6

OIXSTOllY OF ENGLAIO).

CHAP.

XXI.

1695 .

Death ofHalifax.

an officer of the Customs to open a box of books from abroad,except in the presence of one of the censors of the press. How,it is very sensibly asked, is the officer to know that thereare books in the box till he has opened it? Such were thearguments which did what Milton’s Areopagitica had failedto do.

The Lords yielded without a contest. They probably ex-pected that some less objectionable bill for the regulation ofthe press would soon be sent up to them; and in fact such a billwas brought into the House of Commons, read twice, and re-ferred to a select committee. But the session closed before thecommittee had reported; and English literature was eman-cipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of thegovernment.* This great event passed almost unnoticed.Evelyn and Luttrell did not think it worth mentioning in theirdiaries. The Dutch minister did not think it worth mentioningin his despatches. No allusion to it is to be found in theMonthly Mercuries. The public attention was occupied byother and far more exciting subjects.

One of those subjects was the death of the most accom-plished, the most enlightened, and, in spite of great faults,the most estimable of the statesmen who were formed in thecorrupt and licentious Whitehall of the Restoration. About amonth after the splendid obsequies of Mary, a funeral proces-sion of almost ostentatious simplicity passed round the shrineof Edward the Confessor to the Chapel of Henry the Seventh.There, at the distance of a few feet from her coffin, lies thecoffin of George Savile, Marquess of Halifax.

Halifax and Nottingham had long been friends: and Lord

* See the Commons 1 Journals of Feb. 11., April 12. and April 17., andthe Lords’ Journals of April 8. and April 18. 1695. Unfortunately there is ahiatus in the Commons’ Journal of the 12th of April, so that it is now im-possible to discover whether there was a division on the question to agreewith the amendment made by the Lords.