cation of Souls (1529), and the Confutation of Tyndale (1532). In 1530 he was made Lord Chancellor, but resigned the seals in 1533 over the question of Henry VIII's divorce. After this he fell into disfavour, and in 1535 he was beheaded for treason. An English translation of Utopia (by Ralph Robinson) was published in 1551: six years later appeared the first edition of the History, which had remained in MS. during More's lifetime. In the record of our literature his career has a threefold interest. He was one of the first great English scholars, the pupil of Linacre and Colet, the friend of Peter Giles and Erasmus, a notable pioneer in the renascence of Greek learning. In the religious movement of his time he bore an important part; and he paid with his life a refusal to acknowledge Henry VIII's supremacy over the Church. His Utopia, from which the following extract is taken, is one of the most famous works on Political Philosophy in our language: a sketch of an ideal commonwealth, following remotely the lines of Plato's Republic, but more closely the forerunner of such books as Bacon's New Atlantis and Campanella's City of the Sun. The descriptions are so vivid that the island, in spite of its name, was for many years believed to have a real existence: and it is included (though with some misgivings) by Peter Heylin in his account of Terra Australis Incognita.

OF SCIENCES, CRAFTS, AND OCCUPATIONS

(From Utopia)

HUSBANDRY is a Science common to them all in general, both men and women, wherein they be all expert and cunning. In this they be all instruct even from their youth partly in their schools with traditions and precepts, and partly in the country nigh the city, being brought up as it were in playing, not only beholding the use of it, but by occasion of exercising their bodies practising it also. Besides husbandry, which (as I said) is common to them all, every one of them learneth one or other several and particular sciences as his own proper craft. That is most commonly either clothworking in

wool or flax, or masonry, or the smith's craft, or the carpenter's science. For there is none other occupation that any number to speak of doth use there. For their garments, which throughout all the Island be of one fashion (save that there is a difference between the man's garment and the woman's, between the married and the unmarried), and this one continueth for evermore unchanged, seemly and comely to the eye, no let to the moving and wielding of the body, also fit both for winter and summer; as for these garments (I say) every family maketh their own. But of the other foresaid crafts every man learneth one. And not only the men but also the women. But the women, as the weaker sort, be put to the easier crafts, as to work wool and flax. The more laboursome sciences be committed to the men. For the most part every man is brought up in his father's craft. For most commonly they be naturally thereto bent and inclined. But if a man's mind stand to any other, he is by adoption put into a family of that occupation which he doth most fantasy. Whom not only his father, but also the magistrates do diligently look to, that he be put to a discreet and an honest householder. Yea, and if any person, when he hath learned one craft, be desirous to learn also another, he is likewise suffered and permitted.

When he hath learned both he occupieth whether he will unless the city have more need of the one than of the other. The chief and almost the only office of the Syphogrants' is to see and take heed that no man sit idle; but every one apply his own craft with earnest diligence. And yet for all that not to be wearied from early in the morning to late in the evening with continual work, like labouring and toiling beasts.

For this is worse than the miserable and wretched

1 More's name for the Magistrates of Utopia.

:

condition of bondmen. Which nevertheless is almost everywhere the life of workmen and articifers saving in Utopia. For they dividing the day and the night into xxiiij just hours, appoint and assign only six of those hours to work before noon, upon which they go straight to dinner and after dinner, when they have rested two hours, then they work iij hours, and upon that they go to supper. About eight of the clock in the evening (counting one of the clock at the first hour after noon) they go to bed: eight hours they give to sleep. All the void time, that is between the hours of work, sleep, and meat, that they be suffered to bestow, every man as he liketh best himself. Not to the intent that they should mis-spend this time in riot or slothfulness, but being then licensed from the labour of their own occupation to bestow the time well and thriftily upon some other science as shall please them. For it is a solemn custom there to have lectures daily, early in the morning, where to be present they only be constrained that be namely chosen and appointed to learning. Howbeit a great multitude of every sort of people, both men and women, go to hear lectures, some one and some another as every man's nature is inclined. Yet this notwithstanding, if any man rather bestow this time upon his own occupation (as it chanceth in many, whose minds rise not to the contemplation of any science liberal) he is not letted nor prohibited but is also praised and commended as profitable to the commonwealth. After supper they bestow one hour in play: in summer in their gardens; in winter in their common halls, where they dine and sup. There they exercise themselves in music or else in honest and wholesome communication. Dice-play and such other foolish and pernicious games, they know not. But they use ij games not much unlike the chess. The one is the

battle of numbers, wherein one number stealeth away another. The other is wherein vices fight with virtues as it were in battle array, or a set field. In the which game is very properly showed both the strife and discord that vices have among themselves and again their unity and concord against virtue; and also what vices be repugnant to what virtues; with what power and strength they assail them openly; by what wiles and subtlety they assault them secretly; with what help and aid the virtues resist and overcome the puissance of the vices; by what craft they frustrate their purposes; and finally by what sleight or means the one getteth the victory.

CHAPTER VIII

THE REVOLT AGAINST POETIC CONVENTION

THREE times at least, in the history of English literature, has poetry flourished from a prosaic and unpromising soil. Our thirteenth-century lyrics blossomed under an almost impenetrable thicket of homilies and chronicles: our eighteenth-century Age of Reason was also the age of Blake and Burns: midway between them, among the elaborate and conventional moralities of our dullest period, a few native wild-flowers sprang up into spontaneous growth. Lydgate and Occleve had overspread the early half of the fifteenth century with an established method and an established range of topics: with heroic subjects treated in an unheroic manner: with long records in which every tale becomes a sermon and every text is half-obliterated by its commentary. Another step and they would have anticipated Molière's valet, who turned the history of Rome into madrigals. But during the next generation this danger was averted: poetry once more shook off its court-trappings and its embroidered uniform, and recovered, if not grace of movement, at any rate freedom and unconstraint.

The value of Skelton's work is a matter of conflicting opinion. Some critics have decried him; others, like Lowell, have hailed him as our only fifteenthcentury poet. On one point, however, there can be no dispute: that among all mediaeval writers of English verse he was the least conventional. Nothing can be less like the sedate and decorous metres of the time than the vivid breathless doggerel-itself a sort of inspiration-which he seems to have invented, and which at least he habitually employed.