verse when far away on political business, "but stripes
hardly ever."

[Sidenote: The Utopia]

The accession of Henry the Eighth drew More back into the political
current. It was at his house that Erasmus penned the "Praise of Folly,"
and the work, in its Latin title, "Moriae Encomium," embodied in playful
fun his love of the extravagant humour of More. He was already in Henry's
favour; he was soon called to the royal court and used in the king's
service. But More "tried as hard to keep out of court," says his
descendant, "as most men try to get into it." When the charm of his
conversation gave so much pleasure to the young sovereign "that he could
not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife or children, whose
company he much desired,... he began thereupon to dissemble his nature,
and so, little by little, from his former mirth to dissemble himself." He
shared to the full the disappointment of his friends at the sudden
outbreak of Henry's warlike temper, but the Peace again brought him to
Henry's side and he was soon in the king's confidence both as a counsellor
and as a diplomatist. It was on one of his diplomatic missions that More
describes himself as hearing news of the Kingdom of "Nowhere." "On a
certain day when I had heard mass in Our Lady's Church, which is the
fairest, the most gorgeous and curious church of building in all the city
of Antwerp and also most frequented of people, and service being over I
was ready to go home to my lodgings, I chanced to espy my friend Peter
Gilles talking with a certain stranger, a man well stricken in age, with a
black sun-burnt face a large beard, and a cloke cast trimly about his
shoulders, whom by his favour and apparell forthwith I judged to be a
mariner." The sailor turned out to have been a companion of Amerigo
Vespucci in those voyages to the New World "that be now in print and
abroad in every man's hand," and on More's invitation he accompanied him
to his house, and "there in my garden upon a bench covered with green
turves we sate down, talking together" of the man's marvellous adventures,
his desertion in America by Vespucci, his wanderings over the country
under the equinoctial line, and at last of his stay in the Kingdom of
"Nowhere."

It was the story of "Nowhere," or Utopia, which More began in 1515 to
embody in the wonderful book which reveals to us the heart of the New
Learning. As yet the movement had been one of scholars and divines. Its
plans o