Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/101

 This same year, William Prynne first began to make a noise in England. A learned young gentleman ‘from Swainswick, near Bath,’ graduate of Oxford, now ‘an Outer Barrister of Lincoln’s Inn’; well read in English Law, and full of zeal for Gospel Doctrine and Morality. He, struck by certain flagrant scandals of the time, especially by that of Play-acting and Masking, saw good, this year, to set forth his Histriomastix, or Player’s Scourge; a Book still extant, but never more to be read by mortal. For which Mr. William Prynne himself, before long, paid rather dear. The Book was licensed by old Archbishop Abbot, a man of Puritan tendencies, but now verging towards his end. Peter Heylin, ‘lying Peter’ as men sometimes call him, was already with hawk’s eye and the intensest interest reading this now unreadable Book, and, by Laud’s direction, taking excerpts from the same.—

It carries our thought to extensive world-transactions over sea, to reflect that in the end of this same year, ‘6th November