The Project Gutenberg EBook of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1,
No. 3, August, 1850., by Various

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Title: Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.

Author: Various

Release Date: August 10, 2009 [EBook #29655]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HARPER'S

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

No. III.--AUGUST, 1850.--VOL. I.

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS MORE.]

[From the Art-Journal.]

PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOME OF SIR THOMAS MORE.

BY MRS. S. C. HALL.

While living in the neighborhood of Chelsea, we determined to look upon
the few broken walls that once inclosed the residence of Sir Thomas
More, a man who, despite the bitterness inseparable from a persecuting
age, was of most wonderful goodness as well as intellectual power. We
first read over the memories of him preserved by Erasmus, Hoddesdon,
Roper, Aubrey, his own namesake, and others. It is pleasant to muse over
the past; pleasant to know that much of malice and bigotry has departed,
to return no more, that the prevalence of a spirit which could render
even Sir Thomas More unjust and, to seeming, cruel, is passing away.
Though we do implicitly believe there would be no lack of great hearts,
and brave hearts, at the present day, if it were necessary to bring them
to the test, still there have been few men like unto him. It is a
pleasant and a profitable task, so to sift through past ages, so to
separate the wheat from the chaff, to see, when the feelings of party
and prejudice sink to their proper insignificance, how the morally great
stands forth in its own dignity, bright, glorious, and everlasting. St.
Evremond sets forth the firmness and constancy of Petronius Arbiter in
his last moments, and imagines he discovers in them a softer nobility
of mind and resolution, than in the deaths of Seneca, Cato, or Socrates
himself; but Addison says, and we can not but think truly, "that if he
was so well pleased with gayety of humor in a dying man, he might have
found a much more noble instance of it in