The great Daniel De Foe did stand on high on a pillory, but he was not earless. He was by birth and belief a Dissenter, and he wrote a severe satire against the Church party, entitled _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, which so ironically, and with such apparent soberness, reduced the argument of the intolerant to an absurdity, that for a short time it deceived zealous church-folk, who welcomed and praised it, but who turned on him with redoubled hatred when they finally perceived the satire. It was termed a scandalous and seditious pamphlet, and fifty pounds reward was offered for him. He was arrested, tried, pilloried in three places, and imprisoned for a year; but the Queen paid his fine for his release from prison, and his pillory was hung with garlands of flowers, and his health was drunk, and scraps of his vigorous doggerel from his _Hymn to the Pillory_ passed from lip to lip. "Men that are men in thee can feel no pain And all thy insignificants disdain Contempt that false new word for shame Is, without crime, an empty name. The first intent of laws Was to correct the effect and check the cause And all the ends of punishment Were only future mischiefs to prevent. But justice is inverted when Those engines of the law Instead of pinching vicious men Keep honest ones in awe." Williams, the bookseller, set in the pillory in the year 1765 for republishing the _North Briton_ was also treated with marks of consideration and kindness. He held a sprig of laurel in his hand as he stood, and a purse of two hundred guineas for his benefit was collected in the crowd. As times changed, so did opinions. The Bishop of Rochester denounced Martin Luther and all his works, and Luther's books were burned in the public squares. Puritan publications by the hundreds fed the flames; Quaker and Baptist books took their turns. Then the Parliamentary soldiers burned the Book of Common Prayer. In France, in the year 1790, the monasteries were ransacked and their books burned. In Paris eight hundred thousand were burned; in all France over four million: of these twenty-six thousand were in manuscript. Crossing the Atlantic to a land void of printing presses could not silence Puritan authors. They still had pen and ink, and manuscripts could be sent back across the ocean to a land full of presses and type. A rather amusing episode of early Massachusetts history anent authors happened in 1634, as may be found in Volume I, page 137, of the _Colonial Records_. "Whereas Mr. Israel Stoughton hath written a certain book, which hath occasioned much trouble and offence to the Court; the said Mr. Stoughton did desire of the court, that the said book might be burnt, as being weak and offensive."