Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/849

Rh M O R M O R 819 prisoner in the Tower. He affirmed that, having himself admitted in the course of this conversation &quot; that there were things which no parliament could do, e.y., no parlia ment could make a law that God should not be God,&quot; Sir Thomas had replied, &quot; No more could the parliament make the king supreme head of the church.&quot; By this act of perjury a verdict of &quot;guilty &quot;was procured from the jury. The execu tion of the sentence followed within the week, on 7th July 1535. The head was fixed upon London Bridge. The ven geance of Henry was not satisfied by this judicial murder of his friend and servant ; he enforced the confiscation of what small property More had left, expelled Lady More from the house at Chelsea, and even set aside assignments which had been legally executed by More, who foresaw what would happen before the commission of the alleged treason. More s property was settled on Princess Elizabeth, afterwards queen, who kept possession of it till her death. At his death Sir Thomas More was in the fifty-eighth year of his age. He was twice married, but had children only by his first wife. His eldest daughter Margaret, married to William Roper, is one of the foremost women in the annals of the country for her virtues, high intelli gence, and various accomplishments. She read Latin and Greek, was a proficient in music, and in the sciences, so far as they were then accessible. Her devotion to her father is historical ; she gave him not only the tender affection of a daughter but the high-minded sympathy of a soul great as his own. It is unfortunate for More s reputation that he has been adopted as a champion of a party and a cause which is arrayed in hostility to the liberties and constitution of his country. Apart from the partisan use which is made of his name, we must rank him among the noblest minds of England, as one who became the victim of a tyrant whose policy he disapproved and whose servile instruments lie despised. If his language towards the tyrant is often more servile than became a freeman, we must remember that such was the court style of the period, and that we must not construe liter ally phrases of compliment. It is, however, impossible to deny that More s policy in later life did not bear out the more liberal convictions of his earlier years. His views and feelings contracted under the combined influences of his professional practice and of public employment. In the Utopia, published in 1516, he not only denounced the ordinary vices of power, but evinced an enlightenment of sentiment which went far beyond the most statesmanlike ideas to be found among his contemporaries, pronouncing not merely for toleration but rising even to the philosophical conception of the indifference of religious creed. It was to this superiority of view, and not merely to the satire on the administration of Henry VII., that we must ascribe the popularity of the work in the 16th cen tury. For, as a romance, the Utopia has little interest either of incident or of character. It does not, as has been said, anticipate the economical doctrines of Adam Smith, and much of it is fanciful without being either witty or ingenious. Mackintosh says of it : &quot; It intimates a variety of doctrines, and exhibits a multiplicity of projects, which the writer regards with almost every possible degree of approbation and shade of assent, from the frontiers of serious and entire belief, through gradations of descending plausi bility, where the lowest are scarcely more than exercises of ingenuity, and to which some wild paradoxes are appended, either as a vehicle, or as an easy means, if necessary, of disavowing the serious inten tion of the whole of this Platonic fiction.&quot; The Epistola ad Dorpium at a later date exhibits More em phatically on the side of the new learning. It contains a vindi cation of the study of Greek, and of the desirability of printing the text of the Greek Testament, views which at that date required an enlightened understanding to enter into, and which were con demned by the party to which More afterwards attached himself. At the most, he can be doubtfully exculpated from the charge of having tortured men and children for heresy. It is admitted by himself that he inflicted punishment for religious opinion. Erasmus only ventures to say in his friend s defence &quot;that while he was chancellor no man was put to death for these pestilent opinions, while so many suffered death in France and the Low Countries.&quot; The Life of Sir Thomas More was written by his son-in-law Roper about the end of Mary s reign. It was preserved in MS. during the reign of Elizabeth, and handed about in copies, many of which were carelessly made. It was not given to the press till 1626, with the date of Paris. Reprints were made by Hearne (1716), by Lewis (1729, 1731), and by Singer (1817, 1822). Roper s life is the source of all the many subsequent biographies. More s Life in MS. (Harleian 6253), anonymous, but by Nicolas Harpsfield, was also written in Mary s reign. All that is material in this MS. is taken from Roper. Another anonymous Life, written in 1509, printed in Wordsworth s Ecclesiastical Biography, ii. 43-185, is chiefly compiled from Roper and Harpsfield. The preface is signed B. R. Stapleton (I m Thom/e, s. res gestx S. Thomas apostoli, S. Thorns; archiepiscopi Cantttariensis, Thomas Mori, Douay, 1588, Cologne, 1612, and the Vita. Thomas Mori (separately), Gratz, lt&amp;gt;8!) translates Roper, interweaving what material he could find scattered through More s works and letters and the notices of him in the writings of his contemporaries. Cresacre More, great-grandson of Sir Thomas, compiled a new life about the year 1627. It was printed without date, but, according to the editor, Hunter, in 1031. The title of this edition is Tin- Life of Sir Thos. More, Lord High ChaneeUour of England, 4to, s. 1. eta., and with new title-page, 1(542, 1726, 1828. This life is cited by the subsequent biographers as an independent authority. But it is almost entirely borrowed from Roper and Stapleton. The additions made have sometimes the appearance of rhetorical amplifications of Roper s simple statements. At other times they are decor ative miracles. The whole is couched in that strain of devotional exaggeration in which the lives of the saints are usually comjiosed. The author seems to imply that he had received supernatural cinniiiunications from the spirit of his ancestor. Already, only eighty years after More s execution, hagiography had taken possession of the facts, and was transmuting them into an edifying legend. Cresacre More s Life cannot be alleged as evidence for any facts which are not otherwise vouched. It has been remarked by Hunter that More s life and works have been all along manipulated for political purposes, and in the interest of the holy see. In Mary s reign, and in the tide of Catholic reaction, Roper and Harpsfield wrote lives of him ; Ellis Heywood dedicated his II Moro to Cardinal Pole, and Tottell reprinted the folio of his English works. Stapleton prepared his Tres Thomas in 1588, when the recovery of England to the see of Rome was looked for by the Spanish invasion. In 1599, when there was a prospect of a disputed succession, the anonymous Life by 13. R. was composed ; and soon after Charles had allied himself with a Catholic, the Life by Cresacre More issued from the press. Hunter might have added that Stapleton was being reprinted at Gratz at the time when the conversion of England was expected from James II. The later lives of Sir Thomas More have been numerous, but the only one which has any critical value is that by G. T. Rudhart Thomas Moms, aits den Quellen bfarbeitet, Nuremberg, 1829. Other lives are by J. Hoddesdon, London, 1652, 1662 ; by Cayley, 2 vols., London, 1808 ; by Mackintosh, Lardner s Cab. Cyclop., London, 1831, 1844 ; and in More s H orA s, London, 1845 ; by Lord Campbell in Lives of the Chancellors, vol. i., 1848-50 ; by D. Nisard in Renaissance et Rrforme ; by Baumstark, Freiburg, 1879. A biographical study on More s Latin poems is Philomorus by J. H. Marsden, 2d ed., London, 1878. More s writings are numerous, and a complete bibliography of them would occupy several columns. His English Works were collected and published in one vol. folio by Rastall, London, 1530, and reprinted by Tottell, London, 1557. His Latin Work* were also separately collected in one vol., Basel, 1563 ; Louvain, 1566; and, most complete, Frankfort and Leipsic, 1089. The Utopia has had numerous editions, the first is Louv., 1516. There aie two English translations of the Utopia, by R. Robynson, London, 1551, 1556, 1624, and by Gilb. Burner, 16S8. The Latin poems, Progymnasmata, appeared in 1518, 1520, 1563. This last edition contains the Utopia and other prose Latin pieces. (M. P.) MOREAU, HEGESIPPE, a minor lyric poet of disputed but considerable talent, was born at Paris on the 9th April 1810, and died in the hospital of La Charite&quot; on the 10th December 1838. In his early youth his parents, who were very ill-off, migrated to Provins, where the mother went into service and the father took the post of usher in a public school. Both died in the same refuge for the desti tute which afterwards received their son. Hegesippe was fairly educated and was apprenticed to a printer, but he preferred the work (in France usually paid most miserably) of &quot; maitre d etudes &quot; in a school. He went to Paris before 1830, and appears to have practised both his occupations there, though for the most part he either adopted by choice or was driven by ill-fortune to adopt the singular life of alternate hardship and cheap dissipation which is dignified in France by the name of Bohemianism. In Moreau s case there is no doubt that the hardships exceeded the dissipa tion. He was habitually houseless, and is said to have exposed himself to the dangers of a cholera hospital in the great epidemic of 1832 simply to obtain shelter and food. Then he revisited Provins and published a kind of satirical serial called Diogene. Some years of this life entirely ruined his health, and it was only just before his death that he succeeded in getting his collected poems published, selling the copyright for 4 sterling and eighty copies of the book. It was received not unfavourably, but, as has happened in other cases, the author s death, which happened soon in the circumstances mentioned, was required to excite an interest which was proportionately excessive. Moreau s work, like that of many other young poets, has a strong note of imitation, his model being especially Beranger ; and his character, both moral and literary, is not improved by obvious affectation in political, religious, and social matters. But some of his poems, such as La Voulzie and the charming La Fermiere, have great sweetness, and he had a faculty of writing both in prose and poetry which seems to show that with better fortune, or, to speak honestly, with more intelligence and more per severance he might easily have saved himself from the miserable destitution which was his lot.