Page:The Life of Sir Thomas More (William Roper, ed by Samuel Singer).djvu/22

 charge which can be brought against his memory, is the severity of misguided zeal with which he sought out and punished the early reformers, whom he unrelentingly persecuted with the pen and the scourge, as pernicious heretics. That he entertained more liberal opinions at his outset in life is apparent from his letters to Erasmus, and from some parts of his Utopia, in which he expressly declares that no man ought to be persecuted for his religious opinions. Yet at last he himself suffered death for a religious scruple of conscience! That he was a great and a good, though mistaken man, there can be no doubt; and, as Addison has elegantly remarked, "His death was of a piece with his life. There was nothing in it new, forced, or affected. He did not look upon the severing his head from his body as a circumstance that ought to produce any change in the disposition of his mind, and as he died under a fixed and settled hope of immortality, he thought any unusual degree of sorrow and concern improper on such an occasion, as had nothing in it which could deject or terrify him."

, August, 1822.