uld
undoubtedly have gone to the stake in defence of his opinions as
cheerfully as I laid down my neck upon the block; like his namesake in
the tale which you have quoted, he too when in Nix's frying-pan would
have said he was in his duty, and content. But withal he cannot be
called an honest man, unless in that sort of liberal signification by
which, in these days, good words are so detorted from their original and
genuine meaning as to express precisely the reverse of what was formerly
intended by them. More gross exaggerations and more rascally
mis-statements could hardly be made by one of your own thorough-paced
revolutionists than those upon which the whole argument of his
supplication is built.

_Montesinos_.--If he had fallen into your hands you would have made a
stock-fish of him.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Perhaps so. I had not then I learnt that laying men
by the heels is not the best way of curing them of an error in the head.
But the King protected him. Henry had too much sagacity not to perceive
the consequences which such a book was likely to produce, and he said,
after perusing it, "If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and
begin at the bottom, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his
head." But he saw also that it tended to serve his immediate purpose.

_Montesinos_.--I marvel that good old John Fox, upright, downright man as
he was, should have inserted in his "Acts and Monuments" a libel like
this, which contains no arguments except such as were adapted to
ignorance, cupidity, and malice.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Old John Fox ought to have known that, however
advantageous the dissolution of the monastic houses might be to the views
of the Reformers, it was every way injurious to the labouring classes. As
far as they were concerned, the transfer of property was always to worse
hands. The tenantry were deprived of their best landlords, artificers of
their best employers, the poor and miserable of their best and surest
friends. There would have been no insurrections in behalf of the old
religion if the zeal of the peasantry had not been inflamed by a sore
feeling of the injury which they suffered in the change. A great
increase of the vagabond population was the direct and immediate
consequence. They who were ejected from their tenements or deprived of
their accustomed employment were turned loose upon society; and the
greater number, of course and of necessity, ran wild.

_Montes