WILLIAM AND MART.

161

present generation as any of those battles and sieges of whichthe most minute details have been carefully recorded.

During the first three years of William’s reign scarcely avoice seems to have been raised against the restrictions whichthe law imposed on literature. Those restrictions were inperfect harmony with the theory of government held by theTories, and were not, in practice, galling to the Whigs. RogerLestrange, who had been licenser under the last two Kings ofthe House of Stuart, and who had shown as little tenderness toExclusionists and Presbyterians in that character as in his othercharacter of Observator, was turned out of office at the Revolu-tion, and was succeeded by a Scotch gentleman, who, on ac-count of his passion for rare books, and his habit of attendingall sales of libraries, was known in the shops and coffeehousesnear Saint Paul’s by the name of Catalogue Fraser. Fraserwas a zealous Whig. By Whig authors and publishers he wasextolled as a most impartial and humane man. But the con-duct which obtained their applause drew on him the abuse ofthe Tories, and was not altogether pleasing to his officialsuperior Nottingham.* No serious difference however seemsto have arisen till the year 1692. In that year an honest oldclergyman named Walker, who had, in the time of the Com-monwealth, been Gauden’s curate, wrote a book which con-vinced all sensible and dispassionate readers that Gauden, andnot Charles the First, was the author of the Icon Basilike.This book Fraser suffered to be printed. If he had authorisedthe publication of a work in which the Gospel of Saint John orthe Epistle to the Romans had been represented as spurious,the indignation of the High Church party could hardly havebeen greater. The question was not literary, but religious.

* Dunton's Life and Errors; Autobiography of Edmund Bolinn, pri-vately printed in 1853. This autobiography is, in the highest degree,curious and interesting.

Macaulay, History. VII. 11

CHAP.

XIX.

1693."