Page:The Life of Sir Thomas More (William Roper, ed by Samuel Singer).djvu/21

 or rather of its propensity to accumulate falsities and forgeries, even amidst surrounding reformation and refinement In Roper and Harpsfield there is scarcely any thing fanatical; Stapleton, who wrote (in 1588) about thirty years afterwards, and at a distance from the scene of action, being in exile at Douay, has detailed several miraculous stories : but Mr. More, Sir Thomas's great grandson, whose life of his ancestor came out in the year 1627, goes much farther; (one very short specimen may be found in the note ). May we not easily believe that, but for the iniquity of the times, in another generation Sir Thomas More would have been canonized ?"

The character of Sir Thomas More has been variously estimated by writers of various parties, but all allow him to have been endowed with many virtues; and the only serious and unrefuted