_Municipal Censorship._--An early instance of the exercise of a city censorship occurred in Nuremberg, in 1527, in the case of a volume containing woodcuts illustrating the history of the Tower of Babel, for which cuts a rhyming text had been supplied by the cobbler-poet, Hans Sachs. The book had been printed without a license or permission from the magistracy. The magistrates decided that the book must be suppressed. They further cautioned Sachs that the writing of verses was not his proper business, and that he should keep to his own trade of shoemaking. The edict was simply an emphatic reiteration of the old proverb, “Shoemaker, stick to your last.” The difficulty in this case appears to have been due not to the Lutheran tendencies of Sachs’s rhymes, but to the lack of respect shown to the magistrates in issuing a book without a permit: and to the further breach of authority on the part of a man licensed only as a shoemaker undertaking also to carry on the avocation of a poet. [Sidenote: France] In France, the first State regulations for the control of the press date from 1521, and were directed against the works of the writers of the Protestant Reformation. While it was the case that the theologians of the University and the bishops put into action certain measures against works of heresy, the larger proportion of the censorship regulations came directly from the Crown or from the Parliament. In 1735, Duplessis d’Argentré published, in three volumes, a _collectio judiciorum_ which contained the most important of the acts and edicts in regard to censorship from the faculty of the Sorbonne, from the bishops, from the Parliament, and from the king up to the year 1735.