hings (I say),
when I consider with myself, I hold well with Plato, and do nothing
marvel that he would make no laws for them that refused those laws,
whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions of riches and
commodities. For the wise men did easily foresee this to be the one and
only way to the wealth of a community, if equality of all things should
be brought in and established' (Utopia).). We wonder how in the reign of
Henry VIII, though veiled in another language and published in a foreign
country, such speculations could have been endured.

He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than any one who
succeeded him, with the exception of Swift. In the art of feigning he is
a worthy disciple of Plato. Like him, starting from a small portion
of fact, he founds his tale with admirable skill on a few lines in the
Latin narrative of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. He is very precise
about dates and facts, and has the power of making us believe that the
narrator of the tale must have been an eyewitness. We are fairly puzzled
by his manner of mixing up real and imaginary persons; his boy John
Clement and Peter Giles, citizen of Antwerp, with whom he disputes
about the precise words which are supposed to have been used by the
(imaginary) Portuguese traveller, Raphael Hythloday. 'I have the more
cause,' says Hythloday, 'to fear that my words shall not be believed,
for that I know how difficultly and hardly I myself would have believed
another man telling the same, if I had not myself seen it with mine own
eyes.' Or again: 'If you had been with me in Utopia, and had presently
seen their fashions and laws as I did which lived there five years and
more, and would never have come thence, but only to make the new land
known here,' etc. More greatly regrets that he forgot to ask Hythloday
in what part of the world Utopia is situated; he 'would have spent no
small sum of money rather than it should have escaped him,' and he begs
Peter Giles to see Hythloday or write to him and obtain an answer to the
question. After this we are not surprised to hear that a Professor of
Divinity (perhaps 'a late famous vicar of Croydon in Surrey,' as the
translator thinks) is desirous of being sent thither as a missionary by
the High Bishop, 'yea, and that he may himself be made Bishop of Utopia,
nothing doubting that he must obtain this Bishopric with suit; and he
counteth that a godly suit which proceedeth not of the desire of honour