for commending the latter of them-though he were the malicious libeller of his chief friends to be read by the tyrant Dionysius, who had little need of such trash to spend his time on, but that he knew

to take them nightly to read on, and after make them his pillow." MILTON'S Apology for Smectymnuus.

Few fragments of these mimes remain, and Milton seems, without foundation, to have classed them with the licentious Roman mimes.

659. Aristophanes. See the note to . 187 and also the "Historical Notes."

655, 656. his chief friends; e.g., Socrates, the friend of Plato, is libelled by Aristophanes in his Clouds.

656. tyrant, an absolute ruler, without the modern bad sense.

656. Dionysius was Tyrant of Syracuse. Died B.C. 367. See note to l. 187. Dionysius made Attic Greek the court language of Syracuse, and invited the Attic philosophers to attend his court. Plato was one of those who accepted the invitation.