Areopagitica | Page 9

unfit for
his reading, we should in the judgment of Aristotle not only, but of
Solomon and of our Saviour, not vouchsafe him good precepts, and by
consequence not willingly admit him to good books; as being certain
that a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, than a fool
will do of sacred Scripture.
'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptations without
necessity, and next to that, not employ our time in vain things. To both
these objections one answer will serve, out of the grounds already laid,
that to all men such books are not temptations, nor vanities, but useful
drugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and
strong medicines, which man's life cannot want. The rest, as children

and childish men, who have not the art to qualify and prepare these
working minerals, well may be exhorted to forbear, but hindered
forcibly they cannot be by all the 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 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
rest 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 by making many edicts to his airy burgomasters,
which they who otherwise admire him 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 law-keepers had seen it,
and allowed it. But that Plato meant this law peculiarly to that
commonwealth which he had imagined, and 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 this licensing of poems
had reference and dependence to many other provisos there set down in
his fancied republic, which in this world could have no place: and so
neither he himself, nor any magistrate or city, ever imitated that course,
which, taken apart from those other collateral injunctions, must needs
be vain and fruitless. For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless
their care were equal to regulate all other things of like aptness to
corrupt the mind, that single endeavour they knew would be but a fond
labour; to shut and fortify one gate against corruption, and be
necessitated to leave others round about wide open.
If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must
regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No
music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and
Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or
deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be
thought honest; for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than
the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, and
the guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they
do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all
the airs and