Produced by Steven Gibbs, Lisa Reigel, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. A complete list of typographical and punctuation corrections follows the text. Words italicized in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. In quoted material, a row of asterisks represents an ellipsis. Other ellipses match the original. More notes follow the text. The Book-Lover's Library. Edited by Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A. BOOKS CONDEMNED TO BE BURNT. BY JAMES ANSON FARRER, LONDON ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW 1892 PREFACE. _When did books first come to be burnt in England by the common hangman, and what was the last book to be so treated? This is the sort of question that occurs to a rational curiosity, but it is just this sort of question to which it is often most difficult to find an answer. Historians are generally too engrossed with the details of battles, all as drearily similar to one another as scenes of murder and rapine must of necessity be, to spare a glance for the far brighter and more instructive field of the mutations or of the progress of manners. The following work is an attempt to supply the deficiency on this particular subject._ _I am indebted to chance for having directed me to the interest of book-burning as an episode in the history of the world's manners, the discursive allusions to it in the old numbers of "Notes and Queries" hinting to me the desirability of a more systematic mode of treatment. To bibliographers and literary historians I conceived that such a work might prove of utility and interest, and possibly serve to others as an introduction and incentive to a branch of our literary history that is not without its fascination. But I must also own to a less unselfish motive, for I imagined that not without its reward of delight would be a temporary sojourn among the books which, for their boldness of utterance or unconventional opinions, were not only not received by the best literary society of their day, but were with ignominy expelled from it. Nor was I wrong in my calculation._