was almost coincident with More's birth. A year earlier Caxton had set up a printing-office in Westminster, and produced for the first time an English printed book there. That event had far-reaching consequences on the England of More's childhood. The invention of printing was to the sixteenth century what the invention of steam locomotion was to the nineteenth.

The birth in England of the first of the two great influences which chiefly stimulated men's intellectual development, during More's adolescence, was almost simultaneous with the introduction of printing. Greek learning and literature were first taught in the country at Oxford in the seventh decade of the fifteenth century. It was not till the last decade of that century that European explorers set foot in the New World of America, and by compelling men to reconsider their notion of the universe and pre-existing theories of the planet to which they were born, completed the inauguration of the new era of which More was the earliest English hero.

II

More's family belonged to the professional classes, whose welfare depends for the most part on no extraneous advantages of inherited rank or wealth, but on personal More's ability and application. His father was His father was a bar- father. rister who afterwards became a judge. Of humble origin he acquired a modest fortune. His temperament was singularly modest and gentle, but he was blessed with a quiet sense of humour which was one of his son's most notable inheritances. The father had a wide experience of matrimony, having been thrice married, and he is credited with the ungallant remark that a man taking a wife is like one

putting his hand into a bag of snakes with one eel among them; he may light on the eel, but it is a hundred chances to one that he shall be stung by a snake.

At school

Of the great English public schools only two-Winchester and Eton-were in existence when More was a boy, and they had not yet acquired a national repute. Up to in London. the age of thirteen More attended a small day school-the best of its kind in London. It was St. Anthony's school in Threadneedle Street, and was attached to St. Anthony's Hospital, a religious and charitable foundation for the residence of twelve poor men. Latin was the sole means and topic of instruction.

In the service of the Archbishop.

Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was wont to admit to his household boys of good family, to wait on him, and to receive instruction from his chaplains. More's father knew the Archbishop and requested him to take young Thomas More into his service. The boy's wit and towardness delighted the Archbishop. At Christmastide he would sometimes suddenly step in among the players and masquers who made merriment for the Archbishop, and, never studying for the matter, would extemporise a part of his own presently among them, which made the lookers-on more sport than all the players besides.' The Archbishop, impressed by the lad's alertness of intellect, 'would often say of him to the nobles that divers times dined with him "This child here writing at the table, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.'

The Archbishop arranged with More's father to send him to the University of Oxford, and, when little more than fourteen, he entered Canterbury Hall, a collegiate establishment which was afterwards absorbed in Cardinal Wolsey's noble foundation of Christ Church.

At Oxford.

More's allowance while an Oxford student was small. Without money to bestow on amusements, he spent his time in study to the best advantage. At Oxford More came under the two main influences that dominated his life.

The

of Oxford.

Oxford has often been called by advanced spirits in England the asylum of lost causes, but those who call her so have studied her history superficially. Oxford is commonly as ready to offer a home to new intel- influence lectual movements as faithfully to harbour old causes. Oxford has a singular faculty of cultivating the old and the new side by side with a parallel enthusiasm. The university, when More knew it, was proving its capacity in both the old and the new directions. It was giving the first public welcome in England to the new learning, to the revival of classical, and notably of Greek, study. It was helping to introduce the modern English world to Attic literature, the most artistically restrained, the most brilliantly perspicuous body of literature that has yet been contrived by the human spirit. Greek had been lately taught there for the first time by an Italian visitor, while several Oxford students had just returned from Italy burdened with the results of the new study. More came under the travelled scholars' sway, and his agile mind was filled with zeal to assimilate the stimulating fruits of pagan intellect. He read Greek and Latin authors with avidity, and essayed original compositions in their tongues. His scholarship was never very exact, but the instinct of genius revealed to him almost at a glance the secrets of the classical words. His Latin verse was exceptionally facile and harmonious. French came to him with little trouble, and, in emulation of the frequenters of the Athenian Academy, he sought recreation in music, playing with skill on the viol and the flute.

His conservative father, who knew no Greek, was alarmed

A student of law.

by his son's enthusiasm for learning, which did not come within his own cognisance. He feared its influence on the boy's religious orthodoxy, and deemed it safer to transfer him to the study of law. Recalling him from Oxford, he sent him to an Inn of Court in London before he was twenty, to pursue his own legal profession. More, with characteristic complacency, adapted himself to his new environment. Within a year or two he proved himself an expert and a learned lawyer.

Spiritual questionings.

But his father had misunderstood Oxford, and had misunderstood his son. At the same time as the youth imbibed at Oxford a passion for the new learning, he had also imbibed a passion there for the old religion. Oxford, with its past traditions of unswerving fidelity to the Catholic Church, had made More a religious enthusiast at the same time as her recent access of intellectual enlightenment had made him a zealous humanist. While he was a law student in London, the two influences fought for supremacy in his mind. He extended his knowledge of Greek, making the acquaintance of other Oxford students with like interests to his own. Colet, Linacre, Grocyn, and Lily, all of whom had drunk deep of the new culture of the Renaissance, became his closest associates. He engaged with them in friendly rivalry in rendering epigrams from the Greek anthology into Latin, and he read for himself the works of the great Florentine humanist and mystical philosopher, Pico della Mirandola, who had absorbed the idealistic teachings of Plato. But spiritual questionings at the same time disturbed him. Every day he devoted many hours to spiritual exercises. He fasted, he prayed, he kept vigils, he denied himself sleep, he wore a shirt of hair next his skin, he practised all manner of austerities. He gave lectures on St. Augustine's Christian ideal of a 'City of

God' in a London city church; he began to think that the priesthood was his vocation.

But before he was twenty-five he had arrived at a different conclusion. He resolved to remain at the bar and in secular life; he thought he had discovered a via media whereby he could maintain allegiance to his two-fold faith in Catholicism and in humanism. The breadth of his in

tellect permitted him the double enthusiasm, although the liability of conflict between the two was always great. While moderating his asceticism, he continued scrupulously regular in all the religious observances expected of a pious Catholic. But he pursued at the same time his study of Lucian and the Greek anthology, of Pico della Mirandola and the philosophic humanists of modern Italy. He made, to his own satisfaction, a working reconciliation between the old religion and the new learning, and imagined that he could devote his life to the furtherance of both causes at once. There was in the resolve a fatal miscalculation of the force of his religious convictions. There was inconsistency in the endeavour to serve two masters. But miscalculation and inconsistency were the moving causes of the vicissitudes of Thomas More's career.

III

The influ

ence of

Probably the main cause of More's resolve to adhere to the paths of humanism, when his religious fervour inclined him to abandon them, was his introduction to the great scholar of the European Renaissance, Erasmus, who came on a first visit to England about the year that More reached his majority. Erasmus, a Dutchman about eleven years More's senior, became a firstrate Greek scholar when a student at Paris, and gained a

Erasmus.