" The expurgatory
Indexes excited louder complaints than those which simply condemned
books; because the purgers and castrators, as they were termed, or as
Milton calls them, "the executioners of books," by omitting, or
interpolating passages, made an author say, or unsay, what the
inquisitors chose; and their editions, after the death of the authors,
were compared to the erasures or forgeries in records: for the books
which an author leaves behind him, with his last corrections, are like
his last will and testament, and the public are the legitimate heirs of
an author's opinions.
The whole process of these expurgatory Indexes, that "rakes through the
entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any
could be offered to his tomb," as Milton says, must inevitably draw off
the life-blood, and leave an author a mere spectre! A book in Spain and
Portugal passes through six or seven courts before it can be published,
and is supposed to recommend itself by the information, that it is
published with _all_ the necessary privileges. They would sometimes keep
works from publication till they had "properly qualified them,
_interemse calficam_," which in one case is said to have occupied them
during forty years. Authors of genius have taken fright at the gripe of
"the master of the holy palace," or the lacerating scratches of the
"corrector-general por su magestad.
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