_Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have
lost._ Arius Montanus, in printing the Hebrew Bible, commonly called the
Bible of the king of Spain, much wasted himself, and was accused in the
court of Rome for his good deed, and being cited thither, _Pro tantorum
laborum praemio vix veniam impetravit_. Likewise Christopher Plantin, by
printing of his curious interlineary Bible in Antwerp, through the
unseasonable exactions of the king's officers, sunk and almost ruined
his estate. And our worthy English knight, who set forth the
golden-mouthed father in a silver print, was a loser by it.
_Whereas foolish pamphlets prove most beneficial to the printers._ When
a French printer complained that he was utterly undone by printing a
solid serious book of Rabelais concerning physic, Rabelais, to make him
recompense, made that his jesting scurrilous work, which repaired the
printer's loss with advantage. Such books the world swarms too much
with. When one had set out a witless pamphlet, writing _finis_ at the
end thereof, another wittily wrote beneath it:
----_Nay there thou liest, my friend,
In writing foolish books there is no end._
And surely such scurrilous scandalous papers do more than conceivable
mischief. First, their lusciousness puts many palates out of taste, that
they can never after relish any solid and wholesome writers; secondly,
they cast dirt on the faces of many innocent persons, which dried on by
continuance of time can never after be washed off; thirdly, the
pamphlets of this age may pass for records with the next, because
publicly uncontrolled, and what we laugh at, our children may believe:
fourthly, grant the things true they jeer at, yet this music is unlawful
in any Christian church, to play upon the sins and miseries of others,
the fitter object of the elegies than the satires of all truly
religious.--T. FULLER. _The Holy State and the Profane State._