there was no encouragement to the printers to produce good work. This petition, though it does not seem to have received any official reply, was noticed by Sir Roger L'Estrange in the Proposals which he laid before the House of Parliament, and which undoubtedly formed the basis of the Act of 1662. Sir Roger L'Estrange had been an active adherent of the Royal cause, and soon after the Restoration, on the 22nd February 1661-2, he was granted a warrant to search for and seize unlicensed presses and seditious books (_State Papers_, Charles II. Vol. li. No. 6). A list is still extant of books which he had seized at the office of John Hayes, one of the signatories of the above petition. So that although the office of Surveyor of the Press was not officially created until 1663, it is clear from the issue of the warrant, and also from the fact of L'Estrange having been directed to draw up proposals for the regulation of the Press, that he was acting in that capacity more than a twelvemonth earlier. His proposals were, in 1663, printed in pamphlet form with the title, _Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press_, and were dedicated to the King, and also to the House of Lords; and they contain much that is interesting. He states that hundreds of thousands of seditious papers had been allowed to go abroad since the King's return, and that there had been printed ten or twelve impressions of _Farewell Sermons_, to the number of thirty thousand, since the Act of Uniformity, adding that the very persons who had the care of the Press (_i.e._ the Company of Stationers) had connived at its abuse. In support of this statement he pointed out that Presbyterian pamphlets were rarely suppressed, that rich offenders were passed over, and scarcely any of those who were caught were ever brought to justice. He gives the number of printers then at work in London as sixty, the number of apprentices about a hundred and sixty, besides a large number of journeymen; and he proposed at once to reduce the number of printers to twenty, with a corresponding reduction of apprentices and journeymen. As this would throw a large number of men out of work, he further proposed a scheme for the relief of necessitous and supernumerary printers. He calculated that the twelve impressions of the _Farewell Sermons_, allowing a thousand copies to each impression, had yielded a profit, 'beside the charge of paper and printing,' of £3300, and he advised that this sum should be levied as a fine upon those booksellers who had sold the book, and be placed to a fund for the benefit of the suppressed printers, the balance of the sum required to be levied on other seditious publications! [Illustration: SIR ROGER L'ESTRANGE.]