l illustration in
your excellent story of Tenterden Steeple and Goodwin Sands.

_Sir Thomas More_.--That illustration would have been buried in the dust
if it had not been repeated by Hugh Latimer at St. Paul's Cross. It was
the only thing in my writings by which he profited. If he had learnt
more from them he might have died in his bed, with less satisfaction to
himself and less honour from posterity. We went different ways, but we
came to the same end, and met where we had little expectation of meeting.
I must do him the justice to say that when he forwarded the work of
destruction it was with the hope and intention of employing the materials
in a better edifice; and that no man opposed the sacrilegious temper of
the age more bravely. The monasteries, in the dissolution of which he
rejoiced as much as he regretted the infamous disposal of their spoils,
delayed the growth of pauperism, by the corrodies with which they were
charged; the effect of these reservations on the part of the founders and
benefactors being, that a comfortable and respectable support was
provided for those who grew old in the service of their respective
families; and there existed no great family, and perhaps no wealthy one,
which had not entitled itself thus to dispose of some of its aged
dependants. And the extent of the depopulating system was limited while
those houses endured: because though some of the great abbots were not
less rapacious than the lay lords, and more criminal, the heads in
general could not be led, like the nobles, into a prodigal expenditure,
the burthen of which fell always upon the tenants; and rents in kind were
to them more convenient than in money, their whole economy being founded
upon that system, and adapted to it.

_Montesinos_.--Both facts and arguments were indeed strongly on your side
when you wrote against the supplication of beggars; but the form in which
you embodied them gave the adversary an advantage, for it was connected
with one of the greatest abuses and absurdities of the Romish Church.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Montesinos, I allow you to call it an abuse; but if
you think any of the abuses of that church were in their origin so
unreasonable as to deserve the appellation of absurdities, you must have
studied its history with less consideration and a less equitable spirit
than I have given you credit for. Both Master Fish and I had each our
prejudices and errors. We were both sincere; Master Fish wo