severe course of studies necessary as preparation for the bar, removed him from Oxford, and from 1494 to 1495 we find him reading at the New Inn. After his term of legal study was over and he was called to the bar, he began his lectures in the Church of St. Lawrence on the "De Civitate Dei," attempting in them to show the connection between the history of the Romans and their character and religion. He was afterwards appointed reader at Furnival's Inn, and in 1503-4, when only twenty-five, he became member of Parliament, and sat in that last and most subservient Parliament of Henry VII., of which Dudley was the Speaker. "In this Parliament the King demanded two so-called reasonable aids, one for the marriage of the King's daughter Margaret with the King of Scots, the other for the knighting of the King's son. These reasonable aids were made the foundation of a demand of three-fifteenths, one half as much again as he had previously required to defray the cost of the recent war." The grant had passed two readings, when More arose and "made such arguments and reasons there against," says his son-in-law, Roper, "that the King's demands were clean overthrown, and it was brought word to the King that a beardless boy had disappointed all his purpose." The King gained only £30,000, one-third less he demanded. What wonder, then, that after this the King's wrath should follow the family of More, picking a quarrel with the father, and so threatening the son as to oblige him to retire for some time into seclusion. He remained in retirement from 1504 to 1505, and it is during this period that he went through a phase very natural to a simple ideal nature. He thought of becoming a monk, of living in the cloister, true to those principles whose exercise brought struggle and ruin in practical life. He indulged in that asceticism which the Church thought necessary to purify and discipline the corrupt body, and to make it the true servant of the soul. It was then that he took to "that inner sharp shirt of hair," which he wore all his life, sending it a few days before his death, "not willing to have it seen," says Roper, "to my wife, his dearly beloved daughter,

and he used also sometimes to punish his body with whippes, the cords knotted." Probably this phase was cut short by the beginning of his friendship with Colet, who came to London to take his duties at St. Paul's in 1504. To Colet he soon became deeply attached. In one of his absences he writes to him: "Meanwhile I shall spend my time with Grocyn, Linacre, and Lilly" (Lilly, the grammarian, had been one of his earliest

friends, and had shared with him the wish to become a monk). "The first is director of my life in your absence, the second is master of my studies, and the third my most dear companion." As he began again to study Greek, and had for his greatest friend a man whose fiercest zeal was directed against the formalism and degeneration of the monastic class, the idea of the cloister began to lose its hold on him. Monasticism, he found, did not solve the problem of life. He saw that the solution of it was not found in the separation of the spiritual from the worldly life, but in their reconciliation, in the compromise between the ideal and the actual. He began to study and translate some of the works of Pico della Mirandola, and was specially interested in his letters to his nephew, which are indeed the autobiography of this man, who united the most fervent Christian piety with that enthusiasm for humane studies which came in with the Renaissance. He read how Pico scourged his own flesh in remembrance of the passion and death that Christ suffered for his sake; how he always bore in mind the thought that "the Son of God died for thee, and thou thyself shalt die shortly;" but at the same time he saw how Pico still was concerned with practical life; how he never wished to shirk its duties, never lost his interest in it; how he prayed that he might not so embrace Martha as utterly to forget Mary; and how, in spite of the warning of Savonarola, he remained a layman to the end. In 1505 More's decision to embrace a practical life was emphasized by his marriage; and Roper tells us as an instance of his tact and consideration how he turned away his affection from a younger daughter, who was the most attractive, towards the elder, fearing that she might feel hurt if her younger sister were preferred before her. During the remainder of Henry VII.'s life he lived in a state of continual fear; but when on April 23, 1509, Henry VII. died and Henry VIII. came to the throne, and a new régime began marked by the execution of Empson and Dudley, More was appointed under-sheriff in the city. Much was hoped by the New Learning of the young King. Erasmus pays him the highest compliment in his power when, sending him The Christian Prince, he speaks of him "as delighting in the converse of learned and prudent men, especially of those who did not know how to speak just what they thought would please." Their hopes were not entirely disappointed. "Much of the new life of English literature was due," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, "to the patronage of the new King." Much of the stimulus to study Greek and Latin was

given by him; and on one occasion when an Oxford divine had been preaching against the study of Greek, he silenced him for the future by saying, "the students will do well to devote themselves with energy and spirit to the study of Greek literature;” and when there was called before him a preacher who had stigmatised all who studied Greek as heretics, and excused himself by saying he was carried away by the Spirit, the King replied, "the spirit was not the Spirit of Christ but the spirit of foolishness," and forbade him ever again to preach at Court.

More presented to the King on his accession some congratulatory verses; yet although he shared the hopes of the New Learning, and accepted office under him, he showed himself by no means servile. He refused, a few years later, a pension offered him by the Government; and in the city, in his public career, he was remarkable for the impartiality of his dealings in the suits between King and subject, an impartiality which was only equalled by his disinterestedness in his own profession. He always tried to bring about a friendly agreement before going to law, and would never undertake any cause that he did not consider just. His reputation for uprightness, joined to his business capacity, caused him to be much sought after. When Erasmus impatiently demands letters of him, he replies that he is constantly engaged in grave affairs. He is frequently closeted with the Lord Chancellor; and his son-in-law Roper says "there was at that time in none of the Prince's Courts of the Law of the realm any matter of importance in controversy wherein he was not one with part of the council;" he acquired experience and tact in the management of the King. "Tell him what he ought to do," he says to Cromwell, "and not what he can do, for if he knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him." It was in the intervals of such business he wrote his History of Richard III. In 1515 he was sent with others on an embassy to settle a quarrel between England and the Netherlands, and was chosen specially to represent the interests of the merchants of London. In the course of this quarrel Parliament, to revenge itself on the Netherlands, had forbidden the exportation of wool from Norfolk to Holland and Zealand. The settlement of the dispute was therefore very important to the trading classes of England. It was during this embassy that More conceived the idea of writing the Utopia. On his return the success of his conduct in the embassy, together with the cleverness and ingenuity he displayed in defending the rights of the Pope with regard to a ship which the King claimed in forfeiture, caused

Henry "no longer to forbear his services." The King had so far changed his warlike policy as to give up his designs on France, and enter into alliance with it; and More, believing in the good intentions of the King, overcame his reluctance to accept officea reluctance of which he gives the reasons in the first book of the Utopia. Years afterwards he reminds the King "of those most godly words which his highness did speak unto him at his first coming into his noble service, the most virtuous lesson that ever a prince taught his servant, willing him first to look to God, and after God to him." During the term of his office we see him uniformly independent and upright. Three things More strove for in his political career,-universal peace, uniformity of religion, and the King's marriage. "Now would to God, son Roper, upon condition three things were well established in Christendom, I were put in a sack and presently cast into the Thames." In 1530 he resigns the Chancellorship, foreboding differences which would arise between him and the King when the Acts of Supremacy and Succession, then in contemplation, were passed. These Acts tended to advance none of his objects. More, as a disciple of the New Learning, eager for reform, but faithful to the Church, could not but disapprove of this hurried and complete separation from Rome, still less could he admit the King's right to settle the divorce on his own authority. Nor could he approve of a marriage which, instead of advancing the King's amicable relationship with the states of Europe, would plunge him into dissensions.

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And thus More, refusing to take the oaths attached to these Acts, suffered martyrdom. He underwent it with a cheerful spirit, untinged by bitterness or doubt; and surely no martyr had put before him so strongly that commonplace side of facts which seems to rob martyrdom of all its heroism and glory. He was visited in prison by his second wife, a simple woman, and somewhat worldly too," whom he had married in 1515 for the sake of his children. I marvel," she says to him, "that you that have always hitherto been considered so wise a man will now so play the fool as to be in this close filthy hole when you might be abroad at liberty if you would only do as all the bishops and learned men have done. Why not return to the right farye house at Chelsea?"-"I pray thee, good mother Alice," he answered, "tell me one thing is not this house as nigh heaven as mine own?"

On the 6th of July 1535 his pure and upright life closed. His age, as incapable of understanding his high aims and pur

poses as his wife, passed judgment on him thus: "It is much to be lamented of all," says Robynson, the translator of the Utopia, "and not only of us Englishmen, that a man of so incomparable witte, of so profound knowledge, of so absolute learning, and of so fine eloquence, was yet, nevertheless, so much blinded, rather with obstinacie than with ignorance, that he could not or rather would not see the shining light of God's Holy Truth in certain principal points of Christian religion: but did rather choose to persevere and continue in his wilful and stubborn obstinacie even to the very death.”

The matter of the Utopia has a threefold interest for us. It not only embodies the spirit of criticism on social and political affairs, distinctive of this earliest phase of the English Renaissance, it not only reveals the mind of the author, rare in its sympathy and originality,—but it gives by its satire that corroboration of historical, political, and social fact so valuable from a contemporary.

The first book is concerned with the conversation between More and the traveller Raphael Hythloday, the second with Raphael's description of the Commonwealth, which had so charmed him in his travels. The first book has perhaps the greatest historical interest, as speaking plainly and directly of the conditions of things at the time, and showing the actual nature of the relations between the King and More. It was written after the second book in 1516, when Wolsey was urging him to enter the royal service. It is supposed that he wished to show in this book how severely he judged the state of the realm, how severely he censured the King's action; that he could not change these views if he accepted office under the King; and that he would never accept a post under Government unless there was a possibility of modifying the King's action. In both books More attempts to give reality and force to his conceptions by describing every detail of his fictitious personages and his fictitious Commonwealth with an appearance of great precision and accuracy. He tries thus to supply the place of that glowing and vivid imagination which an author in a work like this must have, if he wishes to make it attractive and carry the reader along with him.

The book opens with the meeting of More while on his embassy with a stranger, "a man well stricken in years, with a black sun-burned face, with a long beard, and a cloak cast homely about his shoulders".. "a man who had sailed, not indeed as the mariner Palinure, but as the expert and prudent prince, Ulysses—yea, rather as the ancient and sage philosopher