folio after folio, like almanacs; and Dr. Owen and Baxter wrote more than sixty to seventy volumes, most of them of the most formidable size.  The truth is, however, that it was then easier to write up to a folio, than in our days to write down to an octavo; for correction, selection, and rejection were arts as yet unpractised.  They went on with their work, sharply or bluntly, like witless mowers, without stopping to whet their scythes.  They were inspired by the scribbling demon of that rabbin, who, in his oriental style and mania of volume, exclaimed that were “the heavens formed of paper, and were the trees of the earth pens, and if the entire sea run ink, these only could suffice” for the monstrous genius he was about to discharge on the world.  The Spanish Tostatus wrote three times as many leaves as the number of days he had lived; and of Lope de Vega it is said this calculation came rather short.  We hear of another who was unhappy that his lady had produced twins, from the circumstance that hitherto he had contrived to pair his labours with her own, but that now he was a book behindhand.

I fix on four celebrated Scribleri to give their secret history; our Prynne, Gaspar Barthius, the Abbe de Marolles, and the Jesuit Theophilus Raynaud, who will all show that a book might be written on “authors whose works have ruined their booksellers.”

Prynne seldom dined:  every three or four hours he munched a manchet, and refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant; and when “he was put into this road of writing,” as crabbed Anthony telleth, he fixed on “a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;” and then hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous pages.  Prynne has written a library amounting, I think, to nearly two hundred books.  Our unlucky author, whose life was involved in authorship, and his happiness, no doubt, in the habitual exuberance of his pen, seems to have considered the being debarred from pen, ink, and books, during his imprisonment, as an act more barbarous than the loss of his ears.[349] The extraordinary perseverance of Prynne in this fever of the pen appears in the following title of one of his extraordinary volumes.  “Comfortable Cordials against discomfortable Fears of Imprisonment; containing some Latin Verses, Sentences, and Texts of Scripture, written by Mr. Wm. Prynne, on his Chamber Walls, in the Tower of London, during his imprisonment there; translated by him into English Verse, 1641.”  Prynne literally verified Pope’s description: 

    Is there, who locked from ink and paper, scrawls
    With desperate charcoal round his darkened walls.

We have also a catalogue of printed books, written by Wm. Prynne, Esq., of Lincoln’s Inn, in these classes,