While living in the neighborhood of Chelsea, we determined to look upon the few broken walls that once in closed the residence of Sir Thomas More, a man who, despite the bitterness inseparable from a persecuting age, was of most wonderful goodness as well as intellectual power.
We first read over the memories of him preserved by Erasmus, Hoddesdon, Roper, Aubrey, his own namesake, and others. It is pleasant to muse over the past; pleasant to know that much of malice and bigotry has departed, to return no more, that the prevalence of a spirit which could render even Sir Thomas More unjust and, to seeming, cruel, is passing away.
Though we do implicitly believe there would be no lack of great hearts, and brave hearts, at the present day, if it were necessary to bring them to the test, still there have been few men like unto him.
It is a pleasant and a profitable task, so to sift through past ages, so to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see, when the feelings of party and prejudice sink to their proper insignificance, how the morally great stands forth in its own dignity, bright, glorious, and everlasting.
St. Evremond sets forth the firmness and constancy of Petronius Arbiter in his last moments, and imagines he discovers in them a softer nobility of mind and resolution, than in the deaths of Seneca, Cato, or Socrates himself; but Addison says, and we can not but think truly, "that if he was so well pleased with gayety of humor in a dying man, he might have found a much more noble instance of it in Sir Thomas More, who died upon a point of religion, and is respected as a martyr by that side for which he suffered."
What was pious philosophy in this extraordinary man, might seem frenzy in any one who does not resemble him as well in the cheerfulness of his temper as in the sanctity of his life and manners.
Oh, that some such man as he were to sit upon our woolsack now; what would the world think, if when the mighty oracle commanded the next cause to come on, the reply should be, "Please your good lordship, there is no other!" Well might the smart epigrammatist write:
