164

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CnAP.

XIX.

1693 .

Cheshire was not permitted to appear, because His Lordshiphad spoken contemptuously of divine right and passive obe-dience. Julian Johnson found that, if he wished to promulgatehis notions of government, he must again have recourse, as inthe evil times of King James, to a secret press.* Such restraintas this, coming after several years of unbounded fi-eedom, na-turally produced violent exasperation. Some Whigs began tothink that the censorship itself was a grievance: all Whigsagreed in pronouncing the new censor unfit for his post, andwere prepared to join in an effort to get rid of him.

Of the transactions which terminated in Bohun’s dismission,and which produced the first parliamentary struggle for the■liberty of unlicensed printing, we have accounts written byBohun himself and by others: but there are strong reasons forbelieving that in none of those accounts is the whole truth to befound. It may perhaps not be impossible, even at this distanceof time, to put together dispersed fragments of evidence in sucha manner as to produce an authentic narrative which would haveastonished the unfortunate licenser himself.

There was then about town a man of good family, of somereading, and of some small literary talent, named CharlesBlount.** In politics he belonged to the extreme section of theWhig party. In the days of the Exclusion Bill he had been oneof Shaftesbury’s brisk boys, and had, under the signature ofJunius Brutus, magnified the virtues and public services ofTitus Oates, and exhorted the Protestants to take signalvengeance on the Papists for the fire of London and for themurder of Godfrey.*** As to the theological questions which

* Character of Edmund Bohun, 1692.

** Dryden, in his Life of Lucian, speak3 in too high terms of Blount’sabilities. But Dryden’s judgment was biassed ; for Blount's first work wasa pamphlet in defence of the Conquest of Granada.

*** See his Appeal from the Country to the City for the Preservation ofHis Majesty’s Person, Liberty, Property, and the Protestant Religion.